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A FIRST SKETCH 



ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



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First Sketch 



English Literature. 



Henry Morley, 

w 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, AND EXAMINER 

IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND HISTORY TO 

THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON. 





Cassell, Petter, & Galpin, 

London, Paris, and New York. 

r o 







C ° nt «i N umber 

llll/II j 



^P 96 03 155 9 



PREFACE. 



Basil Valentine said, in his Triumphant Chariot of Anti- 
mony, " The shortness of life makes it impossible for one man 
thoroughly to learn Antimony, in which every day something 
of new is discovered." What shall we say then of all the best 
thought of the best men of our nation in all times ? Let no 
beginner think that when he has read this book, or any book, 
or any number of books for any number of years, he will have 
thoroughly learned English Literature. We can but study 
faithfully and work on from little to more, never to much. 
Basil Valentine felt in his own way with that teacher of the 
highest truth who wrote, " If any man think he knoweth 
anything, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know." 

This book is but a first sketch of what in " English Writers " 
it is the chief work of my life to tell as fully and as truly as I 
can. But no labour of this kind is intended to save any one 
the pains of reading good books for himself. It is useful only 
when it quickens the desire to come into real contact with 
great minds of the past, and gives the kind of knowledge that 
will lessen distance between us and them. As far as our wit 
serves, we understand the books of our own day because we 
live with them. Knowledge common to us as the air we breathe 
will hereafter be a part of the detail necessary to make that 



fresh and pleasant to a student in the future, which the idler 
may enjoy now without trouble. 

Together with a first outline of our literature, some account 
of the political and social history of England should be read ; 
and while each period is being studied, direct acquaintance 
should be made with one or two of its best books. Whatever 
examples may be chosen should be complete pieces, however 
short, not extracts, for we must learn from the first to recognise 
the unity of a true work of genius. A short Appendix gives the 
names and prices of a few of the books suitable for use in this 
way, and contains a page to be read with the chapter upon 
Chaucer and his time. 

H. M. 

University College, London. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. page 

The Forming of the People: Celts . . . i — n 

CHAPTER II. 

The Forming of the People : First English . n— 39 

CHAPTER III. 

Transition English 39—94 

CHAPTER IV. 

Chaucer and his Contemporaries .... 94 — 170 

CHAPTER V. 

The Fifteenth Century 170—209 

CHAPTER VI. 

From the Year 1500 to the Year 1558 . . 210 — 316 

CHAPTER VII. 

The Reign of Elizabeth 316 — 491 



VI 11 CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER VIII. ? age 

From Elizabeth to the Commonwealth . . 491— 594 

CHAPTER IX. 

The Commonwealth 594—628 

CHAPTER X. 

From the Commonwealth to the Revolution . 62S— 735 

CHAPTER XL 

Under William III. and Anne .... 735 — 794 

CHAPTER XII. 

From Anne to Victoria 794—895 

Appendix 896—900 

Index 901—912 



A FIRST SKETCH 



English Literature. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE FORMING OF THE PEOPLE : CELTS. 

I. The Literature of a People tells its life. History records its 
deeds ; but Literature brings to us, yet warm with their first 
heat, the appetites and passions, the keen intellectual debate, 
the higher promptings of the soul, whose blended energies 
produced the substance of the record. We see some part of 
a man's outward life and guess his character, but do not 
know it as we should if we heard also the debate within, loud 
under outward silence, and could be spectators of each conflict 
for which lists are set within the soul. Such witnesses we are, 
through English Literature, of the life of our own country. Let 
us not begin the study with a dull belief that it is but a bewilder- 
ment of names, dates, and short summaries of conventional 
opinion, which must be learnt by rote. As soon as we can feel 
that we belong to a free country with a noble past, let us begin 
to learn through what endeavours and to what end it is free. 
Liberty as an abstraction is not worth a song. It is precious 
only for that which it enables us to be and do. Let us bring 
our hearts, then, to the study which we here begin, and seek 
through it accord with that true soul of our country by which 
we may be encouraged to maintain in our own day the best 
work of our forefathers. 

The literature of this country has for its most distinctive 
mark the religious sense of duty. It represents a people 
striving through successive generations to find out the right and 
do it, to root out the wrong, and labour ever onward for the 



2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

love of God. If this be really the strong spirit of her people, to 
show that it is so is to tell how England won, and how alone 
sne can expect to keep, her foremost place among the nations. 

2. Once Europe was peopled only here and there by men 
who beat at the doors of nature and upon the heads of one 
another with sharp flints. What knowledge they struck out 
in many years was bettered by instruction from incoming 
tribes who, beginning earlier or learning faster, brought higher 
results of experience out of some part of the region that we 
now call Asia. Generation after generation came and went, 
and then Europe was peopled by tribes different in temper : 
some scattered among pastures with their flocks and herds, or 
gathering for fight and plunder around chiefs upon whom they 
depended ; others drawing together on the fields they ploughed, 
able to win and strong to hold the good land of the plain in 
battle under chiefs whose strength depended upon them. But 
none can distinguish surely the forefathers of these most remote 
forefathers of the Celt and Teuton, in whose unlike tempers 
lay some of the elements from which, when generations after 
generations more had passed away, a Shakespeare was to come. 

Their old home may have been ugon the plains and in the 
valleys once occupied by the Medes and Persians, and in the 
lands watered by those five rivers of the Punjaub which flow 
into the Indus. We may look for it westward from the Indus 
to the Euphrates ; northward from the shores of the Persian 
Gulf and the Arabian Sea to the Caucasus, the Caspian, and the 
river Oxus. 

Through the passes of the Caucasus it may be true that 
those known as the Celts first migrated to the region north of 
the Black Sea. Ezekiel, 600 years B.C., named Gomer as 
a nation, placing it in the north quarter, that is, south of the 
Caucasus. ^Eschylus, about 130 years later, placed the 
Cimmerians (whose name lives with our Welsh countrymen as 
Cymry) about the Sea of Azov and in the peninsula called from 
them the Crimea. We are told that in Assyrian inscriptions 
the Sacan or Scythian population which spread over the Persian 
Empire was called Gimiri ; and the two words (each, perhaps, 
meaning " rover") were applied afterwards to separate branches 
of the same national stock. North of the Black Sea, between 
the Danube and the Don, were the Cimmerian or Cymric Celts. 
East of the Don were the Scyths, whose name may live among 
ourselves as Scot, since they are thought to be fore. a, hers of 



CELTS AND TEUTONS. 3 

those Gaels who are of our nation as the Celts of Ireland and the 
Scottish Highlands. 

Then came the migrations in which, it is said, the Scythian 
or Gaelic Celts, pushing westward across the Don, forced the 
Cymry before them. The Cymry, crossing the Danube, ravaged 
part of Asia Minor, and spread into Europe. The Gaels who 
followed them spread also into Europe, and were also driven 
westward as more tribes came after them. 

These next tribes appear to have been men of another stock, 
who held by the eastern plains of Europe, and there established 
the Slavonic populations. 

Then came the Teutons. First, perhaps, came those from 
about the upper waters of the Tigris and Euphrates and the 
northern part of the plateau of Iran, who went north-westward 
towards the shores of the North Sea and western Baltic, there 
to become forefathers of Low German populations. From the 
coasts of France and Spain they were shut out by the strong 
Celtic occupation ; and behind them pressed men of another 
branch of their own stock — men, perhaps, who had once occu- 
pied the highlands of Southern Iran. These established them- 
selves on the higher lands of Central Europe, and were, if the 
theory be true, ancestors of the High Germans. 

3. Gaelic Celts, migrating by sea from Spain, struck on the 
western coast of Ireland and on our south-western shores. 
Thence they spread over these islands, of which the first thin 
peopling seems to have been by a Celtic population of the 
Gaelic branch. 

Low Germans afterwards crossed the Rhine, and made their 
way by Belgium along North France to the Seine, expelling 
Cymry whom they found there in possession. These Cymry, 
driven across the Channel, landed on the eastern part of our 
south coast, and forced Gaels there in occupation westward. 
The Low Germans, who had formed a Belgic Gaul, crossed also, 
and were strong enough to form a Belgic England. Low 
Germans and Scandinavians from all lands opposite our eastern 
coast came over as colonists. The Gaels went westward before 
pressure of the Cymry, as the Cymry were pushed westward by 
incoming Teutons. At last the main body of the Gaels of 
Southern Britain had been forced to join their countrymen across 
the Irish Sea. The Cymry held the pasture land among the 
mountain fastnesses of Western England, and the Teuton 
ploughed the plains. 

B 2 



4 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d 284. 

This process of change was continuous, and may have been 
so for some centuries before the hundred years between the 
middle of the fifth and the middle of the sixth century after 
Christ, during which there were six Teutonic settlements thought 
worthy of especial record. The six settlements were thus dis- 
tinguished because they established sovereignties and began the 
strong uprearing of the nation which took from a great immi- 
grant Teutonic tribe its name of English. 

4. As tribe pressed upon tribe, lands were not yielded 
without struggle. These changes and recombinations in the 
chemistry of nations were accompanied with a quick efferves- 
cence ; there was war. War and the common needs of life 
were foremost in man's thought. We have in this country two 
famous traditional periods of Celtic literature. One belongs to 
the Gael, the other to the Cymry ; and each centres in a battle. 

5. About the Battle of G-abhra, said to have been fought 
A.D. 284, is gathered the main body of old Gaelic tradition. 
Fionn (which means "Fair-haired"), the son of Cumhaill, 
known in modern poetry as Fingal, had a son Oisin (which 
means " The Little Fawn "), who is known in modern poetry as 
Ossian. Fionn's father, Cumhaill, had been slain in battle by 
Goll Mac Morna, who, as Fionn's mortal enemy, and afterwards 
his friend, has an important place in the old traditions. Fionn 
led one of the four bands into which the Gaels were parted, that 
of Leinster, known as the Clanna Baoisgne. His clan attained 
to so much power that the other three combined against it, and 
then Fionn and his family had to fight for their lives against 
all the forces of Erin armed against them, except those of his 
friend the King of Munster. Stirred to the depths by a struggle 
that compelled them to put out all strength in the defence 
of what they held most dear, they felt keenly, reached the 
highest level of the life of their own time, and poured its music 
out in song. Fionn's cousin, Caeilte Mac Ronan, was warrior 
and bard. Oisin, the son of Fionn, was warrior and bard. The 
brother of Oisin, Fergus the Eloquent (Fergus Finnbheoil), 
was chief bard, and bard only. 

More or less changed by time, some fragments of the singing 
of these men remain on the lips of country folks among the 
Scotch and Irish Gaels. Only eleven of them are to be found 
in records older than the fifteenth century ; but others were 
collected from the lips of the people by a Dean of Lismore in 
Argyllshire, before the days of Queen Elizabeth. 



a.d. 570.] BATTLE OF CATTRAETH. 5 

Of the old Gaelic poems and histories Ireland has many 
remains, such as the tale of The Battle of Moytura, and the 
Tain Bo, or Cattle Plunder of Chuailgne. In the Senchns Mor 
are ancient laws of Ireland, ascribed sometimes to the third 
century, sometimes to the fifth, and certainly known as ancient 
in the days of Alfred. But the chief feature in old Gaelic lite- 
rature is the development of song during the struggle that ended 
a year after the death of Fionn in the crushing of his tribe at 
the battle of Gabhra, which is said to have been fought in the 
year 284. • 

Oisin is said to have had a warrior son, Oscar, killed in the 
battle, and to have himself survived to an extreme old age, 
saddened by change of times. The name of Oisin was even 
blended in tradition with that of St. Patrick, who came to 
Ireland about a century and a half after the battle of Gabhra. 
Patrick is made to say to Oisin, " It is better for thee to be with 
me and the clergy, as thou art, than to be with Fionn and the 
Fenians, for they are in hell without order of release;" to which 
Oisin is made to answer, " By the book and its meaning, by thy 
crozier and by thine image, better were it for me to share their 
torments than to be among the clergy continually talking. . . 
Son of Alphinen of the Wise Words, woe is me that I am near 
the clergy of the bells ! For a time I lived with Caeilte, and 
then we were not poor." 

6. The flowering of the other branch of our old Celtic litera- 
ture—the Cymric — is associated also with a struggle that 
brought out the noblest life of men touched to the quick 
and concentrating all their powers for defence of home and 
liberty. Here also was a struggle against overwhelming force, 
closed with a ruinous defeat in battle. This was the Battle of 
Cattraeth, said to have been fought in the year 570 by con- 
federate Cymry to resist the advance of the Teuton inland,, 
after the last of the six settlements upon our eastern shores. 
They were, indeed, men of the sixth settlement, who had landed 
(a.d. 547) in the north-east, under Ida, and then spread from the 
sea inland across a part of the land we now call Northumber- 
land, Durham, aird Yorkshire. They took certain lands of the 
Gododin (Otadini of the Romans), which the Cymry made a 
last great effort to wrest from them. The scene of battle was 
probably Catterick Bridge, a few miles from Richmond, in York- 
shire. The Cymric tribes were gathered at the call of the Lord 
of Eiddin, which means, perhaps, not Edinburgh, but the 



6 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 547 

region of the river Eden, flowing from a source near that of the 
Swale, through Westmoreland and Cumberland, into the Solway 
Frith. They came from districts now known by such names as 
Dumbarton, Wigtown, Kirkcudbright, and Ayr, from Morecambe 
Bay and all surrounding regions, gathered their force on the 
hills about the sources of the Eden and the Swale, and thence 
marched (A.D. 570) down through Swaledale, some five and 
twenty miles, to Catterick, or Cattraeth. Aneurin, one of the 
chief of the bards inspired by the great life-struggle, sang the 
disasters of the battle in a poem called the Gododin, of which 
ninety-seven stanzas yet remain. Gray found in a translation of 
it the passage which he thus put into music of his own : — 

"To Cattraeth's vale in glittering row 
Twice two hundred warriors go ; 
Every warrior's manly neck 
Chains of regal honour deck, 
Wreathed in many a golden link : 
From the golden cup they drink 
Nectar that the bees produce, 
Or the grape's ecstatic juice. 
Flush'd with mirth and hope they burn ; 
But none from Cattraeth's vale return, 
Save Aeron brave and Conan strong 
(Bursting through the bloody throng). 
And I, the meanest of them all, 
That live to weep and sing their fall." 

The battle began on a Tuesday, and continued for a week. 
The Cymry fought to the death, and of three hundred and sixty- 
three chiefs who had led their people to the conflict, only three, 
says Aneurin, besides himself, survived. " Morien lifted up 
again his ancient lance, and, roaring, stretching out death 
towards the warriors, whilst towards the lovely, slender, blood- 
stained body of Gwen, sighed Gwenabwy, the only son of Gwen. 
. . . Fain would I sing, 'would that Morien had not died/ 
I sigh for Gwenabwy the son of Gwen." Thus Aneurin ends 
his plaint over the crowning triumph of the Teuton. But 
hearts had beaten high among the Cymry, and from souls astir 
song had been poured throughout the days of long resistance 
'hat had come before. Urien was the great North of England 
:hief who led the battle of the Cymry for their homes and liber- 
ies against invading Angles. Llywarch the Old (Llvwarch 
Hen) Prince of Argoed, whom the remains of verse ascribed to 
lim show to have been first in genius among the Cymric bards, 
vas Urien's friend and fellow-combatant at Lindisfarne, between 



TO a.u. 579.] TALIESIN. MERLIN. J 

the years 572 and 579. There, after the death of Urien, he carried 
the chiefs head in his mantle from the field. "The head," he 
sang, " that I carry carried me ; I shall find it no more ; it will 
come no more to my succour. Woe to my hand, my happiness 
is lost ! " After Urien's death Llywarch joined arms with Cyn- 
dyllan, Prince of Powys, at his capital, where Shrewsbury now 
stands. Cyndyllan xell in a battle at Tarn, near the Wrekin. 
"The hall of Cyndyllan," then sang his friend Llywarch, "is 
gloomy this night, without fire, without songs — tears afflict 
the cheeks ! The hall of Cyndyllan is gloomy this night, with- 
out fire, without family— my overflowing tears gush out ! The 
hall of Cyndyllan pierces me to see it, roofless, fireless. My 
chief is dead, and I alive myself." Twelfth century tradi- 
tion says that this bard was for a time one of King Arthur's 
counsellors. Llywarch had many sons ; he gave to all of them 
his heart to battle for their country, and lost them all upon the 
battle-field. " O, Gwenn," he sang of his youngest and last 
dead, " O, Gwenn, woe to him who is too old, since he has lost 
you. A man was my son, a hero, a generous warrior, and he 
was the nephew of Urien. Gwenn has been slain at the ford of 
Morlas. . . Sweetly sang a bird on a pear tree above the 
head of Gwenn before they covered him with the turf. That 
broke the heart of the old Llywarch." 

Taliesia (Shining Forehead) was another of those Cymric 
bards who sang in the hall of Urien. He was bard only, 
chief bard, and sang Urien's victories over Ida at Argoed, at 
Gwenn Estrad, and at Menao, between the years 547 and 560. 
After the death of Urien, he was the bard of Urien's son, Owain, 
by whom Ida was slain. After the death of all Urien's sons, 
Taliesin ended a sad life in Wales, and was buried, it is said, 
under a cairn near Aberystwith. 

Myrddhin, or Merlin, was another of these bards, the one 
who became afterwards one of the chief figures in Arthurian 
romance. He was born between the years 470 and 480 ; served 
first the British chief Ambrosius Aurelianus, from whom he took 
the name of Ambrose before his own name of Merlin ; then 
served as bard with Arthur, leader of the Southern Britons. That 
was the King Arthur who fought as Urien fought, and who, 
though seldom named in our oldest Cymric remains, became after- 
wards typical hero of the contest, Arthur, the King of that heroic 
myth which runs through our literature and is made part of the life 
of England. Merlin, one day, between the years 560 and 574, 



8 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

in a field of slaughter on the Solway Firth, lost reason at sight 
of the miseries and horrors that surrounded him, broke his sword, 
and fled the society of man. Thenceforth he poured lament 
through all his music, and at last he was found dead by the banks 
of a river. Of other bards the memories survive, but these were 
the chief; and if the records of their lives be blended with 
much fable, they do, nevertheless, retain truths out of the life of 
that great time of effervescence which preceded in this country 
a blending of the elements of English strength. 

7. Influence of the Celt on English literature proceeds not 
from example set by one people and followed by another, but in 
the way of nature, by establishment of blood relationship, and 
the transmission of modified and blended character to a suc- 
ceeding generation. 

The pure Gael — now represented by the Irish and Scotch 
Celts — was, at his best, an artist. He had a sense of literature, 
he had active and bold imagination, joy in bright colour, skill in 
music, touches of a keen sense of honour in most savage times, 
and in religion fervent and self-sacrificing zeal. In the Cymry 
— now represented by the Celts of Wales — there was the same 
artist nature. By natural difference, and partly, no doubt, 
because their first known poets learnt in suffering what they 
taught in song, the oldest Cymric music comes to us, not like 
the music of the Irish harp, in throbbings of a pleasant tuneful- 
ness, but as a wail that beats again, again, and again some 
iterated burden on the ear. 

The blending of the_Celt and Teuton had begun in the north 
even before the days of the great battle at Cattraeth. Some 
passages in Aneurin's Gododin show that Celts of part of the 
Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire coast, the men of 
Deivyr and Bryneich (Deira and Bernicia), had remained there 
and become incorporated with the new possessors of the soil. 
There never was repulse of the whole body of the Cymry into 
Wales. Bede, writing a hundred and fifty years after the battle 
of Cattraeth, speaks of the Britons of Northumberland as being 
in his day partly free and partly subject to the Angles. In the 
hill-country of the north and west, to which the Teuton did not 
care to follow with his plough, and in the fens, were independent 
Celts. The drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe is one of FalstafFs 
similes for melancholy. The familiar presence of the bagpipe 
indicates a former Celtic occupation of the fens. In the West of 
England the Celts were so far from having been entirely driven 



INFLUENCE OF THE CELT. 9 

into Wales that in King Alfred's time, three centuries after the 
struggle ended at Cattraeth, a line from north to south, dividing 
England into equal parts, had on the west side of it a country 
in which Celts abounded. They were the chief occupants of the 
five south-western counties. In Athelstane's time, Celts and 
Teutons, Britons and Englishmen, divided equal rule in Exeter. 
Neither in the West nor in the North of England were the Celts, 
enslaved. Wales they had to themselves ; and there they 
cherished British nationality. But where they lived among the 
English they accepted, when outnumbered, the established 
power; or, if in equal force, divided rule, and lived in either 
case as fellow-citizens with their Teutonic neighbours. 

In the fusion of the two races, which then slowly began 
among the hills and valleys of the North and West of England, 
where the populations came most freely into contact, the gift 
of genius was the contribution of the Celt. The writer of our 
latest and best history of Architecture, when ' preparing the 
ground for his work by a survey of the characteristics of 
different races in relation to his ait, says that " the true glory 
of the Celt in Europe is his artistic eminence. It is not, 
perhaps," adds Mr. Fergusson, " too much to assert that with- 
out his intervention we should not have possessed in modern 
times a church worthy of admiration, or a picture or a statue 
we could look at without shame." 

8. The sense of literature was shown in the earliest times by 
the support of a distinct literary class among the Celts who 
then possessed this country. In Erin, the first headquarters of 
song and story, even in the third century, there was the poet 
with his staff of office, a square tablet staff, on the four sides of 
which he cut his verse ; and there were degrees in literature. 
There was the Ollamh, or perfect doctor, who could recite seven 
fifties of historic tales ; and there were others, down to the 
Driseg, who could tell but twenty. As we travel down from the 
remotest time of which there can be doubtful record, we find the 
profession of historian to be a recognised calling, transmitted in 
one family from generation to generation, and these later 
professors of history still bore the name of Ollamhs. Of the 
active and bold fancy that accompanied this Celtic sense of 
literature as an art, and of the Celt's delight in bright colour, 
almost any one of the old Gaelic poems will bear witness. The 
delight in colour is less manifest in the first poems of the 
Cymry. For them the one colour was that of blood ; they are 



IO A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

of the sixth century, and sing of men who died in the vain fight 
against the spreading power of the Teuton. Of those Gaels 
who were known as Gauls to Rome, Diodorus, the Sicilian, told, 
three centuries before the time of Fionn and Oisin, how they 
wore bracelets and costly finger-rings, gold corselets, and dyed 
tunics flowered with colours of every kind, trews, striped cloaks 
fastened with a brooch and divided into many parti-coloured 
squares, a taste still represented by the Highland plaid. In the 
old Gaelic tale of the " Tain Bo," men are described marching : 
u Some are with red cloaks ; others with light blue cloaks ; 
others with deep blue cloaks ; others with green, or grey, or 
white, or yellow cloaks, bright and fluttering about them. There 
is a young, red-freckled lad, with a crimson cloak, in their midst; 
a golden brooch in that cloak at his breast." Even the ghost of 
a Celt, if it dropped the substance, retained all the colouring 
of life. The vivacity of Celtic fancy is shown also by an out- 
pouring of bold metaphor and effective simile : — 

" Both shoulders covered with his painted shield 
The hero there, swift as the war-horse, rushed. 
Noise in the mount of slaughter, noise and fire ; 
The darting lances were as gleams of sun. 
There the glad raven fed. The foe must fly- 
While he so swept them as when in his course 
An eagle strikes the morning dews aside, 
And like a whelming billow struck their front. 
Brave men, so say the bards, are dumb to slaves. 
Spears wasted men, and ere the swan-white steeds 
Trod the still grave that hushed the master voice, 
His blood washed all his arms. Such was Buddvan, 
Son of Bleedvan the Bold." 

Here, in a mere average stanza, containing one of the ninety 
celebrations of the Cymric chiefs who fell at Cattraeth, we have 
more similes than in the six thousand and odd lines (English 
measure) of " Beowulf," the first heroic poem of the Teutonic 
section of our people. The delight in music — among the old 
Irish Celts in the music of the harp and tabor, among the old 
Welsh Celts in music of the harp, the pipe, and the crowd — is 
another characteristic. It is noted also that the music of the 
Gaels was sweet, lively, and rapid ; and that the music of the 
Cymry was slower and more monotonous. 

In the old Gaelic story of the first appearance of their people 
in Erin, we read how the Milesians landed unobserved, marched 
upon Tara, and called on the three kings of the Tuatha de 
Danaan, who then held the country, to surrender. The kings 



THE FIRST ENGLISH. 1 1 

answered that they h°d been taken by surprise, and that the 
invaders ought to re-embark, retire nine waves, and try whether 
they could make good their landing in fair fight. The Milesians 
agreed that this was just, and did try back. We are not bound 
to believe that such things were ever done ; enough for us that 
there is the temper of the people indicated by the character of its 
inventions. And they are suggestions of a chivalrous ideal in 
old days of savage artist life, when the Celt was a pagan gentle- 
man very much in the rough ; savage times when, says another 
of these old tales, the Ulster men mixed the brains of their slain 
enemies with lime, and played with the hard balls they made of 
them. Such a brainstone is said to have gone through the skull 
of Conchobar, who lived afterwards seven years with two brains 
in his head, always sitting very still, because it would be death 
to shake himself. The Ollamh of old told, doubtless, this story 
with a roguish twinkle of the eye that has descended to his 
children's children. 

The self-sacrificing zeal that entered into the religion of the 
Celts bore fruit in the first Christianising of the English. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE FORMING OF THE PEOPLE : FIRST ENGLISH. 

I. The First English, who are commonly known by the school' 
name of Anglo-Saxons, but who called themselves, as we call 
ourselves now, the English people {Englisc /o/c),were formed 
by a gradual blending of Teutonic tribes. They came, at 
different times and in different generations, from different parts 
of the opposite coast. On our eastern shores, from the Moray 
Firth to below Whitby, the land lay readiest of access to men 
from the opposite side of the North Sea, among whom Scandi- 
navians were numerous ; accordingly, the Scandinavian element 
is chiefly represented in the character, form, face, and provincial 
dialects of our north country. The part of our east coast 
belonging now to Lincolnshire was readiest of access to the 
Danes ; and in Lincolnshire the Danish element is strongly 
represented. Farther south, our coast was opposite the Frisian 
settlements ; therefore, among the immigrants over the North 
Sea to Southern England, the Frisians, forefathers of the 



12 A FIRST SKETCH OP ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

modem Dutchmen, would predominate. Adventurers of many 
tribes might join in any single expedition. When they had 
formed their settlements, the Teutonic spirit of co-operation, 
and the social progress that came of it, produced changes of 
home, intermarriages, community of interests, community of 
speech in a language proper to the cultivated men of the whole 
country. This manner of speech, First English (or Anglo- 
Saxon), was not brought complete from any place upon the 
Continent, but it was formed here by a fusion of the closely- 
related languages or dialects of the Teutonic immigrants. The 
Teutons of the coast being chiefly the Low Germans, our first 
English were chiefly a Low German people. The language 
formed by them, and written with care as they advanced in cul- 
ture, was mainly Frisian in structure. They called it English. 
It was English. Let us call it, then, First English, and avoid 
the confusion of ideas produced by giving it— as if it were the 
language of another people — the separate name of Anglo-Saxon. 
Their educated men wrote it with much regard to uniformity of 
practice and grammatical accuracy. The main body of the 
people spoke it, as they still do, with less regard to grammar, and 
with great diversities of vocabulary, idiom, and pronunciation. 
Those diversities are still sharply defined, though in the course 
of centuries they have been softened by continuance of free 
communication, and by intermarriage between me^i and women 
of all English provinces. The provincial dialects still bear very 
distinct witness to the original diversity of the Teutonic colonists - r 
but these differences are not expressed by the Latin words, 
Anglns and Saxo. Anglus was only a Latin form of Englisc 
(pronounced English), the name by which the people called 
itself ; and Saxon was the name which others gave to them. 
This might readily come into some formal use in the south, 
where Church-bred statesmen had a Roman education ; but in 
the north it might be less familiar, because there the first 
educated priestly class was not formed on the Roman model. 
Thus Bede, a north countryman, tells of English or Angle 
settlements in his own part of the country ; but, being informed 
by a southern correspondent of the Saxon settlements of Southern 
England, supposes that the difference of word means difference 
of people. Difference there was — in the north were mere Scan- 
dinavians, in the south more Frisians — but they all took English 
for their common name ; and when they were first incidentally 
called Anglo-Saxons by Bishop Asser, the biographer of King 



A.D. 6oo- 7 oo.] BEOWULF. 1 3 

Alfred, the compound word was not meant to represent a race 
compounded of Angles and of Saxons, but the English part of 
that great Teutonic population which there was a growing ten- 
dency among foreign writers to call, without discrimination of 
tribes, by the common name of Saxon. Anglo-Saxons meant, 
therefore, those Saxons who called themselves the Angles ; but 
Angle is no more than an imperfect re-translation of the Latin- 
ised name of the English. 

2. Many Celts in our island had been converted to the 
Christian faith when the last strong settlements were being 
established here by pagan Teutons. The Teutonic settlers 
brought with them battle-songs and a heroic legend of a chief 
named Beowulf. This legend was afterwards put into First 
English verse, probably in the seventh century, perhaps earlier 
or later, and remains to us, under the name of its hero, one of 
the earliest monuments of English literature ; a poem of 6,357 
short lines, the most ancient heroic poem in any Germanic lan- 
guage. Its hero sails from a land of the Goths to a land of the 
Danes, and there he frees a chief named Hrothgar from the 
attacks of a monster of the fens and rnoors, named GrendeL 
Afterwards he is himself ruler, is wounded mortally in combat 
with a dragon, and is solemnly buried under a great barrow on 
a promontory rising high above the sea. " And round about the 
mound rode his hearth-sharers, who sang that he was of kings, 
of men, the mildest, kindest, to his people sweetest, and the 
readiest in search of praise." In this poem real events are 
transformed into legendary marvels ; but the actual life of the 
old Danish and Scandinavian chiefs, as it was first transferred 
to this country, is vividly painted. It brings before us the feast 
in the mead-hall, with the chief and his hearth-sharers, the cus- 
toms of the banquet, the rude beginnings of a courtly cere- 
mony, the boastful talk, reliance upon strength of hand in 
grapple with the foe, and the practical spirit of adventure that 
seeks peril as a commercial speculation — for Beowulf is undis- 
guisedly a tradesman in his sword. The poem includes also 
expression of the heathen fatalism, " What is to be goes ever as 
it must," tinged by the energetic sense of men who feel that even 
fate helps those who help themselves, or, as it stands in Beowulf, 
that " the Must Be often helps an undoomed man when he is 
brave." 

The original scene of the story of this poem was probably a 
corner of that island of Saeland upon which now stands the 



14 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 305 

capital of Denmark, the corner which lies opposite to Gothland, 
the southern promontory of Sweden. But if so, he who in this 
country told the old story in English metre did not paint the 
scenery of Sasland, but that which he knew. A twelve-mile 
walk by the Yorkshire coast, from Whitby northward to the top 
of Bowlby Cliff, makes real to the imagination all the country of 
Beowulf as we find it in the poem. Thus we are almost tempted 
to accept a theory which makes that cliff, the highest on our 
eastern coast, the ness upon which Beowulf was buried, and on 
the slope of which — Bowlby then being read as the corrupted 
form of Beowulfes-by — Beowulf once lived with his hearth- 
sharers. High sea-cliffs, worn into holes or " nickerhouses 
many," with glens rocky and wooded running up into great 
moors, are not characters of the coast of Sseland opposite to 
Sweden, but they are special characters of that corner of 
Yorkshire in which the tale of Beowulf seems to have been told 
as it now comes to us in First English verse. 

To the same part of England, and to a date between the years 
670 and 680, certainly belongs the other great First English 
poem, known as Caedmon's " Paraphrase," a paraphrase of some 
parts of the Bible story. This poem arose out of the Christian- 
ising of the English of the north by Celtic missionaries. 

3. There are doubtful traditions which even brought the 
Apostle Paul to Britain ; which found this country a first bishop 
in Aristobulus, one of the seventy disciples whom St. Paul men- 
tions in his Epistle to the Romans ; and made a King Lucius, 
who died A.D. 201, the first Christian King, founder also of the 
first church, St. Martin's, at Canterbury. 

But we know more certainly from the evidence of Eusebius, 
towards the beginning, and of Chrysostom, towards the close of 
the fourth century, that Christian teachers then visited Britain 
and made converts. Alban is said to have been the first British 
martyr, and the date assigned to his martyrdom is the year 305. 
In 314 three British bishops were among those present at the 
Council of Aries. British bishops were also at the Council of 
Rimini, in 359. Between the years 394 and 415, a British 
Christian scholar, of independent mind and earnest piety, named 
Morgan, or Morgant (who transformed his Cymric name, which 
means " one born by the sea-shore," into its classical synonym, 
Pelagius), maintained opinions upon sundry points which were 
hotly opposed by the Augustine of the primitive Church, and by 
the great body of the Roman clergy, as the Pelagian heresy. 



to a.]). 605.] COLUMBA. AUGUSTINE. 1 5 

Patricius, the St. Patrick of the Irish, was Morgan's contem- 
porary, but a younger man, born on the Clyde, near Dumbarton, 
in the year 372, and active during the former half of the fifth 
century. His work among the Gaelic Celts aided the efforts of 
the small communities of Celtic missionaries, called Culdees. 
St. David, who is remembered as the most famous teacher of 
the Welsh, was an austere and able priest of the school of the 
Egyptian monks, son of a Cymric prince, and by tradition uncle 
to King Arthur. He was at work during the former half of the 
sixth century. But the chief missionary work was then being 
done by the Culdees of the Irish Church. Cohimba, an Irish 
abbot of royal descent, after founding monasteries in the North 
of Ireland, passed in the year 563 to Scotland, and for the 
next thirty-four years laboured there as a missionary on the 
mainland and in the Hebrides, making his headquarters upon 
one of the Hebrides, the rocky island of Iona. Iona then 
became the most important of the Culdee missionary stations. 
It was not until Columba had been thus at work for three and 
thirty years that Pope Gregory I. sent the Italian Augustine 
into this country, where he acted as a missionary from Rome 
to the South of England, and became the first Archbishop of 
Canterbury. 

The Celtic missionaries had then been at work for genera- 
tions among the English of the north. They had received 
their own teaching rather from the Eastern than from the 
Western Church, and followed, therefore, the practice of the 
Eastern Church in fixing the time for Easter, and in points of 
ceremonial wherein that Church differed from the Church of 
Rome. As the influence of teachers from Rome spread north- 
ward, hot conflict was raised between the teachers of the south 
and of the north upon these points of ceremonial. They 
appeared more vital questions to the Rome-bred clergy than 
to those trained in the schools of the Culdees, at Iona or at 
Lindisfarne. In the year 634 Oswald became king over the 
rude population of Deivyr and Bryneich, among whom there 
had been that early fusion of Celts with the incoming English 
settlers which is referred to by Aneurin in the Gododin (ch. i. § 7). 
King Oswald sent for missionaries to Iona. 

This was two years after the death of the Arabian prophet, 
Mahomet. 

The first of the teachers who came from Iona to the North- 
umbrians went back and made hopeless report of the people. 



1 6 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 657 

Then Aidan volunteered for the work, and led a religious 
colony to Lindisfarne, which is at low water a peninsula, 
at high water an island, nine miles to the southward of our 
present Berwick-upon-Tweed. At Lindisfarne, where Oswald 
founded for him a bishopric, Aidan formed the great missionary- 
station for Northumbria. He gave his goods to the poor, 
travelled on foot among the people whom he sought to bring to 
Christ, and won their hearts by simple truth and self-denying 
earnestness. More Culdees passed through Lindisfarne to join 
the work, and thus. the place came to be known as Holy Isle. 
For the next thirty years the Celts were in all this region spiritual 
teachers of the English, and it was out of the midst of this great 
North of England movement, in the newly-established monastery 
of Whitby, that the English heart sang through the verse of 
Casdmon its first great hymn based on the Word of Truth. 

4. The Whitby monastery was founded by the Abbess Hilda, 
in the year 657. She then moved to it from the religious house 
at Hartlepool, over which she had presided, and into which she 
had received, two years before, Elfleda, the one-year-old daughter 
of King Oswald's brother and successor. In thanksgiving for a 
victory, Elfleda's father had devoted the child to religious life. 
With a community of both sexes, bound less by formal ties 
than by a common wish to serve God and aid one another 
in His service while they diffused Christianity among the 
people, Hilda lived in the first simple abbey built on the high 
cliff at Whitby, maintained by a grant of surrounding lands. 
That which maintained her maintained also the poor about 
her. She had been taught by Aidan ; had been for some years 
at Hartlepool much trusted, visited, and counselled by Aidan 
and other chief teachers of the Celtic Christians. Under her 
roof, in the year 664, when Whitby Abbey was but seven years 
old, there was held the Synod of Whitby, for settlement of 
the questions of ceremonial between the Celtic and the Roman 
Churches, and peace was secured by concession of the points 
upon which Rome insisted. At Whitby Hilda was as mother to 
the child-princess, who grew up under her care and became next 
abbess after her ; was as mother in her little community, and 
among the rude people round about, who long preserved the 
belief that her form is at certain times to be seen in a vision of 
sunshine among the ruins of the later abbey built upon the site 
of hers. She so much encouraged the close study of Scripture 
that in her time many worthy servants of the Church and five 



TO a.d. 680.] CjEDMON. 17 

bishops are said to have come out of her abbey. Afflicted 
during the last six years of her life, she never failed in any duty ; 
and her last words to her people were that they should preserve 
the peace of the Gospel among themselves and with all others. 
At the time of her death, in 680, Cuthbert, who died in 686, 
was Bishop of Lindisfarne. He also left the mark of a true 
Christian's life among the people, and was remembered as an 
angelic missionary priest, who had deep sympathy for the neg- 
lected poor. He would seek them in their most craggy and 
inaccessible homes, to dwell with them by the week or month — 
their bishop and their brother. Such stir of human energies pro- 
duced a poet worthy of the time. All that we know of him was 
told by Bede, who was also a north countryman, and who was 
born about the time when Caedmon's Paraphrase was written. 

5. From Bede's account, without adopting its suggestion of 
miracle in the gift of song to the poet, we may infer that 
Csedmon was a tenant on some of the abbey lands at Whitby, 
and one of the converts who had a poet's nature stirred by 
Christian zeal. One day he joined a festive party at the house of 
some remoter neighbour of the country-side. The visitors came 
in on horseback and afoot, or in country cars, drawn some by 
horses and some by oxen. There was occasion for festivity 
that would last longer than a day. The draught cattle of 
the visitors were stabled, and would need watching of nights, 
since in wild times cattle-plunder also was a recreation, and one 
that joined business to pleasure. The visitors took turns by 
night in- keeping watch over the stables. One evening when 
Caedmon sat with his companions over the ale-cup, and the song 
went round, his sense of song was keen, but, as a zealous 
Christian convert, he turned with repugnance from the battle- 
strains and heathen tales that were being chanted to the music 
of the rude harp which passed from hand to hand. As the 
harp came nearer to him he rose, since it was his turn that night 
to watch the cattle, and escaped into the stables. There, since we 
know by his work that he was true poet born, his train of thought 
doubtless continued till it led to a strong yearning for another 
form of song. If for these heathen hymns of war and rapine, 
knowledge and praise of God could be the glad theme of their 
household music, ana if he, even he — perhaps we may accept 
as a true dream the vision which Bede next tells as a miracle. 
Caedmon watched, slept, and in his sleep one came to him and 
said, " Caedmon sing." He said, " I cannot. I came hither out of 

c 



13 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 657 

the feast because I cannot sing." " But," answered the one who 
came to him, " you have to sing to me." " What," Caedmon 
asked, " ought I to sing ? " And he answered, " Sing the origin of 
creatures." Having received which answer, Bede tells us, he 
began immediately to sing, in praise of God the Creator, verses 
of which this is the sense : — " Now we ought to praise the Author 
of the Heavenly Kingdom, the power of the Creator and His 
counsel, the deeds of the Father of Glory : how He, though 
the eternal God, became the Author of all marvels ; Omnipotent 
Guardian, who created for the sons of men, first Heaven for their 
roof, and then the Earth." " This," adds Bede, " is the sense but not 
the order of the words which he sang when sleeping." Caedmon 
remembered upon waking the few lines he had made in his sleep, 
and continued to make others like them. The vision seems to 
have been simply the dream-form given to a continuation of his 
waking thoughts ; and Caedmon may well have believed, accor- 
ding to the simple faith of his time, that in his dream he had 
received a command from heaven. He went in,the morning to 
the steward of the land he held under the abbey, and proposed 
to use his gift of song in aid of the work that was being done by 
Abbess Hilda and her companions. Hilda called him to her, up 
the great rock, and, to test his power, caused pieces of Scripture 
story to be told to him, then bade him go home and turn them 
into verse. He returned next day with the work so well done 
that his teachers became in turn his hearers. Hilda then coun- 
selled him to give up his occupations as a layman, and received 
him with all his goods into the monastery. There sacred history 
was taught to him, that he might place the Word of God in 
pleasant song within their homes, and on their highways, and at 
festive gatherings, upon the lips of the surrounding people. He 
was himself taught by religious men trained in the Celtic school, 
which was more closely allied to the Eastern than the Western 
Church. They knew and read the Chaldee Scriptures, and as 
their new brother began his work with the song of Genesis, 
the name they gave him in the monastery was the Chaldee name 
of the book of Genesis, derived from its first words, " In the 
beginning," that being in the Chaldee b'Cadmon. 

6. Caedmon sang, in what is now called his Paraphrase, of 
the Creation, and with it of the War in Heaven, of the fall 
of Satan, and of his counsellings in Hell as the Strong Angel of 
Presumption. Thus Caedmon began, first in time and among the 
first in genius, the strain of English poetry : 



TO A.d. ©5o.] C^EDMON S PARAPHRASE. 10. 

" Most right it is that we praise with our words, 
Love in our minds, the Warden of the skies. 
Glorious King of all the hosts of men ; 
He speeds the strong, and is the Head of all 
His high Creation, the Almighty Lord. 
None formed Him, no first was nor last shall be 
Of the eternal Ruler, but His sway- 
Is everlasting over thrones in heaven." 

Casdmon paints " The Angel of Presumption," yet in heaven, 
questioning whether he would serve God: 

" ' Wherefore,' he said, ' shall I toil ? 
No need have I of master. I can work 
With my own hands great marvels, and have power 
To build a throne more worthy of a God, 
Higher in heaven. Why shall I, for His smile, 
Serve Him, bend to Him thus in vassalage 1 
I may be God as He. 

Stand by me, strong supporters, firm in strife. 
Hard-mooded heroes, famous warriors, 
Have chosen me for chief; one may take thought 
With such for counsel, and with such secure 
Large following. My friends in earnest they, 
Faithful in all the shaping of their minds : 
I am their master, and may rule this realm. 

And thus, to quote one passage more, Caedmon, a thousand 
years before the time of Milton, sang of Satan fallen : 

" Satan discoursed, he who henceforth ruled hell 
Spake sorrowing. 

God's Angel erst, he had shone white in heaven, 
Till his soul urged, and most of all its pride, 
That of the Lord of Hosts he should no more 
Bend to the word. About his heart his soul 
Tumultuously heaved, hot pains of wrath 
Without him. 

Then said he, ' Most unlike this narrow place 
To that which once we knew, high in heaven's realm. 
Which my Lord gave me, though therein no more 
For the Almighty we hold royalties. 
Yet right hath He not done in striking us 
Down to the fiery bottom of hot hell, 
Banished from heaven's kingdom, with decree 
That He will set in it the race of man. 
Worst of my sorrows this, that, wrought of earth, 
Adam shall sit in bliss on my strong throne ; 
Whilst we these pangs endure, this grief in hell. 
Woe ! Woe ! Had I the power of my hands, 
And for a season, for one winter's space, 

Might be without ; then with this host, I 

But iron binds me round ; this coil of chains 
Rides me ; I rule no more — close bonds of hell 
Hem me their prisoner." 



20 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 657 

Csedmon, when he has thus told the story of Creation and 
the Fall of Man, follows the Scripture story to the Flood, and 
represents with simple words the rush of waters, and the ark "at 
large under the skies over the orb of ocean." So he goes on, 
picturing clearly to himself what with few words he pictures for 
his hearer. The story of Abraham proceeds to the triumph of 
his faith in God when he had led his son Isaac to the top of a 
high mount by the sea, " began to load the pile, awaken fire, 
and fettered the hands and feet of his child ; then hove on the 
pile young Isaac, and then hastily gripped the sword by the hilt, 
would kill his son with his own hands, quench the fire with the 
youth's blood." From this scene of God's blessing on the per- 
fect faith of Abraham, Caedmon proceeds next to the passage 
of the Red Sea by the Israelites, a story of the power of God, 
who is able to lead those who put their faith in Him unhurt 
through the midst of the great waters. And the next subject of 
the extant Paraphrase is taken from the book of Daniel, to show 
the same Power leading Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael, with 
their garments unsinged, through the furnace fire. This para- 
phrase closes with Belshazzar's feast. The rest is from the New 
Testament, inscribed in the one extant manuscript less carefully, 
and by a later hand. It has for its subject Christ and Satan ; 
it is fragmentary, and perhaps no part of it is by Caedmon, 
except that which describes the fasting and temptation in the 
wilderness. 

7. As to their mechanism, there is one measure for Beowulf, 
Caedmon's Paraphrase, and all subsequent First English poems. 
There is no rhyme, and no counting of syllables. The lines are 
short, depending upon accent for a rhythm varying in accord- 
ance with the thought to be expressed, and depending for its 
emphasis upon alliteration. Usually in the first of a pair of 
short lines the two words of chief importance began with the 
same letter, and in the second line of the pair the chief word 
began also with that letter, that is to say, if the alliteration were 
of consonants ; in the case of vowels the rule was reversed, the 
chief words would begin with vowels that were different. 

8. As to their matter, if we except Caedmon, in whom there 
was an artistic power perhaps to be accounted for by the 
beginning of some mixture of blood between the northern 
English and their Celtic fellow-citizens, the First English writers, 
whether of verse or prose, were wanting in vivacity of genius. 
They were practical, earnest, social, true to a high sense ot duty, 



toa.d. 68o.3 FIRST ENGLISH POETRY. 21 

and had faith in God. They used few similes, and, although 
their poetry is sometimes said to abound in metaphor, its meta- 
phors were few and obvious. By metaphor a word is turned out 
of its natural sense. There is little of metaphor in calling the 
sea the water-street, the whale-road, or the swan-road ; the ship 
a wave-traverser, the sea-wood, or the floating-wood ; a chief's 
retainers his hearth-sharers, or night the shadow-covering of 
creatures. This kind of poetical periphrasis abounds in First 
English poetry, but it proceeds from the thoughtful habit of 
realisation, which extends also to a representation of the sense 
of words by some literal suggestion, that will bring them 
quickened with a familiar experience or human association to 
the mind. There is in the unmixed English an imagination 
with deep roots and little flower, solid stem and no luxuriance of 
foliage. That which it was in a poet's mind to say was realised 
first, and then uttered with a direct earnestness which carried 
every thought straight home to the apprehension of the 
listener. The descendants of those'Frisians who did not cross 
to our shores resemble the First English before they had been 
quickened with a dash of Celtic blood. Both Dutch and 
English, when the seed of Christianity struck root among them, 
mastered the first conditions of a full development of its grand 
truths with the same solid earnestness, and carried their con- 
victions out to the same practical result. Holland, indeed, has 
been, not less than England, with England and for England, a 
battle-ground of civil and religious liberty. The power of the 
English character, and, therefore, of the literature that expresses 
it, lies in this energetic sense of truth, and this firm habit of 
looking to the end. Christianity having been once accepted, 
aided as it was greatly in its first establishment among us by 
zeal of the Gael and Cymry, the First English writers fastened 
upon it, and throughout the whole subsequent history of our 
literature, varied and enlivened by the diverse blending of the 
races that joined in the forming of the nation, its religious 
energy has been the centre of its life. 

9. Casdmon's Paraphrase, written certainly during Abbess 
Hilda's rule over Whitby, between 657 and 680, was probably 
being produced during the last ten years of her life, or between 
the years 670 and 680. Aldhelm, born in 656, was then a 
youth, well-born, and well-taught by the learned Adrian, spend- 
ing alike his intellectual and his material wealth at Malmesbury 
for the love of God. In Caedmon's time, in the year 672, 



22 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 672 

Aldhelm, a youth of sixteen, joined the poor monastery which 
had been founded by a Scot more learned than rich, named 
Meldum, after whom the place had its name of Meldum's 
Byrig, or Malmesbury. The place was so poor that the 
monks had not enough to eat. Aldhelm obtained a grant of the 
monastery, rebuilt the church, gathered religious companies 
about him, and inspired in them his zeal for a pure life. He 
was a musician and a poet ; played, it is said, all the instru- 
ments of music used in his time. His letters, and his Latin 
verse, chiefly in praise of chastity, survive, but those English 
songs of his which were still on the lips of the people in King 
Alfred's day are lost to us. William of Malmesbury has re- 
corded, on King Alfred's authority, that Aldhelm was unequalled 
as an inventor and singer of English verse ; and that a song 
ascribed to him, which was still familiar among the people, had 
been sung by Aldhelm on the bridge between country and town, 
in the character of an English minstrel or gleeman, to keep the 
people from running home directly after mass was sung, as it 
was their habit to do, without waiting for the sermon. Another 
story is, that on a Sunday, at a time when many traders from 
different parts of the country came into Malmesbury, Abbot 
Aldhelm stationed himself on the bridge, and there, by his 
songs, caused some of those who would have passed to stay 
by him and, leaving their trade until the morrow, follow him to 
church. 

10. Bede, born in 673, was a child in arms when Csedmon 
sang the power of the Creator and his counsel, and the young 
Aldhelm had begun his work at Malmesbury. When seven 
years old — that is to say, about the time of the death of Abbess 
Hilda — Bede was placed in the newly-founded monastery of St. 
Peter, at Wearmouth. Three years later the associated monas- 
tery of St. Paul was opened at J arrow, on the banks of the Tyne, 
about five miles distant from St. Peter's. Bede, then aged ten, 
was transferred to the Jarrow monastery. There he spent his 
life, punctual in all formal exercises of devotion, and employing 
his whole leisure, pen in hand, for the advancement of true 
knowledge. He digested and arranged the teaching of the 
fathers of the Church, that others might with the least possible 
difficulty study the Scriptures by the light they gave. He pro- 
duced, in a Latin treatise on The Nature of Things, a text-book 
of the science of his day, digested and compacted out of many 
volumes. His works are almost an encyclopaedia of the know- 



toa.d. 731.] BEDE'S ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. 23 

ledge of his time. He drew it from many sources, where it lay- 
hidden in dull, voluminous, or inaccessible books, and he set it 
forth in books which could be used in the monastery schools, or 
be read by the educated for their own further instruction. The 
fame of the devout and simple-minded English scholar spread 
beyond our shores. A pope in vain desired to have him brought 
to Rome. He refused in his own monastery the dignity of abbot, 
because " the office demands household care ; and household 
care brings with it distraction of mind, which hinders the pur- 
suit of learning." He was thus at work in his monastery, thirty- 
six years old, at the time of the death of Aldhelm. 

It was in those days that Roderick the Goth lost Spain to 
the Arabs. 

In 731, when in his fifty-ninth year, Bede finished the most 
important of his works, that known as his Ecclesiastical History. 
That History of the English Church was virtually a History of 
England brought down to the date of its completion, and based 
upon inquiries made with the true spirit of a historian. Bede did 
not doubt reported miracles, and that part of the religious faith 
of his time supplies details which we should be glad now to ex- 
change for other information upon matters whereof he gives too 
bare a chronicle ; but, whatever its defects, he has left us a 
history of the early years of England — succinct, yet often warm 
with life ; business-like, and yet child-like in its tone ; at once 
practical and spiritual, simply just, and the work of a true scholar, 
breathing love to God and man. We owe to Bede alone the 
knowledge of much that is most interesting in our early history. 
Where other authorities are cited, they are often writers who, 
on the points in question, know no more than Bede had told them. 
Bede died in the year 735, three years after the completion 
of his History. He wrote in Latin, then the language of all 
scholars ; but in his last days, under painful illness, he was 
urging forward a translation into English of the Gospel of St. 
John. One of his pupils said to him, when the end was near, 
" Most dear master, there is still one chapter wanting ; do you 
think it troublesome to be asked any more questions ?' ; He 
answered, " It is no trouble. Take your pen and make ready, 
and write fast." Afterwards, says the pupil, who gave, in a 
letter that remains to us, the narrative of Bede's last days, 
when the dying scholar had been taking leave of his brethren 
in the monaster)', and bequeathing among them his little wealth 
of pepper, napkins, and incense, " the boy said, * Dear master, 



24 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. |a.d. 73* 

there is yet one sentence not written.' He answered, ' Write 
quickly.' Soon after the boy said, ' The sentence is now 
written.' He replied, i It is well. You have said the truth. It 
is ended. Receive my head into your hands, for it is a great 
satisfaction to me to sit facing my holy place, where 1 was wont 
to pray, that I may also sitting call upon my Father.' And thus 
on the pavement of his little cell, singing ' Glory be to the 
Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost,' when he had 
named the Holy Spirit he breathed his last, and so departed 
into the heavenly kingdom." 

11. The year of the death of Bede, 735, is the supposed date 
of the birth of Alcuin. Alcuin was bred from infancy in the 
monastery of York. He was there in the time of Egbert, who, 
in 735, received the pall as second Archbishop of York, and who 
is said to have founded in York monastery the famous school in 
which Alcuin was taught. The fame of the York school and 
library spread to the court of Charlemagne. Noble youths 
came from afar to be taught theology by Egbert, and other 
knowledge by his vice-master Albert who in the year 766 suc- 
ceeded him in the archbishopric. Albert, with Alcuin's help, 
increased the fame of the school, and continued to be zealous 
beyond all others for the enrichment of the library. During 
the fourteen years of the archbishopric of Albert, Alcuin had in 
the York monastery immediate charge over the school and 
library. What he learnt from the books he told in his own words 
to his pupils, and with some of the best of them he established 
life-long friendships. One of his friends and pupils, Eanbald, in 
780 became Albert's successor in the archbishopric. Alcuin 
had once been to Rome with Albert on a search for books ; now 
he was sent again, that he might use the opportunity of a mission 
to fetch the archbishop's pall, and bring with it more books to 
the York library. Thus Alcuin chanced to be, in 781, at Parma 
when Charlemagne was passing through that town on the way 
home from the crowning of his infant son Louis, afterwards 
Louis le Ddbonnaire, as King of Aquitaine, and of his second 
son, Pepin, as King of Lombardy. 

Alcuin then was, what Bede had been, the foremost scholar 
of his time, and Charlemagne sought aid from him as an intel- 
lectual ally. He invited Alcuin to his court, where in the winter, 
when fighting was not in season, Charlemagne studied himself 
and compelled all his family to study, and whence he would 
compel his people also to receive instruction under Alcuin's 



to a.d. 804.] ALCUIN AND CHARLEMAGNE. 2$ 

directions. Having returned to York and obtained leave of 
absence from his superior, Alcuin went, therefore, in 782, to the 
court of Charlemagne, and took with him some of his best pupils 
as assistants. In the empire of Charlemagne his work was 
virtually that of a Minister of Public Instruction, the emperor 
supporting with despotic power every act of his for the estab- 
lishment of well-disciplined schools throughout the land. There 
was also Charlemagne's own Palace School, which some believe 
to have been the germ of the first university, that of Paris. 
But 121 5 is the date of the earliest record of a place of education 
called the University of Paris, and Alcuin went to the court of 
Charlemagne in the year 782. He remained with Charlemagne 
eight years, and then returned to York ; Charlemagne, who 
had sought to retain him, still maintaining direct relations by 
investing Alcuin with the office of ambassador to Offa, King of 
Mercia. After a stay of not quite two years in England, Alcuin 
returned in the year 792, and spent the rest of his life in the 
service of Charlemagne, as faithful friend to him and to his 
empire. Wealth and power were at Alcuin's disposal, but he 
spoke of himself as " the humble Levite," and was single-hearted 
in austere performance of his duty. He was strict in discipline, 
and faithful in counsel to his headstrong master, as his extant 
correspondence shows. In his theological writing, Alcuin 
chiefly occupied himself with attack on heresy ; but he wrote 
also text-books to provide means for efficient teaching in his 
schools, and he was energetic in repression of the love of wine 
and of the chase that had defied Church discipline. 

The scriptorium, or writing-room in the monastery — which 
once was what the printing-office is to us — Alcuin developed with 
an energy that ensured rapid multiplication of good books. The 
hunting monks were bribed to industry by being allowed to chase 
as many beasts as would yield skins to meet the demand from 
the scriptorium for parchment. Wine-bibbing monks were told 
that it was better to copy books than to tend vineyards, by as 
much as reading lifted the soul higher than wine. But the books 
to be copied must be those which directly sought to raise men 
to a contemplation of the God of Christians. As a youth at 
York, Alcuin had hidden Virgil under his pillow from the eyes 
of the brother who came with a cane to rouse the sleepers to 
nocturns ; in his later years Alcuin could see in Virgil no more 
than a heathen liar. " The good monk," he said, " should find 
enough to content him in the Christian poets." Throughout 



26 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 750 

Alcuin's writings, which include 232 letters, and some inscrip- 
tions, epigrams, and poems, there is a hard sense of duty for the 
love of God, but there is little liveliness of fancy. He was a 
thoroughly practical man, who carried into the empire of Charle- 
magne the same administrative ability which he had shown as 
schoolmaster and librarian in the monastery of York, labouring 
always with all his powers to bring men to knowledge, that they 
might come near to God. He worked on difficult material, a 
fact which may account for some of his severity ; and when he 
died, in 804, he was in some trouble with his imperial master for 
misconduct of the monks in his own abbey of St. Martin's, at 
Tours. 

12. Meanwhile, the spirit of the people was expressed also in 
song. Apart from " Beowulf/' and Caedmon's " Paraphrase, " 
each existing in a single manuscript, the main body of the 
First English poetry that has come down to us has been preserved 
in two collections, known as the Exeter Book: and the Vercelli 
Book. Each is named from the place where it was found. The 
Exeter Book is a collection of poems given, with other volumes, 
to the library of his cathedral by Leofric, Bishop of Exeter, 
between the years 1046 and 1073. The other volume was dis- 
covered in 1823, in a monastery at Vercelli, in the Milanese, 
where it had been mistaken for a relic of Eusebius, who was 
once Bishop of Vercelli, and died in 371. 

Among the pieces in these volumes are three of considerable 
length, by a poet named Cynewulf. His name comes down to 
us, because he had a peculiar way of distributing the letters of it 
among the verses in some part of each of his poems. In the 
Vercelli Book is Cynewulf s Elcne, a poem of 2,648 lines, on the 
legend of St. Helen, or the Finding of the True Cross by the 
mother of Constantine. In the Exeter Book we have Cynewulfs 
legend of Juiiana, martyr in the days of Emperor Maximian, 
and a series of poems which have unity among themselves, and 
have been read as a single work, Cynewulfs Christ. Cynewulf 
deals with Scripture history and legend in a devout spirit, and 
his poems arc interesting, although their earnestness is not 
quickened by any touch of genius. He was probably, as Jacob 
Grimm suggests, a Cynewulf, Bishop of Lindisfarne, who died in 
the year 780 ; possibly, as Mr. Kemble suggests, a Cynewulf, 
Abbot of Peterborough, who died in the year 1014. 

Among other poems in the two collections we have in the 
Exeter Book the 'Traveller's Song, which is sometimes thought 



to a.d. 850.] THE EXETER AND VERCELLI BOOKS. 2J 

to be the oldest of First English poems. In it Widsith names the 
places through which he has wandered. He has witnessed 
the wars of an ^Etla. Some say that this means Attila, the Hun. 
Another interpretation places the scene of the wandering in our 
own country, between the years 511 and 534. The Exeter Book 
contains also the legend of St. Guthlac, and a poem on the myth 
of The Phoenix, as an allegory of the life of the Christian ; 
another of its poems is a fable of The Panther, applied to the 
resurrection of our Lord, and another is of The Whale, who 
attracts fishes by sweet odour from his mouth, " then suddenly 
around the prey the grim gums crash together. So is it to every 
man who often and negligently in this stormy world lets himself 
be deceived by sweet odour. . . Hell's barred doors have not 
return or escape, or any outlet for those who enter, any more 
than the fishes, sporting in ocean, can turn back from the whale's 
grip." The jaws of the whale were the accepted symbol of the 
mouth of hell. They stand for that in tenth century pictures 
which adorn the manuscript of Cysdmon. In later years we still 
find them so accepted in the scenery of the miracle plays. 

This method of reading natural history into religious parable 
occurred in scattered passages of many early fathers of the 
Church. By degrees a fixed association was established between 
the asserted properties of certain animals and the religious mean- 
ing given to them, and the collection of such parables into a re- 
ligious manual of natural history was made at an early date in the 
Eastern Church, under the name of Physiologus. There was a 
Physiologus denounced as heretical by a council held in the year 
496. Fisolog, or Physiolog, came to be quoted as man or book, 
and we have it as a book in Latin manuscripts of the eighth 
century. Out of this form of literature sprang the Bestiaries of 
the Middle Ages. 

A?i Address of the Soul to the Body, a poem on The Various 
Fortunes of Men, and some Proverbs and Riddles, were also 
among the inventions copied into the Exeter Book. The collection 
includes a few pieces not exclusively devotional, and it represents 
in fair proportion the whole character of First English poetry. 
Since it was produced by an educated class, trained in the 
monasteries, the religious tone might be expected to predominate 
even if this were not also the literature of a religious people. 
The domestic feeling of the Teuton is tenderly expressed among 
these poems in a little strain from shipboard on the happiness of 
him whose wife awaits on shore the dear bread-winner, ready to 



23 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 750 

wash his travel-stained clothes and to clothe him anew by her 
own spinning and weaving. 

In the Vercelli Book, beside Cynewulf's Helen, there is a still 
longer legend of St. Andrew, with a Vision of the Holy Rood, 
the beginning of a poem on The Falsehood of Men, a poem on 
The Fates of the Apostles, and two Addresses of the Soul to the 
Body, one corresponding to that in the Exeter Book. Such 
poems, in which the Soul debates with the Body as chief cause 
of sin, remained popular for centuries. 

13. Among the remains of First English poetry, outside the 
Exeter and the Vercelli Book, the most interesting of those 
which seem to have been produced before the end of the eighth 
century is a fragment of old battle-song, known as The Fight 
at Finnesburg, discovered in the seventeenth century by Dr. 
George Hickes, on the cover of a manuscript of Homilies in 
Lambeth Palace ; also a fine fragment of a poem on Judith in 
the same manuscript which contains Beowulf. Along the 
margin of a volume of Homilies in the Bodleian Library there 
is written also a fragment of a gloomy poem on The Grave. 

14. When Alcuin died, in the year 804, the blending of the 
elements which were to build up a strong nation had advanced 
almost to the fusion of states into a single kingdom, with the 
name of England. The spirit of liberty had from oldest times 
been common to the Celt and Teuton. When Lucan, who lived 
in the first century, sang of the liberty, and with that the great- 
ness, of Rome lost at Pharsalia, he said — 

"That liberty, ne'er to return again 
And flying civil war, her flight has ta'en 
O'er Tigris and the Rhine : and can be brought 
No more, though with our bloods so often sought. 
Would we had ne'er that happiness possessed 
Which Scythia and Germany has blest ! 

{Book. VII. Mays Translation.') 

But the steady spirit of association which knits men together 
for the creation and maintenance of a free state against all 
adverse influences from without or from within, that was espe- 
cially the contribution of the Germans to our strength. Their 
name of Germans meant "brothers-in-arms." Tantus, when he 
described their customs at the end of the first century, told how 
among them the young member of a household was advanced, 
when able to bear arms, into the rank of member of the 
Commonwealth : how chiefs deliberated about minor matters, 



toa.d. 8 7 7-J DICUIL. ERIGENA. 29 

but about the more important the whole tribe ; though when the 
final decision rested with the people, the affair was always 
thoroughly discussed before them by their chiefs. There is the 
genu here of Parliamentary government ; and the true home 
life, from which national life draws its strength, was indicated in 
the respect of the Germans for their women. " Almost alone 
among the barbarians," said Tacitus, "they are content with one 
wife. No one in Germany," he added, with a bitter thought of 
Rome, "no one in Germany laughs at vice, nor do they call it the 
fashion to corrupt and be corrupted." The first suggestion even 
of the spirit which led the Church Reformation of an after age 
is to be found when Tacitus says of the old German tribes that 
they " do not consider it consistent with the grandeur of celestial 
beings to confine the gods within walls, or to liken them to the 
form of any human countenance. They consecrate woods and 
groves, and they apply the names of deities to the abstraction 
which they see only in spiritual worship." Of a mind so charac- 
terised in its days of heathendom we have traced the later forms 
through u Beowulf," Casdmon's " Paraphrase," and other verses, 
and through the work of Bede and Alcuin, to the time when dis- 
tinct communities are about to join in regarding England as 
their common country. 

15. But they owed much to the fervour of the Celt. Dieuil, 
an Irish monk, who, in the year 825, at the age of seventy, wrote 
a Latin description of the earth, says he had spoken with Culdees, 
or Celtic missionary priests, whose zeal penetrated beyond the 
Faroes to distant Iceland. 

The livelier genius, also, of the Celt, with its audacity of 
thought, is shown by the writer who best represented English 
intellect in the generation after Alcuin. This was John Scotus 
Erigena, whose names of Scot and of Erigena — whether that 
mean born in Erin or in Ayrshire— indicate with the form of 
his genius that Celtic blood flowed in his veins. He lived at 
the court of Charlemagne's grandson, Charles the Bald, King of 
France, who looked upon him as a miracle of wit and wisdom. 
He was a little m m, and once, when he sat at dinner between 
two very fat monks, the king sent a dish from his own table of 
three fishes, one large and two small, which he was to share equally 
with his two neighbours. He gave to each of the fat monks a 
little fish, and took the big fish for himself. "That is not equal 
division," said the king. "It is," said Erigena. "There is a 
little one for a big one, there is a little one for a big one, and I'm 



?0 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISh LITERATURE. [a.d. S* 5 

a little one for a big one." Such stories indicate lively familiarity 
of intercourse between the king and the philosopher. Erigena 
was distinguished for his knowledge of Greek, and he translated 
for Charles into Latin certain works ascribed to Dionysius the 
Areopagite, a traditional convert of St. Paul's, and first Bishop 
of Athens. These were mystical, half Platonic writings, first 
produced at an Eastern Church conference in the year 532, and 
there used to support opinions which the theologians of the 
Western Church denounced as heretical as soon as Erigena's 
translation made the nature of the teaching known. Erigena 
produced also a great work of his own in Latin On the Division 
of Nature, in the form of dialogue between pupil and master, 
which, placing reason higher than authority, set out with the 
doctrine that there is a perfect harmony between reason and 
revelation ; and that all philosophy tends to a knowledge of the 
unity of the Creator, in whom all things begin and end. Evil, 
Erigena taught, being the opposite to the eternal God, could not 
be eternal. " A vice/' he said, " is a spoilt virtue that can have no 
separate existence." In eternal fire he saw a material adapta- 
tion of spiritual thought to the unstrengthed faith, and he idealised 
some parts of Old Testament story into spiritual symbols. The 
pure study of Plato, the quick fancy, the bold speculation, 
brought John Scotus Erigena within the censure of the Pope 
and of two councils ; but as long as Charles the Bald lived, there 
was shelter in his court. When Charles the Bald died, in Sy7, 
Erigena returned to England ; and it is said that, about the year 
884, when he was teaching in the monastery at Malmesbury, his 
pupils attacked his theology by stabbing him to death with the 
pointed iron styles used for school writing. 

16. About this time, perhaps, there was produced by a Celtic 
writer a Latin History of the Britons. In a prologue which 
began to appear before the twelfth century copies of the history, 
its authors name is said to be Nennius. Nothing is known of 
Nennius, and the date of his writing is variously inferred from 
internal evidence to have been 796, or 800, or 879, or 980. This 
history tells of the contests of the Britons with the Romans and 
the Saxons. It derives their name from Brutus, a Roman Consul, 
and it thus names King Arthur to recite his twelve great battles 
against the Saxons : — " There it was that the magnanimous 
Arthur, with all the kings and military force of Britain, fought 
against the Saxons. And though there were many more noble 
than himself, yet he was twelve times chosen their commander, 



toa.d. 884.] NORMANS OR DANES. 3 1 

and as often conqueror." Here follow the old names of the 
places where the twelve battles were fought — i, at the mouth ot 
the river Gleni ; 2, 3, 4, 5, by the river Dulas, in the region Linius ; 
6, by the river Bassas ; 7, in the wood Celidon ; 8, near Gur- 
nion Castle, where, it is said, Arthur bore the image of the Virgin 
on his shoulders ; 9, at Caer Leon ; 10, by the river Trat Treuroit; 
11, on the mountain Breguoin; and, 12, a severe battle in which 
Arthur penetrated to the hill of Badon (Bath? Badbury Hill, 
Dorsetshire? Bowden Hill, on the Avon, near Linlithgow?). " In 
this engagement," adds Nennius, " nine hundred and forty fell 
by his hand alone, no one but the Lord affording him assistance." 
No more is said about King Arthur in this early history, and 
when he is there spoken of it is in association with the year 452. 
The history of Nennius was ascribed in some manuscripts to 
Gildas, in whose name there remains a slighter British chronicle, 
and who is said to have been a fellow pupil of Llyvvarch Hen, 
and a brother of Aneurin. But the writer of this chronicle 01 
The Subjection of Britain was evidently not one of the Cymry ; 
he speaks of them with contempt, under the cloak of brotherly 
reproof. He was a monk of Teutonic race, who lived before the 
writer of that history ascribed to Nennius in which King Arthur 
is first mentioned. The two chronicles differ much in spirit, and 
cannot be by the same writer. In Gildas, who has been some- 
times confounded with Nennius, there is no mention of Arthur. 
But the history of Nennius has some importance in our literature, 
as evidence that a tradition of King Arthur and his twelve great 
battles was extant among us in King Alfred's time. 

17. In the year of the death of Erigena, 884, Alfred was king 
of England; indeed, it is he who is said to have invited Erigena 
back to his own country. When Alfred became king, in 871, the 
same races which, by their settlements three or four centuries 
earlier had laid the foundations of England, were again descend- 
ing on the coasts of the North Sea and the Atlantic. They 
spread their ravages from Friesland to Aquitaine, and pushed 
inland by way of the Rhine, the Seine, the Loire, and the 
Garonne. In England they were called the Danes, in France 
the Normans. In 845 Regner Lodbrok and his Danes entered 
Paris, and took for ship's timber the beams of the church or 
St. Germain- des-Prds. These bold seafarers had long occupied 
Shetland, Orkney, and the Hebrides, and formed settlements in 
Ireland, which in 852 obeyed a chief of their own, who ruled ia 
Dublin. There were minor chiefs of the same race ruling in 



32 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 849 

Waterford and Limerick. In 860 one of the northern Vikings, 
on his way to the Faroe Islands, discovered Iceland. In and 
after 870 Iceland was colonised by northmen of mark, whose 
power at home was being crushed by Harold Harfagr, then 
making himself paramount in Norway. These men took with 
them to Iceland the old language, customs, and traditions of 
their country, which have there suffered less change than on 
the mainland. 

In the autumn of 866 the Danes occupied in strength part of 
our eastern coast, and in the following spring they plundered 
and burnt churches and monasteries of East Anglia. The 
Abbess Hilda's was among the monasteries burnt in 867, and it 
was then that a Danish settlement gave to the place, formerly 
called, from its sacred treasures, Streoneshalh, the name it has 
since borne — Whitby; "by" being the commonest of those 
endings which denote a Danish settlement. 

In 876, when our Alfred, aged twenty-seven, had been for five 
years an unlucky king, with Healfdene strong at the head of his 
Danes in the North of England, and Guthrum in the South, Rolf 
(called also Rollo and Rou) entered the Seine. He and his 
brother Gorm had, like others, contended with their own king at 
home. Gorm had been killed, and Rolf had gone into inde- 
pendent exile as a bold adventurer by sea. He had sought 
prizes in England and Belgium before he went up the Seine, and 
was then invited to take peaceful occupation of Rouen. In 879 
King Alfred obtained peace by his treaty with Guthrum. Thirty- 
two years afterwards, in 91 1, the land of the Normans, afterwards 
called Normandy, was yielded to Rollo and his followers. 

Thus we see that King Alfred in his struggle with the Danes 
was battling only with one part of a great movement akin to that 
which had first brought the English into Britain ; and that the 
foundation of Normandy about ten years after King Alfred's 
d^ath, is but another of its incidents, although an incident of 
first importance in the history of Europe. 

18. King Alfred having secured some peace with the new 
settlers on his coast, proceeded to restore strength to his people 
with the help of the best advisers he could gather to his court. 
Churches and monasteries had suffered for their wealth, but 
their plunder and destruction meant also destruction of their 
schools. " There are only a few," said Alfred, " on this side of 
the Humber who can understand the Divine service, or even 
translate a Latin letter into English ; and I believe not many on 



toa.d. goi.] TRANSLATIONS OF BEDE AND OROSIUS. 33 

the other side of the Humber either. They are so few, indeed, 
that I cannot remember one south of the Thames when I began 
to reign." Alfred re-established monasteries, and took pains to 
make them efficient centres of education for his people. Partly 
because the knowledge of Latin had to be recovered, partly 
because good knowledge is most widely diffused through a land 
when it is written in the language of the people, Alfred made, 
or caused to be made for him, translations of the books which 
had been most valued when they were among the Latin text- 
books of the days of Bede and Alcuin. One of these was Bede's 
Ecclesiastical History, or History of England, translated into 
English without any of the added information with which it 
could have been enriched. Perhaps a reverence for Bede's work 
caused Alfred to present it to his countrymen without change or 
addition. 

The same feeling would not stand in the way of a free 
handling of the Universal History of Orosius. This had been 
the accepted manual in monastery schools for general history 
from the Creation to a.d. 416. Its author was a Spanish contro- 
versial Christian of the fifth century, and it was written at the 
suggestion of St. Augustine of Hippo. Augustine was himself 
writing " De Civitate Dei" to sustain the faith of Christians 
who had seen Alaric sack Rome, by showing from Church 
history that the preaching of the Gospel could not add to 
the world's misery. He suggested to Orosius, who just then 
came to consult him on some question of heresy, that he might 
show from profane history the same thing for the reassurance of 
the faithful. Orosius produced, therefore, in Latin, a dull book, 
written, as Pope Gelasius I. said, "with wonderful brevity against 
heathen perversions," and it became in the monastery schools 
the chief manual of universal history. • King Alfred, in giving 
a free translation of it to his people, cleared the book of Church 
controversy, omitted, altered, and added, with the sole purpose of 
producing a good summary of general history and geography. 
He made these three special additions : — I. Much from the know- 
ledge of his own time on the geography of Europe, which he 
called Germania, north of the Rhine and Danube. 2. A geogra- 
phical sketch of two voyages : one from Halgoland on the coast 
of Norway, round the North Cape into the White Sea; the other 
from Halgoland to the Bay of Christiania, and thence to Slesvig : 
these being taken from the lips of Ohthere, a rich Norwegian,, 
who made voyages for love of adventure and discovery, for the 

D 



34 A FIRS! SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 853 

sake also of taking walrus and for whale-fishing. 3. A geogra- 
phical sketch of a voyage in the Baltic from Slesvig to Truso in 
Prussia, taken from the lips of Wulfstan, who was perhaps 
a Jutlander, and who enriched his dry detail with a lively 
account of the manners and customs of the Esthonians. 
4 King Alfred's other work in aid of a right knowledge of 
history was, probably, the establishment of that national record 
of events which was kept afterwards for a long time from year 
to year, and is now commonly known as the Anglo-Saxon 
Chronicle. It begins, after a brief account of Britain, with 
Csesar's invasion ; is in its earlier details obviously a compilation, 
and that chiefly from Bede, but begins to give fuller details after 
the year 853 ; and so, from a date within Alfred's lifetime, begins 
to take rank rank with Bede as one of the great sources of infor- 
mation on the early history of England. It may be supposed that, 
for the keeping of this annual record of the nation's life, local 
events were reported at the headquarters of some one monastery 
in which was a monk commissioned to act as historiographer ; 
that at the end of each year this monk set down what he thought 
most worthy to be remembered, and that he then had tran- 
scripts of his brief note made in the scriptorium of his 
monastery, and forwarded to other houses for addition to the 
copies kept by them of the great year-book of the nation. 
Geoffrey Gaimar, writing in the twelfth century, says that King 
Alfred had at Winchester a copy of a chronicle fastened by a 
chain, so that all who wished might read. In some such way as 
this the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was kept up until the time of the 
Norman Conquest, and for three generations after that. Its last 
record is of the accession of Henry II. in the year 1 154. 

King Alfred not only tried to make his countrymen acquainted 
with the world in which they lived, but he sought also to aid each 
in acquiring a firm rule over the world within himself. For this 
reason he turned into English the famous Latin work of Boethius, 
the last man of genius produced by ancient Rome. Boethius, a 
Roman senator, lost the favour of Theodoric by a love for his 
country, which his enemies called treason, was imprisoned, and 
from prison led to execution, about the year 525. In prison he 
wrote his noble work called The Consolations of Philosophy, 
in five books of prose, mixed with verse. The first of its'five 
books recognised as the great source of consolation that a 
wise God rules the world; the second argued that man in 
his worst extremity possesses much, and ought to fix his mind 



S-OA.D. goi.] ALFRED'S BOETHIUS. ASSER. 35 

on the imperishable ; the third maintained that God is the chief 
good, and works no evil ; the fourth, that, as seen from above, 
only the good are happy; and the fifth sought to reconcile God's 
knowledge of what is necessary with the freewill of mankind. 
The charm of a philosophic mind expressed through a pure 
strain of natural piety had made this dialogue between Philosophy 
and the Prisoner so popular that the Church justified its use of 
the volume in schools by claiming Boethius as a Christian 
martyr. He was canonised as a saint in the eighth century, 
though in his book he turns from the depth of worldly calamity 
to explore all sources of true consolation, and does not name 
Christ. Alfred believed, as he was told, that Boethius suffered 
as a Christian under Theodoric, and told it again when he gave 
the " Consolations of Philosophy" in English to his people. 

King Alfred also, with the same desire to give men inward 
strength, translated into English a famous book by Pope Gregory 
the Great. This book, known as the " Regula Pastoralis," 
showing what the mind of a true spiritual pastor ought to be, 
was made English as Gregory's Book on the Ca?'e of the Soul. 
It is in the preface to this that King Alfred tells of the decay of 
learning in his kingdom, and of his desire for its true restoration. 

19. We cannot know with certainty whether much of the 
work ascribed to King Alfred was done by his own hand, or 
whether he may rather be said to have encouraged, by strong 
fellowship in industry, the labours of those good men whom he 
gathered to his court, and who worked under his direction, 
giving and receiving counsel, for the furtherance of his most 
royal enterprise. What we do know with certainty assures us 
that, although King Alfred lived a thousand years ago, a thou- 
sand years hence, if there be England then, his memory will yet 
be precious to his country. 

The oldest account of the Life of Alfred is that ascribed to 
his fellow-worker Asser, a Welsh monk of St. David's, who died 
Bishop of Sherborne. This Life comes down to us only in late 
manuscripts, with interpolations from a "Life of St. Neot," which 
probably was not written until sixty-four years after Asser's 
death. A manuscript as old as the tenth century existed until 
i 73 i j when it was burnt in the fire at the Cotton Library; but 
from printed references to its contents we learn that it did not 
contain those passages from the St. Neot's chronicle and idle 
legends which have caused some to deny that Asser could have 
been the writer of this Life. There are other reasons for believing 

d 2 



36 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 947- 

that what we now receive as a Life of Alfred by Asser, his friend 
and fellow-worker, is really Asser's Life of him with later inter- 
polations. 

20. There is little to be said of our First English Literature 
after the time of King Alfred. Ethelwold became in 947 a 
monk at Glastonbury, when Dunstan, aged two-and-twenty, 
was made abbot there. Dunstan and Ethelwold sought the- 
establishment of utmost strictness in monastic rule. Ethelwold 
restored the decayed abbey at Abingdon, became in 953 Bishop 
of Winchester, bought and rebuilt the ruins of Medeshamstead, 
now called Peterborough, and rebuilt Winchester Cathedral. 
Some fragments of First English in the chapter library at 
Gloucester have been partly published in fac-simile as Gloucester 
Fragments, and include a detail of miracles that preceded and 
directed the dedication, by Archbishop Dunstan, of Ethelwold's 
restored cathedral of Winchester to St. S within, who had been 
Bishop of Winchester a hundred years before. In aid of his 
own work as a Church reformer, Ethelwold translated into 
English Benedict's Rule of a Monastic Life. Dunstan wrote 
an adaptation of the same rule for the use of English monks, 
and also a large Cominentary 011 the Benedictine Rule, doubtless 
from notes of the lectures given by him to his pupils in the 
monastery schools. 

21. No vigour of independent genius was developed by this 
movement towards greater strictness of monastic rule. The 
best intellectual effort among us in the century following the 
death of Alfred took the same direction. Earnest and religious 
men felt in their youth an enthusiasm stirred by the re-founding 
of those monasteries in which they were trained ; and, looking 
only to the farthest limit of their little world, they devoutly 
sought to raise their country by putting purer and intenser life 
into the men who were its teachers. But the nation was ad- 
vancing, through much stir of blood, into a new age of its life, 
and could be little helped by a fixed reproduction of past forms. 

Alfred's grandson Athelstane, attacked by Danes from Ire- 
land and Danes of the North of England, with allies from 
among the Gael and Cymry, overcame his enemies in the year 
937 at the great battle of Brunanburh, a place unidentified, 
which may be Brunton, a few miles from Newcastle, by the 
Roman wall. This victory over Anlaf the Dane from Ireland, 
Constantine of Scotland, and. Owen of Cumberland, caused the 
writer of the national record for the year 937 to break into song. 



toa.d. ggo.] BATTLE OF MALDON. MLFRIC. 37 

The account given in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of The Battle of 
Bruna7ibnrh is a poem ; and a precedent having thus been estab- 
lished, scraps of verse of less mark occur now and then in the 
chronicle at the later dates 941, 942, 958, 973, 975, and 1002. 
Trouble with Danes continued, till there was more quiet in the 
reign of Edgar, who began to rule at the age of sixteen, and from 
the outset of his reign took Dunstan for chief counsellor. Edgar, 
therefore, supported the great efforts made for a revival of mon- 
asticism. He died in the year 975, after sixteen years of rule, 
and was called Lord of the whole Isle of Albion. Blending of 
all constituents of the great nation of the future was still going 
on. An England had been formed, and now came the fore- 
shadowing of a Great Britain. The days of the first genera- 
tions, of English are therefore drawing to a close. 

Meanwhile Denmark, Sweden, and Norway had grown also 
into compact powers, and in the reign of Ethelred the Unready 
England was not merely disturbed by the Danes settled on her 
shores, but had to face their power as invaders. In the year 
994 they attacked Ipswich, ravaged the surrounding country, 
and were met unsuccessfully at Maldon in Essex by the patriotic 
bands which had been trained and led by Byrhtnoth, who fell in 
the battle. There remains to us, nearly complete, a First English 
poem on The Battle of Maldon, or, as it is also called, The Death 
of Byrhtnoth, warm with the generous love of independence, and 
yet simply honest in its record of defeat, through which we feel, 
as it were, the pulse of the nation beating healthily. 

22. These were the days of outward tumult in which JElfrie 
wrote his Homilies. yElfric was one of the first pupils of Ethel- 
wold at Abingdon. When Ethelwold became Bishop of Win- 
chester, yElfric acted as chief of the teachers in his diocese, and 
wrote for the use of schools a lively little book of Latin Colloquy* 
It was afterwards enlarged and republished by ^Elfric Bata, who 
had himself been taught Latin by it at Winchester. Latin being 
in his time, and long before and after, spoken and written as the 
common language of the learned, colloquy was a common way 
of teaching. vElfric represents in his dialogue pupils, who beg 
to be taught, answering questions as to their respective trades ; 
and thus he brings out in a few pages a very large number of 
words that would be used by them in talk over the daily busi- 
ness of life. ^Elfric wrote also for his pupils a Glossary in Latin 
and English. He was removed from Winchester to the Abbey 
of Cerne in Dorsetshire by the wish of its founder, and there it 



33 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 990 

fvas that, at the request of the founder's son, ^Elfric produced 
his Homilies, compiled and translated from the Fathers, in two 
sets each of forty sermons. The first set was completed in the 
year 990, and is a harmony of the opinions of the Fathers on all 
points of faith, as the English Church of his time accepted them. 
It was made public by the authority of Sigeric, then Archbishop 
of Canterbury. The other set tells of the saints whom the 
Church then revered, ^lfric also began a translation, in abridg- 
ment, of the Bible into English, and completed in this way the 
whole Pentateuch, as well as the Book of Job. About the year 
1005 ^Elfric became an abbot ; and 1006 was the year of the 
death of ^Elfric, Archbishop of Canterbury, with whom the 
^Elfric of literature has, by mistake, usually been identified. 

23. Some months after the death of Ethelred, Canute King 
of Denmark was also King of England. A monk of Ely, who 
wrote, after 1166, a history of his church, records a scrap of 
song said to be of Canute's composing. When he was going by 
boat to Ely to keep a Church festival, he ordered his men to row 
slowly and near shore, that he might hear the psalms of the 
monks ; then he called to his companions to sing with him, and 
invented on the spot a little song : 

"Merie sungen the Muneches binnen Ely 
Tha Cnut ching reuther by ; 
Rotheth cnites ner the land 
And here ye thes Muneches sang. 
(Pleasantly sang the monks in Ely 
When Canute the King rowed by ; 
Row, boys, near the land, 
And hear ye the song of the monks).' 

With other following words, said to have been still remembered 
and sung a hundred years after the Conquest. 

Earl Godwin was a strong man in the days of Canute's two 
weak Danish successors ; and after the death of Hardicanute, in 
1042, he led the English party, and secured for his countrymen 
an English king in Edward the Confessor, who in 1045 married 
the great Earl's daughter Edith. The story of First English 
Literature ends with the work of an unknown writer, who knew 
intimately Harold and Tostig, who was a loving dependant on 
their sister Edith, by whom he had first been saved from want, 
and who wrote in Latin prose, intermixed with verse, a Life of 
Edward the Confessor, which he dedicated to his patroness 
when she was Edward's widow. This writer was an honest man 
and clever, with personal affection for Earl Godwin and his 



toa.d. 1066.] THE NORMAN CONQUEST. 39 

household added to his patriotic sympathies. He put his heart 
into a narrative of those events before the Norman Conquest in 
which Godwin and his sons Harold and Tostig were chief 
actors. 



CHAPTER III. 

TRANSITION ENGLISH. 

I. DURING the four centuries from Csedmon to the Conquest, 
the language of books written in English may be said to have 
been fixed. Among the First English themselves, mixtures 01 
race and tribe from the Continent varied in different parts of the 
country, and in each place the constituents and the proportions 01 
the mixture were shown by the form of speech. Our provincial 
dialects were thus established. Then, as now, the spoken 
language of the country had its local differences, only more 
strongly marked than they now are ; and the untaught multitude 
was careless about grammar, while the cultivated class, which 
produced books, maintained ifff them a standard of the language, 
being careful to preserve accuracy in use of inflexion, discrimi- 
nation of gender, and upon all other such points. Even the 
vocabulary of First English literature remained for those four 
centuries very uniform; so that, with a few traces of provin- 
cialism which may point towards the birthplace of a writer, and 
perhaps some looseness of grammar towards the close of the 
period, during the four centuries of First English Literature all 
English thought written in English may be said to have come 
down to us in one language as fixed as that which we now 
speak. 

But during the three centuries from the Conquest to the time 
of Chaucer there was continuous change. The language then 
was in transition to the later form, in which again it became 
fixed. In race the Normans were another combination of the 
English elements. Even the part of France on which they had 
established themselves was Teutonized before they came to it, 
for it was that which had in Caesar's time a population traceable 
to a Teutonic immigration, and to which there had come in the 
fifth century the Franks — Teutons again. As far as concerned 
race only, there was quite as much of original kindred in the 



40 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.u. 1066 

blood of those whom we call Normans and Saxons as between 
fellow-Englishmen now living in Yorkshire and in Hampshire. 
But the energetic Normans had been drawing, for the subsequent 
advantage of the world, their own separate lessons from the 
school of life. They had dropped in France their own language, 
their sons learnt speech of the mothers found in the new country, 
and when they first came over here as rulers, gave us kings who 
spoke only French ; ecclesiastics whom their kings could trust, 
French-speaking abbots at the head of the monasteries, which 
were the only conservators of knowledge and centres of educa- 
tion ; and French-speaking knights in their castles, as centres of 
influence among the native rural population. 

French was the language of the ruling class in Church and 
State. Latin was used in books habitually, as the common 
language of the educated throughout Europe ; the only language 
in which a scholar might hope to address not merely the few 
among a single people, but the whole Republic of Letters. 
English remained the language of the people, and its' predomi- 
nance was sure. 

But there was no longer in the monasteries a cultivated class 
maintaining a standard of the language. The common people 
were not strict in care of genders and inflexions. Those new- 
comers who sought to make themselves understood in English 
helped also to bring old niceties of inflexion to decay. At the 
same time old words were modified, and some were dropped, 
when their places were completely taken by convenient new 
words that formed part of the large vocabulary wherewith our 
language was now being enriched. In large towns change was 
continuous and somewhat rapid; in country districts it was 
slow. Thus, while the provincial distinctions all remained, local 
conditions, here advancing there retarding the new movement, 
caused increase of difference between the forms of speech current 
in England at one time. 

The books written in English during this transition period of 
the language are usually said to be in Early English. The 
Early English Text Society, by including Anglo-Saxon, or First 
English, among its publications, has wisely recognised the fact 
that English before the Conquest has as much right to be called 
Early as the English after it. We will take the name, then, as a 
good general term for the English of all books written before our 
language had in most respects attained its present form. If we 
give this sense to the current term of Early English, there 



TO-A.D. noo.] REIGNS OF WILLIAM I. AND II. 4 1 

will be a natural division of the Early English period into its 
two parts ; and as we have spoken of First English (or Anglo- 
Saxon) Literature, we come now to speak of the literature of 
Transition English. Various suggestions have been made for 
the subdivision of this period. Sir Frederick Madden has called 
our language Semi-Saxon from noo to 1230, Early English 
only from 1230 to 1330, and Middle English from 1330 to 1500. 
It is better to shun vagueness. Having a piece of Transition 
English to place in its proper subdivision, we will therefore 
simply say that it is Transition English of the former or the 
latter half of such a century, or of a given date, if date can 
oe more nearly given ; and that it is Northern, Midland, or 
Southern, or of a given county or town, if we can tell more 
nearly where its author wrote. 

2. In the years next following the Conquest the chief authors 
were ecclesiastics, and their language Latin. The books were 
usually Chronicles and Lives of Saints ; but there was represen- 
tation also of the love of travel, and already a faint indication of 
the new spirit of free inquiry that was to break the bonds of 
ancient science. 

To the reign of William the Conqueror (1066 — 1087) belongs 
the History by Marianus Scotus, who was born in 1028, went 
to Germany in 1052, became a monk at Cologne, and died at 
Mayence in 1086. He compiled a History from the Creation 
to the year 1083. In the same reign a translation of Lives of 
Native Saints from First English into Latin was made by 
Osbern of Canterbury, who tells that he saw Canterbury 
Cathedral burnt in the year 1070; and a work was produced 
on the Computus, or Calculation of Easter, by G-erland, our 
earliest mathematician, who observed an eclipse of the sun in 
the year 1086. 

During the reign of William II. (1087 — 1100), Turgot, 
who had assisted in the rebuilding of the ruined monastery of 
J arrow, became prior of the greater monastery of Durham, to 
which Bede's twin monasteries of Jarrow and Wearmouth then 
became cells. Turgot's History of the Monastery of Durha?n, 
in four books, begins with its foundation, and passes into a 
vivid sketch of what he had himself seen of its history within the 
stir of his own time. It ends with the year 1096, and has been 
wrongly ascribed to Simeon of Durham. 

3. In the reign of Henry I. (1100-1135), Ssewulf, a mer- 
chant, the first English traveller who followed in the track of 



42 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. iicc 

the Crusaders, went to the East, escaped by accident from a 
great storm at Joppa, which destroyed a thousand persons, and 
lived to produce a lively record of all that he saw in Palestine 
during the years 1102 and 1103. When he came home, Saswulf 
withdrew from the world, and became a monk of Malmesbury, 
where the best of the chroniclers after Bede was then librarian. 

Our Monastic Chronicles were at their best in Henry I.'s 
reign. Then were produced the Chronicles of Ordericus Vitalis 
and of William of Malmesbury. To record the deeds of the 
history makers, sing the glories of their warrior chiefs, had 
been a foremost occupation of the Celtic and First English bards 
and gleemen. The history-making Normans gave from the first 
much occupation for the pen of the good monk in his Scripto- 
rium. In that room he copied the desirable things that were 
not bought for the monastic library : works of the Fathers, 
writings in defence of orthodox belief; a good book on the right 
computation of Easter ; a treatise on each of the seven steps of 
knowledge which led up to Theology, namely, Grammar, 
Rhetoric, and Logic, forming the Trivium of Ethics, with 
Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy, the Ouadrivium 
of Physics. There would be need also of a fresher history than 
Orosius could furnish. The framer of such a history might 
begin with Adam, and cause any short sketch of the History of 
the World from the Creation to be copied, or a larger history to 
be reduced in scale. As he proceeded towards his own time, he 
would give out now this now that accepted history of a particu- 
lar period, to be copied literally or condensed. But when he came 
down to a time within his own memory, or that of men about 
him, he began to tell his story for himself, and spoke from living 
knowledge ; from this point, therefore, his chronicle became for 
after-times an independent record of great value. In days when 
the strong sought conquest, and lands often changed masters, 
the monasteries, with wide-spread possessions, had reason to 
keep themselves well informed in the history-making of the 
great lords of the soil. The Chronicle, which faithfully preserved 
a record of events in the surrounding world during the years last 
past, would be one of the best read and most useful books in the 
monastic library. Monasteries were many, and the number also 
of the chroniclers was great. In England they were usually men 
whose hearts were with the people to which they belonged. Not 
brilliant, like those chroniclers of France who gave their souls up 
to outside enjoyment of court glitter and the pomp of war ; but 



to a.d. 1142.] CHRONICLERS. ORDERICUS VITALIS. 43 

sober and accurate recorders of such matter as concerned 
realities of life, they saw in England the home of a people, not 
the playground of a king. 

Florence of Worcester was a brother of the monastery 
in that town, where he died on the 7th of July, 11 18. He wrote 
a Chronicle, which at first was a copy from that of Marianus 
Scotus, with inserted additions to enlarge the record of English 
events. His additions he took chiefly from the Anglo-Saxon 
Chronicle, Bede, Lives of Saints, and Asser's " Life of Alfred." 
From 1082, where Marianus Scotus ended, Florence continued 
the work on the same plan, noting events abroad, although 
chiefly concerned with English history. He brought his record 
down to 1 1 17, the year before his death; and it was continued 
to 1 141 by other brethren of his monastery. 

Eadmer, one of the Benedictines of Canterbury, who says 
that from childhood he was in the habit of noting and remem- 
bering events, wrote, in six books, a History of his own Time — 
Historia Novorum — from the Conquest to the year 1122. 
Eadmer wrote also a life of his friend Anselm, Archbishop or 
Canterbury, and other ecclesiastical biographies. He was a 
bright enthusiastic churchman, who refused a bishopric in Scot- 
land because he might not subject it to the Primacy of Canter- 
bury. Archbishop Anselm is the central figure of his History. 

But the chief chroniclers who wrote in the time of Henry I., 
and also during the first seven years of the reign of Stephen, 
were Ordericus Vitalis and William of Malmesbury. Orderic 
was by about twenty years the elder man, but as authors they 
were exactly contemporary, and they both ceased to write — 
probably, therefore, they both died — in the same year, 1142. 

4. Ordericus Vitalis, born during the reign of William the 
Conqueror, near Shrewsbury, at Atcham on the Severn, was the 
son of Odelire, a married priest from Orleans, who had come 
over to England with Roger de Montgomery, made Earl 01 
Shrewsbury. Orderic was the name given to the child by the 
English curate who baptised him. When Orderic was ten years 
. old he had lost his mother, and his father retired, as a monk ot 
the strict Benedictine rule, into a monastery which he had 
caused the earl to found. Half his estates Odelire gave to the 
abbey, and the other half as a fief to be held under the abbey by 
his second son, Everard, who remained outside in the world. 
Orderic was taken into the monastery with a father who soon 
found it to be too much indulgence of the flesh to have a 



44 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. iioo 

beloved child for his companion. Odelire sent him, therefore, a 
boy of eleven, to the Benedictine abbey of Ouche, buried among 
forests in Normandy, and known afterwards by its founder's 
name, as the Abbey of St. Evroult. There the child, in his 
twelfth year, received the tonsure on the day of the Feast of St. 
Maurice, and changed his lay name of Orderic for that of Vitalis, 
who was one of the two lieutenants of St. Maurice, named with 
him in the Church celebration of their martyrdom with the whole 
Roman legion under their command. Ordericus Vitalis spent 
all the rest of his life at St. Evroult, where there was a great 
library, as simply as the venerable Bede had spent his life at 
Jarrow. His work was an Ecclesiastical History of England a?id 
Normandy, in thirteen books. It begins with brief compilation, 
and becomes full from the year 1084, early in the seventh book. 
The first two books, written while Orderic was at work upon a 
later portion of his narrative, gave a compilation of Church 
History from the birth of Christ to the year 855 ; with the addi- 
tion of a list of Popes from that date to the year 1142. The 
next four books, setting out with the foundation of monasteries 
in Normandy, are a history of the Abbey of St. Evroult, and of 
ecclesiastical affairs immediately concerning it. This was the 
part of the work first written. Then come the seven books 
(vii. — xiii.) which are now most to be valued, giving Orderic's 
conscientious and trustworthy, though confused record of the 
political events of his own time in Normandy and England. 
He is chronicler, not historian ; shows no artistic faculty in the 
arrangement of his work. But it abounds in trustworthy sugges- 
tive facts, genuine copies of letters, epitaphs, and proceedings in 
council ; shows good sense, as well as piety, in its judgments, and 
some skilful suggestion of character in the speeches which the 
author now and then attributes to his heroes. The time of 
Orderic's death is inferred from the date of the conclusion of his 
history, 1142, when he was sixty-seven years old. 

5. The artistic faculty wanting in Orderic was not wanting in 
William of Malmesbury, who almost rose from the chronicler 
into the historian. He was born probably about the year 1095, 
and of his parents one was English and one Norman. He went 
as a boy into the monastery at Malmesbury, was known there as 
an enthusiast for books, sought, bought, and read them, and 
gave all the intervals between religious exercises to his active 
literary work. He was made librarian at Malmesbury, and 
would not be made abbot. Robert, Earl of Gloucester, that 



toa.d. 1142.] ROGER INFANS. ATHELARD. 45 

natural son of Henry I. who fought afterwards for his 
sister against King Stephen, was a man of refined taste, and, 
among our nobles, then the great patron of letters. To him 
William of Malmesbury dedicated his chief work, the History of 
the Kings of England (" De Gestis Regum"), as well as other 
writings. The History of English Kings is in five books, 
beginning with the arrival of the First English in 449, reaching 
to the Norman Conquest by the close of Book 2, giving the 
third book to William the Conqueror, the fourth to William 
Rufus, and the fifth to Henry I., as far as the twentieth 
year of his reign. Under a separate title, Historia Novella — 
Modern History — William, at the request of Robert of Glou- 
cester, continued his record of current events, in three short 
books, to the year 1 142, where he broke off in the story of his 
patron's contest with King Stephen at Matilda's escape over the 
ice from Oxford to Wallingford. " This," he said, " I purpose 
describing more fully if, by God's permission, I shall ever learn 
the truth of it from those who were present." As he wrote no 
more, the time of William of Malmesbury's death is inferred 
from the date of the conclusion of his history, 1 142, when his 
age was about forty-seven. So able a scholar had, of course, 
many commissions from the other monasteries to produce Lives 
of their Saints. He wrote also in four books a History of the 
Prelates of England— ■" De Gestis Pontificum." 

6. We have interesting evidence of the impulse given by the 
Arabs to the advance of Science, in the- literature of this country 
during the reign of Henry I. The old school may be said to be 
represented by continued work on the calculation of Easter, and 
in 1 1 24 Roger Infans, who says that he was then very young, 
produced a Computus, following and connecting that of Gerland. 
The new school is now represented in its first faint dawn by 
Athelard of Bath, born some time in the reign of William 
the Conqueror. He studied at Tours and Laon, taught at Laon, 
and went eastward ; made his way to Greece and Asia Minor, 
perhaps even to Bagdad ; and coming home to England in the 
reign of Henry I., on his way home taught the Arabian 
sciences, which he then discussed in a book of Questions in 
Nature — " Quasstiones Naturales". In this book Athelard re- 
presented himself, on his return to England, hearing from his 
friends their complaint of "violent princes, vinolent chiefs, mer- 
cenery judges," and more ills of life. These ills, he said, he 
should cure by forgetting them, and withdrawing his mind to the 



40 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. uoo 

study of Nature. His nephew, interested also in the causes of 
things, asked Athelard for an account of his Arabian studies, and 
the book was his answer. He had left his nephew, seven years 
ago, a youth in his class at Laon. It had been agreed then that 
the uncle should seek knowledge of the Arabs, and the nephew 
be taught by the Franks. The nephew doubted the advantage of 
his uncle's course of study. What could he show for it ? To give 
proof of its value, Athelard proceeded to results : " And because," 
he said, " it is the inborn vice of this generation to think nothing 
discovered by the moderns worth receiving ; whence it comes 
that if you wish to publish anything of your own you say, putting 
it off on another person, It was Somebody who said it, not I — so, 
that I may not go quite unheard, Air. Somebody is father to all 
I know, not I." He then proposed and discussed sixty-seven 
Questions in Nature, beginning with the grass, and rising to 
the stars, the nephew solving problems in accordance with the 
knowledge of the West, the uncle according to knowledge of the 
East, where the Arabians were then bringing a free spirit of 
inquiry to the mysteries of science. Athelard of Bath wrote also 
on the Abacus and the Astrolabe, translated an Arabic work 
upon Astronomy, and was the first bringer of Euclid into 
England by a translation, which remained the text-book of suc- 
ceeding mathematicians, and was among the works first issued 
from the printing-press. 

7. Athelard of Bath expressed his love of science in a little 
allegory, De Eode?n etDiverso — " On the Same and the Different" 
— published before 11 16. The taste for allegory was now gather- 
ing strength in Europe. It had arisen in the early Church, 
especially among the Greek Fathers, with ingenious interpreta- 
tion of the Scriptures. Bede, following this example, showed 
how in Solomon's Temple the windows represented holy teachers 
through whom enters the light of heaven, and the cedar was the 
incorruptible beauty of the virtues. When the monasteries 
passed from their active work as missionary stations into intel- 
lectual strife concerning orthodoxy of opinions, volleys of subtle 
interpretation and strained parallel were exchanged continually 
by the combatants. As the monasteries became rich, wealth 
brought them leisure and temptation of the flesh, but still they 
were centres of intelligence ; and as, in Southern Europe, along 
the coasts of the Mediterranean, contact with tuneful rhyming 
Arabs was awakening a soft strain of love music, the educated 
men of leisure in the monasteries must also exercise their skill. 



to a.d. 1147.J GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH. 47 

Love, it was said, after the Arabs, is the only noble theme of 
song. We also, said the church-bound, obey poet's law and sing 
of love ; but when we name a lady we mean Holy Church, or 
we mean the Virgin, or we mean some virtue. It is earthly love 
to the ear, but there is always an underlying spiritual sense. 
Thus we shall find, in a few generations more, the taste for 
allegory colouring almost the whole texture of European litera- 
ture, and then remaining for a long time dominant. Athelard's 
little allegory is the first example in our literature of what after- 
wards became one of the commonest of allegoric forms. He 
represents Philosophy and Philocosmia, or love of worldly 
enjoyment, as having appeared to him, when he was a student 
on the banks of the Loire, in the form of two women, who dis- 
puted for his affections until he threw himself into the arms of 
Philosophy, drove away her rival with disgrace, and sought the 
object of his choice with an ardour that carried him in search of 
knowledge to the distant Arabs. 

8. We now pass from the literature of the reign of Henry I. 
to that of Stephen (1135 — 1154)? remembering that the last 
seven years of the work of Ordericus Vitalis and William of 
Malmesbury, and some years of the work of Athelard of Bath, fall 
within Stephen's reign. Five years after Orderic and William 
of Malmesbury had ceased to write, Geoffrey of Monmouth 
completed his Latin History of British Kings. The patron of 
William of Malmesbury was the patron also of Geoffrey of 
Monmouth ; the " History of the Kings of England" and the 
u History of British Kings" are both dedicated to Robert Earl of 
Gloucester. In one of these works William of Malmesbury 
"brought chronicle writing to perfection; in the other Geoffrey of 
Monmouth produced out of the form of the chronicle the spirit 
that was to animate new forms of literature, and opened a 
spring of poetry that we find running through the fields of 
English Literature in all after time. 

Geoffrey was a Welsh priest, in whom there was blood of the 
Cymry quickening his genius. He had made a translation of 
the Prophecies of Merlin, when, as he tells us, Walter Calenius, 
Archdeacon of Oxford, found in Brittany an ancient History of 
Britain, written in the Cymric tongue. He knew no man better 
able to translate it than Geoffrey of Monmouth, who had credit 
as an elegant writer of Latin verse and prose. Geoffrey under- 
took the task, and formed accordingly his History of British 
Kings in four books, dedicated to Robert Earl of Gloucester. 



4-S A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d, 1147 

Afterwards he made alterations, and formed the work into eight 
books ; to which he added Merlin's Prophecies, translated out 
of Cymric verse into Latin prose. The History, as finally com- 
pleted by him in 1 147, is in twelve books, and the whole work was 
a romance of history taking the grave form of authentic chronicle. 
Geoffrey closed his budget with a playful reference to more exact 
historians, to whom he left the deeds of the Saxons, but whom 
he advised " to be silent about the kings of the Britons, since 
they have not that book in the British language, which Walter, 
Archdeacon of Oxford, brought out of Brittany." There is a sly 
vein of banter in this reference' to the mysterious book upon 
which Geoffrey fathered his ingenious invention of a list of 
British kings, who did wonderful deeds, gave their names to this 
place and that, reigned each of them exactly so many years and 
months, and made an unbroken series from Brut, great-grandson 
of yEneas, through King Arthur to Cadwallo, who died in the year 
689. " It was Somebody who said it, not I." We first read in 
this fiction of Sabrina, " virgin daughter of Locrine ;"of Gorboduc, 
whose story was the theme of the earliest English tragedy ; of 
Lear and his daughter ; and, above all, of King Arthur as the 
recognised hero of a national romance. Geoffrey obtained the 
by-name of Arturus, and was said to have " made the little finger 
of his Arthur stouter than the back of Alexander the Great." 
So wrote a painstaking unimaginative chronicler of the next 
generation, William of Newbury, who considering " how saucily 
and how shamelessly he lies almost throughout," and not caring 
to specify " how much of the acts of the Britons before Julius 
Caesar that man invented, or wrote from the inventions of others 
as if authentic," said of Geoffrey, " as in all things we trust Bede, 
whose wisdom and sincerity are beyond doubt ; so that fabler 
with his fables shall be straightway spat out by us all." Far 
from it. The regular chronicler was scandalised at the preten- 
sions of a perfectly new form of literature, a work of fancy 
dressed in the form of one of his own faithful records of events. 
But the work stirred men's imaginations. It was short as well as 
lively, the twelve books being no longer than two of the thirteen 
books of Orderic's Ecclesiastical History. Short as it was, 
Alfred of Beverley, charmed with it, in a copy which he had 
with difficulty borrowed, at once made an abridgment of it, 
because he had not time to copy all, or money to pay for a full 
transcript. In the household of Ralph Fitz-Gilbert, a strong 
baron of the North, lived Geoffrey Gaimar. Constance, the 



toa.ij. 1155.J GAIMAR. WACE. H1LARIUS. 49 

baron's wife, could read no Latin, but desired to read the much- 
talked of chronicle. Gaimar undertook, therefore, to translate it 
for her into French verse, and made his translation perhaps from 
the book written by Geoffrey himself for his patron, since the copy 
used was obtained through a friendly Yorkshire baron from the 
Earl of Gloucester himself. Gaimar continued his chronicle, in 
French or Anglo-Norman verse,, by adding the series of Saxon 
kings ; and this latter part of his work was all that survived 
when Wace's more popular version of the famous history into 
French verse for the use of the court, caused that of Gaimar to 
be neglected by the copyists. 

Waoe (who has been miscalled Robert Wace through a mis- 
understanding of five lines in his " Life of St. Nicholas") was born 
at Jersey, educated at Caen, and was a reading clerk and a 
romance writer at Caen in the latter part of Stephen's reign. 
He shared the enthusiasm with which men of bright imagina- 
tion received Geoffrey of Monmouth's Chronicle, and reproduced 
it as a French metrical romance, the Brut, in more than 15,000 
lines. Sometimes he translated closely, sometimes paraphrased, 
sometimes added fresh legends from Brittany, or fresh inven- 
tions of his own. His work was completed in n 55, immediately 
after the accession of Henry II., who gave him a prebend at 
Bayeux. Wace afterwards amplified a Latin chronicle of the 
deeds of William the Conqueror, by William of Poitiers, that 
king's chaplain, into a Roman de Ron. But there was no con- 
tinuance of royal favour, and he died unprosperous in England, 
in 1 1 84. He was eclipsed at court by Benoit de St. Maure, the 
author of the " Geste de Troie." 

The Welsh priest whose bright invention had thus broken 
fresh ground in literature was made Bishop of St. Asaph six 
years after the appearance of his Chronicle. He died in 1154, 
about a year after he had obtained his bishopric. 

9. It was in the time also of Stephen that there was an 
Englishman in France, Hilarius, who had gone to be taught by 
Abelard at Paraclete, and from whom we have our earliest known 
Miracle Plays. The acting of such plays seems to have been 
introduced into this country soon after the Conquest. Matthew 
Paris, a chronicler who lived in the thirteenth century, refers to 
a miracle-play of St. Katherine, written some years before n 19, 
by Geoffrey of Gorham, who became afterwards prior, and was 
in 1 1 19 made Abbot of St. Alban's. Geoffrey had been invited 
from Normandy by Richard, the preceding abbot, to establish a 

E 



5-T A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1119 

school at St. Alban's. He arrived too late, and settled at Dun- 
stable, where there was a school subordinate to that of St. 
Alban's, while waiting for the possible reversion of the office 
which had then been given to another. Meanwhile he com- 
posed at Dunstable his miracle-play, and, wtien it was ready, 
borrowed copes from St. Alban's for the decoration of it. But 
on the following night his house was burnt, together with the 
copes and all his books. This is the earliest allusion to the 
acting of such pieces in this country. They had arisen out of 
the desire of the clergy to bring leading facts of Bible history 
and the legends of the saints home to the hearts of the illiterate. 
A great church was dedicated to some saint. The celebration 
of the saint's day was an occasion for drawing from afar, if 
possible, devout worshippers, and offerings to the shrine. Some 
incidents from the life of the saint, enforcing perhaps his power 
to help those who chose him for their patron, it was thought 
good to place, at some part of the Church service of the day, 
with dramatic ingenuity, before the eyes of the unlettered 
congregation. 

Take, for example, one of the three plays by Hilarius, 
written in France in the time of Stephen, or not later than the 
beginning of the reign of Henry II. In a church dedicated to 
St. Nicholas, upon St. Nicholas's Day, the Image of the Saint 
was removed, and a living actor, dressed to represent the statue, 
was placed in the shrine. When the pause was made in the service 
for the acting of the Miracle, one came in at the church door 
dressed as a rich heathen, deposited his treasure at the shrine, 
said that he was going on a journey, and called on the Saint to 
be the guardian of his property. When the heathen had gone 
out, thieves entered and silently carried off the treasure. Then 
came the heathen back and furiously raged. He took a whip 
and began to thrash the Image of the Saint. But upon this the 
Image moved, descended from its niche, went out and reasoned 
with the robbers, threatening also to denounce them to the 
people. Terrified by this miracle, the thieves returned trem- 
blingly, and so, in silence, they brought everything back. The 
statue was again in its niche, motionless. The heathen sang his 
joy to a popular tune of the time, and turned to adore the 
Image. Then St. Nicholas himself appeared, bidding the 
heathen worship God alone and praise the name of Christ. 
The heathen was converted. The piece ended with adoration 
of the Almighty, and the Church service was then continued. 



toa.d. ii6o.J MIRACLE PLAYS AND MYSTERIES. 51 

It was probably with such plays that the practice of acting 
in churches was begun by the clergy in France, where the 
delight in dramatic entertainment had remained strong since 
the Roman time. Against the theatres of failing Rome the 
early Fathers of the Church had battled as against idolatry 
These things, they said, have their rise from idols, and are 
baits of a false religion. The Roman stage fell into ruin ; but 
the dramatic instinct is part of man's nature. At the close of 
the second century Ezekiel, a tragic poet of the Jews, put the 
story of the Exodus into the form of a Greek drama. In the 
fourth century Gregory Nazianzen, as Patriarch of Constanti- 
nople, attacked the Greek theatre there flourishing by substituting 
for the heathen plays plays of his own on stories of the Old 
and New Testament. They were written to the pattern of those 
of Sophocles and Euripides, Christian hymns taking the place 
of the old choruses. In humbler fashion, prompted perhaps by 
the success of their miracle plays, well-meaning priests en- 
deavoured, on those great days of the Church which com- 
memorate the birth or death of our Lord, or any other of the 
sublimer mysteries of Christian faith, to bring forcibly before 
the very eyes of the congregation the events told in the Bible 
lesson of the day. When, in the course of the service, the time 
came for the reading of the Lesson, it was not read but realised 
within the church. Such a play was called, not a Miracle 
Play but a Mystery ; because it dealt not with the miracles of 
saints, but with the great mysteries of Christianity drawn from 
the life of Christ. In what way they were at first represented is 
shown clearly by that one of the three plays of Hilarius which 
happens to be not a miracle-play but a mystery. Its subject is 
the Raising of Lazarus — mystery of the resurrection of the 
dead. Its incidents having been realised to the utmost, and its 
dialogues set to popular tunes of the day, the officiating priest 
who, as Lazarus, has risen from the tomb, turns in that 
character to admonish the assembled people. He turns then to 
the representation of Jesus, whom he adores as master, king, and 
lord, who wipes out the sins of the people, whose ordinance is 
sure, and of whose kingdom there shall be no end ; and the 
closing direction of the author is, that u This being finished, if 
it was played at matins, Lazarus shall begin ■ Te Deum Lauda- 
mus;' but if at vespers, 'Magnificat anima mea Dammum;"* 
and so the Church service proceeds. The last of the three 
plays by Hilarius was designed for a pompous Christmas. 

E 2 



52 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. |_a.d. 1150 

representation of the story of Daniel, and at its close the 
Church service was to be continued by the priest who played 
Darius. Such were the miracle and mystery plays written in 
France by Hilarius, an Englishman, in or a few years after the 
reign of King Stephen. 

10. One other book written in Stephen's reign points also to 
the future course of thought. This was a little treatise by 
Henry of Huntingdon, entitled " De Contemptu Mundi" 
(On Contempt of the World). Its author was the son of a 
married clerk, and was trained in the household of a Bishop of 
Lincoln, who remained his patron. He wrote verse and prose 
on divers subjects, compiled a Chronicle in seven books, which 
ended with the death of Henry I., and then added an eighth 
book on the reign of Stephen. It was at the end of Stephen's 
reign, when he was Prior of Huntingdon, that this busy writer 
closed his career with a treatise On Contempt of the World, 
addressed to the same friend Walter to whom his youthful 
poems had been dedicated : " A youth to a youth I dedicated 
juvenilities ; an old man to an old man I destine now the 
thoughts of age." He recalled in this little book the friends 
they had both lost. Men rich in luxury were gone, so were the 
wise, so was the strong man who was cruel in his strength. 
Of the great kings also who are as gods the lives are vanity. 
Men of great name were recalled and passed before the imagina- 
tion in a spirit kindred to that of books of later time which 
yielded Tragedies to dramatists when they arose. 

11. We pass now from the reign of Stephen to the reign 
of Henry II. (11 54— 11 89), a time of great interest in the 
early story of our literature. Throughout Europe there was 
a new activity of thought among the foremost nations, and 
that which was partly represented by the contest between 
Henry and Becket was in the general life of the time. Contest 
upon the limit of authority, which in its successive forms is the 
most vital part of our own history, and has been essential every- 
where to the advance of modern Europe, became active in many 
places in the days of Henry II. As we shall find the course of 
English Literature illustrating throughout a steady maintenance 
of the principle out of which this contest arises, let us at once 
settle the point of view from which it will be here regarded. 

No two men think alike upon all points, and some part of 
the difference is as distinctly natural as that which distinguishes 
one man from another by his outward form and face. It is 



toa.d. 1180.] GREAT CURRENTS OF THOUGHT. 53 

part of the Divine plan of the world that we should not all have 
the same opinions. If we observe in one man the group of 
ideas forming his principles of thought, we find that they have 
well-marked characters, which are common to him and to many 
others. One might even imagine an arrangement of men by 
their way of thought, as of plants by their way of growth, into 
primary classes, sections, alliances, families, genera, and 
species. And as the two primary classes of the flowering plants 
are exogens and endogens, so the two primary classes of 
civilised men are (i) those in whom it is the natural tendency of 
the mind to treasure knowledge of the past, and shun departure 
from that which has been affirmed by wise and good men 
throughout many generations, those, in short, who find rest and 
hope of unity in the upholding of authority ; and (2) those in 
whom it is the natural tendency of th^ mind to claim free right 
of examining and testing past opinions, who seek the utmost 
liberty of thought and action, holding that the best interests of 
the future are advanced when every man labours for truth in his 
own way, and holds sincerely by his individual convictions. 
Look where we may> to parties in the Church, to parties in the 
State, or any chance knot of a dozen men collected at a dinner- 
party, the form of debate invariably shows this natural division 
of men's minds, serving its purpose for the thorough trial of 
new truth. No bold assertion is allowed to pass unquestioned. 
Whoever states a fact must also be prepared to prove it against 
ready opponents, who produce all possible grounds of doubt and 
forms of evidence against it. Thus men are trained in the right 
use of reason ; their intellectual limbs gather strength by healthy 
exercise ; and wholesome truths come out of the ordeal, as the 
pure grain winnowed from the chaff. Instead of wishing that 
all men were of our minds, we should account it one of the first 
blessings of life that there are men who don't agree with us. 
The currents of the air and sea are not more necessary and 
more surely a part of the wise ordinance of the Creator than 
those great currents of thought which, with all the storms bred 
of their conflict, maintain health in man's intellectual universe. 

When the millions lie in darkness and are thought for by 
the few, they need the guidance of an absolute authority. As 
the light grows on them, each becomes more able to help him- 
self. External aids and restrictions become gradually less and 
less necessary ; exercise of authority falls within narrower 
limits, and exercise of individual discretion takes a wider range. 



54 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. ii 54 

This constant readjustment of the boundary-line between indi- 
vidual right and the restraint of law must needs advance with 
civilisation, as keen intellectual debate prepares the way for 
every change. In England such a process has gone on so 
actively and freely that our political institutions, which have 
grown and are growing with our growth, are strong also with 
all our strength. 

In the time of Henry II. the contest between the king and 
Becket represented what was then the chief point to be settled 
in the argument as to the limit of authority. It was a question 
of supremacy between the two great forms of authority to which 
men were subjected. Was the Church, representing God on 
earth, to be, through its chief, the pope, a supreme arbiter in the 
affairs of men — a lord of lords and king of kings ? Or was the 
king alone supreme in every temporal relation with his subjects? 
Becket devoutly battled for supreme rule of the Church. Henry 
maintained the independence of his crown. That battle won, 
the next part of our controversy on the limit of authority would 
concern the relations between king and people. When Henry's 
cause was stained with the crime of Becket's murder, the 
Church had an advantage of which it understood the value. 
All that was done to make the shrine of the martyred Becket a 
place of pilgrimage and to exalt the saint was exaltation of the 
name inseparable from the cause of an unlimited Church 
supremacy. 

After his murder, in 1170, The Life of Thomas a, Becket was 
written by William Pitzstephen, a Londoner, who had been 
a trusted clerk in the Archbishop's household, and was witness 
to his death. Fitzstephen's life of Becket includes an interesting 
account of London as it was in Henry II.'s time, with incidental 
evidence of the growing interest in miracle-plays. London, he 
says, instead of the shows of the ancient theatre, "has entertain- 
ments of a more devout kind, either representations of those 
miracles which were wrought by holy confessors, or those 
passions and sufferings in which the martyrs so rigidly dis- 
played their fortitude." It may be observed that Fitzstephen's 
definition of these entertainments limits them to the miracle- 
play ; there is no reference to any acting of a mystery. When, 
afterwards, both forms were common, no distinction of name 
was made between them in this country. All were called miracle- 
plays ; doubtless, because that name alone had become familiar 
during a long period, in which the only plays acted were 



TOA.d. 1189.] NATIONAL LIFE. NIGEL WIREKER. 55 

miracles. Perhaps a sense of reverence delayed the introduc- 
tion, of the mystery. 

12. Outside England the literature of Europe was now taking 
forms more and more representative of the advance of thought. 
There was what may be called a Court literature, con- 
cerned only with the pleasures of the rich ; and there was a 
National literature, through which men, thinking with or for the 
people, showed their sense of life and its duties. The famous 
beast epic of " Reynard the Fox " and Isegrim the Wolf, still 
vigorous and fresh, first came into literature as a Flemish poem 
of "Reinaert" in the year 1150, or towards the close of the 
reign of Stephen. During the reign of Henry II. it was popular 
abroad as a keen satire from the side of the people on the 
current misuse of authority. The essence of the work in its first 
form, and in all early adaptations of it to other countries, was a 
homely spirit of freedom. The reign of Henry II. was also the 
time when the Germans gathered fragments of romance into 
their great national epic of the Nibelungen. It was at the close 
of the same period that the Spaniards poured out their national 
spirit in the poem of the Cid. Crusades had brought men into 
contact with the bright imagination of the East. Romances, 
brisk with action, were recited or sung to the Norman lords ; 
and southern poets were taught by the Arabs to rhyme tune- 
fully on love. The oldest extant troubadour verse dates from a 
year after the accession of King Henry II. ; and his were the 
times in which were born the Suabian Minnesanger Hartmann 
von Aue and Walther von der Vogelweide. Their master, 
Barbarossa, was then bringing Germans into Italy, and forced 
the states of the Lombard League into that patriotic contest 
which, in 11 82, left them free republics, with a nominal allegiance 
to the empire. In Italy the conflict was begun that should stir 
presently a mighty soul to song. 

1 3. At home, in good harmony with the spirit of Reinaert, 
or Reineke Fuchs, we have, among the books written in 
Henry II.'s reign, the " Brunellus " of Nigel Wireker: Nigel 
Wireker was precentor in the Benedictine monastery at Canter- 
bury, friend to William de Longchamp, afterwards Bishop of 
Ely, to whom he dedicated a treatise On the Corruptions of the 
Church. Wireker's minor writings were attacks upon self- 
seeking and hypocrisy among those who made religion their 
profession ; for the movement towards reformation in the 
Church was now begun. Wireker's chief work, Bruiiellus, or 



56 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1154 

Speculum Stuitorum (The Mirror of Fools), is a satirical poem in 
about 3,800 Latin elegiac lines, which has for its hero an Ass, 
who goes the round of the monastic orders. His name, Brunel- 
lus, a diminutive of Brown, is taken from the scholastic logic of 
the day. It was first applied to the horse when a particular 
idea — say this horse Brunellus — had to be discussed instead of 
the general idea, represented, say, by horse. But when the 
logicians took to calling the particular idea Bucephalus, the old 
names of Brunellus and Favellus were transferred to the ass ; 
and a logician would write thus : " Grant there are two men, 
say Socrates and Plato, of which each has an ass ; precisely, 
Socrates Brunellus, Plato Favellus," and so forth. Taking the 
name of his hero, then, from the jargon of the schools he meant 
to satirise, Nigel Wireker represented that the Ass Brunellus 
found his tail too short, and went to consult Galen on the sub- 
ject. The author explained that his " Ass is that monk who, not 
content with his own condition, wants to have his old tail pulled 
off, and try by all means to get a new and longer tail to grow in 
its place — that is to say, by attaching to himself priories and 
abbeys." Brunellus was unlucky with his medicines, and had 
part of his tail, short as he thought it, bitten off by four great 
mastiffs. He could not go home to his friends in that state. 
He felt that he had an immense power of patient labour. He 
would go and study at the University of Paris. After seven 
years of hard work there, he could not remember the name of 
the town in which he had been living. But he was proud of his 
erudition. He did also remember one syllable of the town's 
name, and had been taught that part may stand for the whole. 
The sketch of Brunellus at Paris is a lively satire upon the 
shortcomings of the schools. Brunellus having gone straight 
through the sciences, it was only left for him to perfect himself 
in religion. He tried all the orders in succession, and ended in 
the resolve to construct for himself out of them a new composite 
order of his own. Meeting Galen, Brunellus entered into dis- 
cussion with him on the state of the Church and of society, until 
he fell into the hand of his old master, and returned to the true 
duties of his life. 

14. Nigel Wireker did not fight unaided in this battle against 
the corruption which had come into the Church with wealth and 
idleness. A like battle formed part of the work of the man of 
greatest genius among those who wrote in the time of Henry II. 
This was Walter Map, sometimes called Mapes, because 



toa.d. 1179.] UNIVERSITIES. WALTER MAP. 57 

the Latinised form of his name was Mapus. Walter Map 
had, like Geoffrey of Monmouth, Celtic blood in his veins. 
Born, about the year 1143, on the borders of Wales, he ailed 
the Welsh his countrymen, and England " our mother." 

Map studied in the University of Paris, which was then in 
the first days of its fame. Students were gathered there fr m 
many lands ; English enough were among them to form one c 
the four schools into which it became divided. We know what it 
was from Wireker's "Brunellus;" and Map tells that he saw, 
when he was there, town and gown riots : but an ordinance of 
Innocent III., dated 121 5, five-and-twenty years after the death 
of Henry II., is the first official document in which we find the 
body of teachers and students gathered in Paris to have been 
formally called a University. The first document which speaks 
formally of a University of Oxford is dated 1201 ; and the Uni- 
versity of Cambridge first appears by that name in a document 
of the year 1223. At the time, therefore, of which we now speak, 
the Universities were first ceasing to be places in which indivi- 
dual teachers and students came together for their common 
advantage, and they were acquiring recognition of their corpo- 
rate existence by the application to them of a name at first not 
limited to places of education, but applied also to other organised 
bodies, as to a corporate town, or to an incorporated trade within 
a town. 

After his studies in Paris, Walter Map came home, and was 
at Court in attendance on King Henry II., who had received 
much good service from Map's family. In 11 73, when his age 
was about thirty, Map was presiding at the Gloucester assizes 
as one of the king's ambulant judges, justices in eyre. In the 
same year he was with the court at Limoges, host, at the king's 
cost, to a foreign archbishop. He attended Henry II., pro- 
bably as chaplain, during his war with his sons ; represented 
the king at the court of Louis VII., where he was received as an 
intimate guest; was sent to Rome to the Lateran Council of 
1 1 79, and was hospitably entertained on the way by Henry 
Count of Champagne. 

At that Council appeared some of the Waldenses, or followers 
of Peter Waldo, with a Psalter and several books of the Old and 
New Testament in their own tongue, which they wished the 
Pope to license. Although Map fought stoutly against fleshly 
corruption of the clergy, and was an earnest Church reformer, 
he was not advanced beyond the dread of danger from giving 



$8 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1179 

the Scriptures in their own tongue to the common people. 
" Water," he said, " is taken from the spring, and not from the 
broad marshes." But the question was so far new that this 
Council of 1 1 79 did not interdict Peter Waldo's Bible. Waldo 
himself may be remembered as another sign of the growing life 
of Europe in the days of Henry II. After he had become rich, 
as a merchant of Lyons, he gave his goods to the poor, gathered 
followers about him as Poor Men of Lyons, who preached in the 
villages, opposing a simpler faith and purer rule of life to the 
corruptions of the Church, and labouring to give the Bible itself 
to the people as the one authority in matters of religion. Waldo 
died in 1179, the year of Map's attendance at the Council before 
which some of the Waldenses came to ask for the Pope's license 
to their translation of Scripture. The use of it was not for- 
bidden until fifty years afterwards. 

After his return from Rome, Map was made a canon of St. 
Paul's, and also precentor of Lincoln. He held also the parson- 
age of Westbury, in Gloucestershire, but still was in attendance 
on the king, and especially attached to the young Prince Henry, 
after he had been crowned by his father. In the reign of 
Richard I., and the year 11 96, when his age was about fifty- 
three, Map was made Archdeacon of Oxford, but beyond that 
date nothing is known of him. 

Walter Map was a bright man of the world, with a high pur- 
pose in his life ; poet and wit, a spiritual man of genius. He 
fought with his own weapons against the prevalent corruption 
of the clergy. While he was at court, there began to pass from 
hand to hand copies of Latin verse purporting to be poems of a 
certain Bishop Golias, a gluttonous dignitary, glorying in self- 
indulgence, his name probably derived from gula, the gullet. 
The verses were audacious, lively, and so true to the assumed 
character that some believed them to come really from a shame- 
less bishop. Here was the corruption of the Church personified 
and made a by- word among men. The poems gave a new word 
to the language — " goliard." Walter Map was the creator of this 
character; but the keen satire of his lively Latin verse bred 
imitators, and Father Golias soon had many sons. A fashion 
for Golias poetry sprang up, and then the earnest man of 
genius had fellow-labourers in plenty. In one of Map's poems, 
called the Confession of Golias, the bishop is supposed to be 
confessing himself with the candour of despair. He reveals 
first tiic levity oi" his mind; he who should make bis seat upon a 



toa.d. 1196.] JOHN OF SALISBURY. 59 

rock is as a ship without a mariner, a lost bird borne through 
pathless air. He next declares his lust. And then he remem- 
bers the tavern he has never scorned, nor ever will scorn till he 
hears the angels sing his requiem. Here Map, with a terrible 
earnestness of satire, images the heavens opening upon the 
drunkard priest, who lies in a tavern, where, too weak himself to 
hold the wine-cup, he has it put to his lips, and so dies in his 
shame. " What I set before me," he says, " is to die in a 
tavern ; let there be wine put to my mouth when I am dying, 
that the choirs of the angels when they come, may say, ' The 
.grace of God be on this bibber !' " 

" Meum est propositum in taberna mori, 
Vinum sit appositum morientis ori, 
Ut dicant cum venerint angelorum chori, 
Deus sit propitius huic potatori." 

Somebody having set these four lines to light music as a drinking 
song, without a suspicion of their meaning, somebody else, 
equally wise, has made them a reason for ticketing Walter Map 
as " the jovial archdeacon." Jovial, however, Walter Map may 
have been, for he was keen of wit, and knew how to make a 
light jest do the work of earnest argument. 

15. Another of Map's books took one of the names of a work 
written at the beginning of Henry II.'s reign by John of 
Salisbury, a man of considerable learning, who was born 
about the year 11 20. He also had studied at Paris. He had 
attended Abelard's lectures on Mont St. Genevieve, and was 
fellow-pupil afterwards with Thomas a Becket under an English 
pupil of Abelard's. John of Salisbury studied on, and as he 
advanced in knowledge, sought to make a living by the teaching 
of young noblemen. After twelve years of study and teaching, 
he was a penniless scholar whom a kindly French abbot took 
for his chapiain, and in about three years mor.e, in 1 151, was 
able to help to the post of secretary to Theobald, Archbishop of 
Canterbury. When Becket became archbishop, John of Salis- 
bury remained in office, and was his devoted follower. He 
shared Becket's exile, and narrowly escaped sharing his fate at 
the assassination. After this, John of Salisbury remained as 
secretary with the next archbishop, and in 1 176 was made Bishop 
of Chartres, where he died in 11 80. John of Salisbury's book 
was entitled Polycratzcus, or De Nugis Curialium et Vestigiis 
Philosophorum (On the Trifles of the Courtiers and Tracks of 
the Philosophers). It is in eight books, which were finished in 



60 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1156 

1 156. The first treats with much erudition of the vanities of 
hunting, dice, music, mimes, minstrelsy, magic, soothsaying, and 
astrology, which his second book argues to be not always con- 
temptible. In the third book he treats of flatterers and parasites, 
and then comes to the remarkable feature of his work, its argu- 
ment for tyrannicide, which is scholastic altogether in its tone. 
The fourth book argues that it is only for the Church to say 
what tyrants shall be slain, and enters into learned disquisitions 
on the state and duties of a king. The fifth book treats of the 
king and great officials in their relation to the" commonwealth. 
In his sixth book, John of Salisbury treats of the duties, privi- 
leges, and corruptions of the knights ; and in the last two books 
follows the tracks of the ancient philosophers in discussing 
virtue and vice, true and' false glory, with return at last to the 
doctrine of tyrannicide under the guidance of the Church. In 
its pedantic way, the " Polycraticus " is interesting as a clumsily 
aimed return shot in the controversy between Church and State, 
levelled at the corruption and levity of kings and courts, and 
claiming for the Church a power to destroy kings at discre- 
tion. 

16. The second title of this book by John of Salisbury — De 
Nugis Curialium (On the Trifles of the Courtiers) — was that 
taken by Walter Map for a book of his own, which was very 
different in texture. He had been asked, he says, by a friend, 
Geoffrey, to write something as a philosopher and poet, courtly 
and pleasant. He replied that poetical invention needs a quiet, 
concentrated mind, and that this was not to be had in the 
turmoil of a court. But he did accept a lighter commission, and 
" would endeavour to set down in a book whatever he had seen 
or heard that seemed to him worth note, and that had not 
yet been written, so that the telling should be pleasant, and the 
instruction should tend to morality." His work, therefore, which 
is in five divisions, is a volume of trustworthy contemporary 
anecdote by the man who knew better than any other what was 
worth observing. There is no pedantry at all, no waste of words. 
There is not a fact or story that might not have been matter of 
table talk at Henry's Court. Anecdotes on subjects allied to one 
another are generally arranged together ; but there is a new 
topic in every chapter, and the work is a miscellany rich in 
illustration of its time, and free enough in its plan to admit any 
fact or opinion or current event worth record. It includes bold 
speaking against crusading zeal, that left home duties unper- 



toa.d. 1190.] THE KING ARTHUR MYTH. 6l 

formed ; against the vices of the court of Rome ; even against 
that vice in the kings of England which caused their people to 
be oppressed by unjust game-laws. Under this head King 
Henry II. is himself the subject of a warning anecdote. 

17. But Map's great work was that which justified his friend 
Geoffrey in demanding of him " something as a philosopher and 
poet." He it was who first gave a soul to the King Arthur 
legends, and from whom we date the beginning of a spiritual har- 
mony between the life of the English people and the forms given 
to the national hero by our poets. The Latin races have made 
no such use of Charlemagne or Roland as we shall find the 
English to have made of the King Arthur myth. The cycle of 
the Charlemagne romances offers a wide field for study, bright 
with life and colour derived from the active genius of the 
trouveres. But these tales remain what those of the Arthurian 
cycle were before the genius of Walter Map had harmonised 
them with the spirit of his country. The Noijnans had brought 
a song of Roland to the battle-field of Hastings, and it was 
during the reign of our Henry I., that in 1122, Pope Calixtus II. 
officially authenticated the Latin " Life of Charlemagne and 
Roland," which was said to have been written by one of Charle- 
magne's companions, Turpin, who was Archbishop of Rheims 
in the eighth century. This book, which became a source of 
Charlemagne romance, and earned the title of " Le Magnanime 
Mensonge," may possibly have been invented by the order of 
the pope who guaranteed the authorship of Turpin. Its object 
was to increase the number of the pilgrims to the shrine of St. 
James of Compostella. Thenceforth, the Charlemagne romances 
multiplied, and side by side with them sprang up stories of 
Arthur, a hero popular among the Bretons, for whom the hills 
of Wales and Cornwall were a playground of romance. The 
trouveres of northern France, who catered for energetic men, 
ill satisfied with the mere love music of the southern trouba- 
dours, had tales, no doubt, of Arthur, Merlin, and Lancelot, 
which had been partly founded upon Cymric traditions. Thus 
L'Ancelot, a diminutive form of Ancel (ancilla) a servant, might 
be a translation of the Cymric Mael, which also means a servant ; 
and there is Cymric tradition of a Mael, king of the native 
tribes in the year 560, famous for strength and crimes of un- 
chaste violence ; the Meluas who carried off Guinever, wife of 
his uncle Arthur, and with whom Arthur made disgraceful 
peace. The old tales were tales of animal strength, courage, 



62 a FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1154 

and passion, The spiritual life was added to them when Walter 
Map placed in the midst of them the Holy Graal, type of the 
heavenly mysteries. 

Geoffrey of Monmouth's Chronicle had suddenly made King- 
Arthur famous in England. Wace's romance version had 
quickened the interest in his adventures, and then it seems to 
have occurred to Walter Map, or to have been suggested to him, 
to arrange and harmonise, and put a Christian soul into the 
entire body of Arthurian romance. For this purpose he would 
associate it with the legend of the Holy Graal, and that legend 
itself became the first piece in the series of prose romances, 
now produced and written to be read aloud, forming the ground- 
work on which metrical romances afterwards were based* 
These French prose romances seem to have been translated 
from Latin originals ; and Robert de Borron, to whom it is 
ascribed, may rather have been translator than author of (1) 
the first of the series, The Ro7naiice of the Holy Graal, some- 
times also called The Romance of Joseph of Arimathea, which 
was written at least twenty years later than Geoffrey of Mon- 
mouth's Chronicle. It is professedly told by a hermit, to whom 
in the year 717, appeared, in England, a vision of Joseph of 
Arimathea and the Holy Graal. The hermit set down in Latin 
what was then revealed to him, and his Latin Robert de Borron 
said that he proposed to set forth in French. The Graal, accord- 
ing to its legend, was the Holy Dish (low Latin, gradale) which 
contained the paschal lamb at the Last Supper. After the 
supper it was taken by a Jew to Pilate, who gave it to Joseph of 
Arimathea. It was used by Joseph of Arimathea at the taking 
down of our Lord from the cross, to receive the gore from his 
wounds ; and thus it became doubly sacred. When the Jews 
imprisoned Joseph, the Holy Graal, placed miraculously in his 
hands, kept him from pain and hunger for two-and-forty years. 
Released by Vespasian, Joseph quitted Jerusalem and went with 
:he Graal through France into Britain, where it was carefully 
deposited in the treasury of one of the kings of the island, called 
the Fisherman King. The Latin adaptation of this legend to 
the purpose it was to serve, in the addition of the Graal as a 
type of the mystery of godliness to the mere animal life of the 
King Arthur romances, we may suppose to have been the work 
of Walter Map ; Robert de Borron putting into French not 
that only, but also the next part of the series, (2) the romance of 
Merliiu Then followed (3) the romance of Lancelot of the 



toa.d. 11S9.J QUEST OF THE GRAAL. MORT ARTUS. 63 

Lake, ascribed always and only to Walter Map. In it, while 
developing the Arthur legend, Map idealised that bright animal 
life which it had been the only object of preceding stories to 
express. The romance is rich in delicate poetical invention. 
Lancelot is the bright pattern of a knight according to the flesh, 
cleared in one respect of many scattered offences, which are 
concentrated in a single blot, represented always as a dark blot 
on his character, the unlawful love for Guinevere. Next in the 
series comes (4) the Romance of the Quest of the Holy Graal, 
written also indisputably by Walter Map. From Lancelot, who 
had been painted as the ornament of an unspiritual chivalry, 
Map caused a son to spring, Sir Galahad, the spiritual knight, 
whose dress of flame-colour mystically typified the Holy Spirit 
that came down in tongues of fire. The son and namesake of 
Joseph of Arimathea, Bishop Joseph, to whom the holy dish 
was bequeathed, first instituted the order of the Round Table. 
The initiated at their festivals sat as apostle knights, with the 
Holy Ghost in their midst, leaving one seat vacant as that which 
the Lord had occupied, and which was reserved for the pure 
Galahad. Whatever impure man sat there the earth swallowed. 
It was called, therefore, the Seat Perilous. When men became 
sinful, the Holy Graal, visible only to pure eyes, disappeared. 
On its recovery (on the recovered purity of its people) depended 
the honour and peace of England ; but only Sir Galahad — who 
at the appointed time was brought to the knights by a mysterious 
old man clothed in white — only the unstained Sir Galahad suc- 
ceeded in the quest. Throughout the " Quest of the Graal," Map 
knitted the threads of Arthurian romance into the form which it 
was his high purpose to give them, and made what had become 
the most popular tales of his time in England^ an expression of 
the English earnestness that seeks to find the right, and do it 
for the love of God. All their old charm is left, intensified in 
the romance of Lancelot ; but all is now for the first time shaped 
into a legend of man's spiritual battle, and a lesson on the search, 
through a pure life alone, for the full revelation of God's glory 
upon earth. After this, it remained only to complete the series 
of the romances by adding (5) the Mort Arhis, the Death of 
Arthur ; this also was written by Walter Map, and as a distinct 
romance, although combined in the printed editions with his 
Lancelot. The spiritual significance thus given by Walter Map 
to King Arthur, as the romance hero of the English, he is so far 
from having lost among us, that we shall find great phases in 



64 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. |>.d. 1154 

the history of English thought distinctly illustrated by modifi- 
cations in the treatment of the myth. 

18. Meanwhile, the demand for Arthurian romances grew; 
and when Map's work was done another Englishman, Luces de 
Gast, living near Salisbury, wrote, probably towards the close 
of Henry II.'s reign, the first part of Tristan, or Tristram. 
The second part was added by Helie de Borron. Popular as it 
became, this romance is, in spirit and execution, of inferior 
quality. Sir Tristram and the fair Isoude are but coarse doubles 
of Map's Lancelot and Guinevere. 

A Frenchman, Chrestien of Troyes, who began writing before 
the close of Henry II.'s reign, was, in Arthurian romance, the 
ablest of the contemporaries and immediate followers of Walter 
Map. He began, about the year 1180, with the romance of 
" Erec and Enid," and produced metrical versions of Map's 
Lancelot and Graal romances. He wrote also the romance of 
Percival le Gallois. 

Not long afterwards a German poet, Wolfram von Eschen- 
bach, fastened upon the Graal story in the true spirit of Map's 
work. Taking the sight of the Graal as the symbol of nearness 
to God, he painted in his romance of " Parzival" the soul of 
a man striving heavenward, erring, straying, yielding to despair, 
repenting, and in deep humility at last attaining its desire. 
The Graal, thus become famous, was said to be made of one 
emerald lost from the crown of Lucifer as he was falling out of 
heaven. Is it a sign of the improvement of the world that a 
hexagonal dish of greenish glass, called emerald, which is said 
to be the Graal itself, is now visible to all eyes in the treasury of 
the Cathedral of San Lorenzo at Genoa ? 

19. In the earlier part of Henry II.'s reign, Ailred of Bie- 
vaulx wrote a Rule of Nuns, thirty-three Homilies, and other 
books, including a chronicle which described Stephen's Battle 
of the Standard. Ailred was born in the north of England, and 
educated with the King of Scotland's son, but he left the 
Scottish court to become a Cistercian monk in Rievaulx Abbey. 
In 1 146 he became Abbot of Rievaulx, and he died, aged fifty, 
seven, in 11 66. Five-and-twcnty years afterwards he was 
canonised as a saint, for he was so holy that he forbade nuns to 
teach little girls, because they could not do so without carnally 
patting and fondling them. 

Thomas of Ely also wrote, early in Henry II.'s reign, a 
History of the Church of Ely. 



to a.d. 1189.] GLANVILLE. JOSEPH OF EXETER. 65 

20. In the latter part of this reign Ralph Glanville wrote 
his Latin treatise Upon the Laws and Customs of the Kingdom 
of England (Tractatus de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Regni 
Angliae), which was completed towards the close of Henry's 
reign, and is the first treatise on English law. Ralph, or 
Ranulph de Glanville, famous as a lawyer and a soldier, was 
appointed, in 1180, Chief Justiciary of England under Henry II. 
He distinguished himself by valour in repelling the invasion of 
William King of Scotland, who was taken prisoner while be- 
sieging Alnwick Castle. After the death of Henry II., Richard I. 
is said to have extorted from Glanville ^15,000 towards the 
expenses of the crusade in which he accompanied his new 
master. He was killed at the siege of Acre, in 1 190. Glanville's 
authorship of the book attributed to him has been questioned, 
but is not open to much doubt. He says that the confusion of 
our laws made it impossible to give a general view of the whole 
laws and customs of the land ; he sought rather to give a prac- 
tical sketch of forms of procedure in the king's courts, and of 
the principles of law most frequently arising ; discussing only 
incidentally the first principles upon which law is based. 

21. Latin poems also were produced in the closing years of 
Henry II.'s reign by Joseph of Exeter and Alexander Neckam. 
Joseph of Exeter, or Josephus Iscanus, dedicated to Arch- 
bishop Baldwin a Latin poem, in six books, On the Trojan War, 
founded on Dares Phrygius, and finished when Henry II. was 
preparing for the crusade that Baldwin preached. He wrote 
also an Antiochezs, of which there remains only a fragment. 
Joseph of Exeter's Latin poem on the Trojan war was written 
about the same time as the French metrical romance, the 
" Geste de Troie," by that Benoit de St. Maure who supplanted 
Wace in the favour of King Henry II. Geoffrey of Monmouth's 
chronicle, and Wace's romance version of it, called the " Brut," 
had brought Troy stories, as well as King Arthur stories, into 
fashion among us. For we had now been taught that the British 
were descended from the Trojans. After his escape from Troy 
with his son Ascanius and their followers, his establishment in 
Italy and marriage with Lavinia the daughter of King Turnus, 
/Eneas died. Ascanius, the son of ^Eneas, had a son, named 
Silvius, who secretly loved Lavinia's niece. To this couple a 
son was born, of whom it was foretold that he should slay his 
father and his mother, and be driven from the land. The son 
was called Brutus ; was the Brut who gave his name to Britain. 

F 



66 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. xi8o 

His mother died in giving birth to him. At the age of fifteen he 
accidentally shot his father when they were out hunting together. 
He was banished, went to Greece, and there found kindred 
Trojans who were slaves. He stirred them to revolt, was made 
their duke, compelled the King of Greece to give him his 
daughter Ignogen to wife, and freedom to the Trojans ; also to 
give them all the ships of Greece in which to depart and esta- 
blish themselves in a new country. On their way from Greece 
these Trojans landed in the island of Leogice, where Brutus 
sought counsel in the temple of Diana, and was directed to 
seek beyond France a winsome land named Albion, surrounded 
by the sea. So he sailed on, and added to his company, from 
Spain, a fourfold host of Trojans born of those who had been 
led thither by Atenor after the fall of Troy. Their chief was 
Corineus, he who gave his name to Cornwall. After many 
adventures, Brutus, Corineus, and their Trojans reached this 
country, landed at Dartmouth, destroyed a few giants who were 
then the sole possessors of the land, and founded London as 
New Troy, or Troynovant. Such stories quickened interest in 
the affairs of Troy, and we have evidence of the new interest in 
Joseph of Exeter's Latin poem, and the French romance of 
Benoit de St. Maure. They both based their Troy legends upon 
the narratives ascribed to Dares and Dictys. Homer was no 
eyewitness of the siege ; he was a partisan, too, of the Greeks. 
Dares, to whom a Phrygian Iliad was ascribed as early as the 
year 230, an account said to have been written before Homer's, was 
a Trojan priest of Vulcan, who warned Hector not to kill Patro- 
clus, and was himself killed by Ulysses. His book existed only 
in a Latin version, said to have been made by Cornelius Nepos 
from the Greek autograph found at Athens. This prose history 
of the fall of Troy was usually associated with the six books on 
the history of the Trojan war ascribed to Dictys of Gnossus, 
the companion of Idomeneus. His narrative, said to have been 
written at the request of Idomeneus, on tablets of bark, in 
Phoenician characters, was further said to have been buried with 
its author in a leaden box, and disclosed by an earthquake in 
the thirteenth year of the reign of Nero. Nero caused the work 
to be translated into Greek, and from that Greek the Latin 
version was said to have been made by one O. Septimius 
Romanus. In and long after the time of Henry II., Dictys and 
Dares were regarded as the chief original authorities for the 
story of the siege of Troy. 



to a.d. 1199.] ALEXANDER NECKHAM. CHRONICLERS. 67 

It is in Benoit de St. Maure's " Geste de Troie," based chiefly 
upon Dictys, that we have the germ of the tale, afterwards 
famous in literature, of Troilus and Cressida. 

Alexander Neckam was born at St. Albans, in Septem- 
ber, 1 1 57, oh the same night as King Richard, and was the 
king's foster brother. He was educated at St. Albans, and 
early entrusted with the school at Dunstable, dependent on St. 
Albans Abbey. In 11 80, at the age of twenty-three, he was in 
Paris, distinguished as a teacher. He wrote, within the next ten 
years, a Treatise on Science, in ten books of Latin elegiac verse, 
wherein he treated of creation, the elements, water and its 
contents, fire, air, the earth's surface, its interior, plants, 
animals, and the seven arts. He wrote a similar book in 
prose, besides other Latin poems, grammatical and theological 
treatises, and commentaries upon works of Aristotle. Neckam 
lived on through the reigns of Richard I. and John. In 121 3 
he became abbot of the Augustines at Cirencester, and he died 
in 1217. 

22. We now pass from the reign of Henry II. to that 
of Richard I. (1189 — 1199). In this reign Walter Map was 
adding to the anecdotes in his " De Nugis Curialium." To- 
wards the close of it, in 1198, William of Newbury wrote 
his Latin chronicle, the History of English Affairs. He was a 
Yorkshireman born and bred ; born at Bridlington, and edu- 
cated by the Austin canons at Newbury, in the North Riding. 
As a monk in their abbey he became known for his industry 
and skill as a writer ; and it was at the request of the Abbot of 
Rievaulx that he wrote his " Historia Rerum Anglicarum," of 
which the preface hotly denied Geoffrey of Monmouth's credi- 
bility, and the substance proved himself to be a trustworthy 
chronicler of facts. Beginning at the Conquest, he ran through 
the events before his own time in a very short summary, and 
occupied himself almost wholly with the careful record of con r 
temporary events. He died in 1208, aged seventy-two. 

Another chronicler of this time, also a Yorkshireman, was 
Roger of Hoveden, or Howden, in the East Riding. He 
- was attached to the household of Henry II., who employed him 
in collection of the revenues due to the crown from abbeys 
without abbots or priors. Roger of Hoveden is said to have 
been at one time a Professor of Theology at Oxford. He was 
writing in the time of Richard I. his Annals, which extend to 
the year 1201. They begin at the year 732 with a compilation 

F 2 



\ " 

6B A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH I.lTiERA^URE. [a.d, 1199 

which professes to be planned as a continuation of Bede's 
History, and come in the second part to a more va|uable his- 
tory of the reigns of Henry II. and Richa£el ; I., 'continued to the 
third year of John, 1201. For their last nine years ^Hoveden's 
Annals are a minute and diffuse contemporary record of events. 

23. To the reign of Richard I. belongs also our earliest piece 
of literary criticism, the treatise of Geoffrey, de Vinsauf on 
the New Poetry, De Nova Poetria. This writer is called also 
Galfridus Anglicus. He was educated in the priory of ' St. 
Frideswide at Oxford, and in the nascent Universities of France 
and Italy. ; He was at Rome when, about the year 1 195, he 
dedicated to his patron there, Pope Innocent III., his Latin 
critical didactic ppem on the New^Poetry. His new poetry was 
the old revived; Joseph of Exetefs Latin poem on the Trojan 
war was an t exam^le^of it. Gepffrey of Vinsauf warned men 
back to the ancient 'pleasures, and to the critical standard of 
Horace. He condemned the Latin rhymes by which they had 
been superseded. Tl^ere was, at least, some sign in the boolc of 
a tendency to the revival of scholarship.' Geoffrey of Vinsauf 
probably was not the author' pT an Iti?ierary of King Richard 
and others to Jerusalem, which has be^n ascribed to him, and 
which sets forth that it had been written^by Richard the Canon. 
This is the lively chronicle of an eyewitness, who went himself 
with King Richard, and saw the last flash of the crusading 
enthusiasm that Rome afterwards wanted power to sustain 
in Europe. 

24. There is no more to be said of bur literature in the reign 
of Richard I., except in discussion of one writer of mark, who 
began to use his pen at the' close of the reign of Henry II., was 
writing throughout the reign of Richard L, and continued to 
write until the reign of John (1199 — 1216) was nearly ended. 
This was Gerald du Barri, or Gerald of Wales, commonly known 
as Giraldus Cambrensis. He was born in 1147, and died in 
the same year as King John, 121 6. Gerald came of a fighting 
family, whose home was in the Castle of Manorbeer, three miles 
from Pembroke Castle, and who were among the chief helpers 
in Strongbow's conquest of Ireland. There was an uncle David. 
Bishop of St. David's, who cherished the young Gerald's turn 
for study. Study in Wales was continued abroad, and Gerald 
came home from Paris when his age was about twenty-five, to 
be entrusted at once with a share : .n the work of managing wild 
Wales by a well-organised ecclesiastical discipline. Gerald 



toa.d. i2i6.] GIRALDUS CAgBRENSIS. 69 

came of a Norman father a^4 ;J Welsh mother ; he was tall, 
stalwart, and bold of spirit. As, an archdeacon he laboured to 
re-establish Church discipline among clergy as well; as laity, with a 
fiery zeal that proved inconvenient to many. He was unflinching 
in performance of his own duties, an/1 in claim of his own rights ; 
played a bold match of excommunication against a bislaop him- 
self, and told his story to the king, -who heard it witlvshouts of 
laughter, but saw, nevertheless, that Ams, hot Welsh enthusiast 
for right and duty would not much help the English Church and 
Stat£,as a Welsh bishop. After the dearth, of Gerald's uncle there 
waV a strong desire in Wales to get the^yacant see of St. David's 
restored 'to its old metropolitan dignity^ 'Archdeacon Gerald, 
who shared this desire, was elected bishop by the chapter ; but 
Kjing Henry was for the repression of Welsh national enthu- 
siasm. The election was not confirmed; %nd soon afterwards 
Gerald went to Paris for more study. He came home and 
worried away from St. David's the feeble man to whom .that 
bishopric had been given. In 1 184 Henry IE invited the clever 
Welshman to Court, made him one of his cha*piain% and used 
him in the pacification of Wales, but gave hirn* no substantial 
reward. In the following year Gerald was ordered^ to attend 
upon "Prince John, then eighteen years old, in his unsuccessful 
Irish expedition ; for Gerald's counsels would be ^vigorous, .and 
he had intimate connection with many leading Irish-families.. 
It was then that he wrote his Topography of Ireland, and this, 
was presently followed— both books, and all other writings ; ot 
Gerald, being in Isatin — by his History of the Conquest, of 
Ireland, the best of his writings. The Irish chiefs had their, 
names made classical — Fitzstephen became Stephanides— and 
they were furnished with ornamental orations, but their charac- 
ters were described by a lively and shrewd observer, events were _ 
told after a careful sifting of, evidence, and careful observation 
of the ground in the case of battles, sieges, &c. At Easter, ., 
1 1 86, Gerald returned to England, and soon afterwards went 
home to Wales, where he worked on at his " Topography of , 
Ireland." This he published by reading it at Oxford in 1187. 
The three divisions of the work were. read on three successive 
days, and Gerald entertained at his lodgings on the first day, the 
poor of the town; on the second day, the doctors and the more 
eminent pupils^ on the third day, the other scholars and many 
citizens. The capture of Jerusalem by Salaclm stirred Europe 
in the latter part of this, year. Ih.ii8£ Gexal&was by the side 



70 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1199 

of Archbishop Baldwin when, with a train of clergy, he preached 
a crusade through Wales. This caused him to write his 
Itinerary of Wales. In the following year, 1189, Gerald seems 
to have been present at the death of Henry II. He returned to 
Wales, and refused the bishopric of Bangor, which fell vacant 
while Prince John, during his brother Richard's absence, was 
managing the kingdom. His assigned reason for the refusal 
was a desire to resume study at Paris ; the real reason a desire 
to wait for the bishopric of St. David's, that he might battle 
from that vantage-ground for the independence of the Welsh 
Church. War stopped him on the road to Paris, and Welsh 
Gerald then withdrew to Lincoln, at that time famous for its 
theological school. There he remained until 1 198, when the see 
of St. David's again became vacant. The chapter of St. David's 
again elected Gerald, but the Archbishop of Canterbury refused 
to ratify the election. No Welshman, least of all Welsh Gerald, 
was to have the see. Gerald struggled against the archbishop's 
decision, travelled alone to the pope through a country 
made dangerous by war which had broken out between Philip 
Augustus and the Earl of Flanders, and reached Rome in No- 
vember, 1 199. Innocent III. there trifled with his suit; his zeal 
for the honour and independence of St. David's became a pon- 
tifical joke ; and at home Gerald was attainted of treason. But 
when he found his cause to be helpless, Gerald's prompt energy 
of character enabled him to throw its burden off. He suddenly 
reappeared in England, frankly conceded the point he had been 
unable to gain, was repaid the costs of his suit, received sixty 
marks a year of preferment, and passed the remaining seventeen 
years of his life in peace. Among the many books produced by 
Gerald's active mind was one written in the reign of Richard I., 
called Gemma Ecclesiastica, or jewel of. the Church. He wrote 
also, in the reign of John, an autobiographical sketch, in three 
parts, De Rebus a se Gestis (Of the Things done by Himself), and 
when near the close of his life, a Symbolum Electorum, in four 
parts, containing (1), his Letters: (2), his Poems; (3), the 
descriptions of characters given in his works, and the orations 
put by him in the mouths of persons of his story ; and (4), a 
collection of his prefaces. 

25. The patriotic feeling which dictated the chief ambition 
of Gerald du Barri's life was strong in Wales in his time. En- 
deavours of our Norman kings to bring the Welsh into subjection 
produced in them an energy of contest for the rights and liberties 



toa.d. i2i6.] WELSH POETS. ROBERT GROSSETESTE. 71 

which men hold dear. Whenever the soul of a people is stirred 
by a contest that brings out the nobler energies of men, its voice, 
the literature of the people, acquires higher dignity and power. 
Struggle for life and liberty against the force of Persia gave to 
Greece the full expression of her genius. The blossom time of 
our old Gaelic poetry, in the days of the battle of Gabhra, came of 
the struggle of a clan against the force which threatened its ex- 
tinction. The blossom time of the old Cymric poetry, in the days 
of the battle of Cattraeth, came of the struggle of the Celts 
against invading Teutons. And thus it is that we find a famous 
second period of Cymric poetry which corresponds exactly to 
the time of the Welsh struggle for independence against the 
power of the Anglo-Norman kings, or from the latter part of the 
reign of Stephen to the extinction of Welsh independence at the 
death of Llewellyn in 1282. During this period Meilyr, 
Gwalchmai, Owain Prince of Powis, Prince Howel, 
Kynddelw, Llywarch ab Llywelyn, and many others be- 
came famous for the songs through which they poured the spirit 
of their countrymen. It was also during this period that Welsh 
fancy fastened upon the King Arthur stories, and told those and 
others in the language of the Cymry, as the romances of the 
Mabinogion. That word is the plural of the Cymric word Mabi- 
nogi, which (from Mab, a child) means entertainment or instruc- 
tion for the young. 

What is here said of Welsh literature is true not only of 
the reign of John and the preceding years, but also of the suc- 
ceeding reign of Henry III., and of the earlier part of the reign 
of Edward I. We have now to complete the sketch of English 
literature in King John's time. 

26. Gervase of Tilbury studied in foreign schools, and 
served abroad the Emperor Otho IV., for whom he wrote, about 
the year 121 1, his Otia Imperialist, full of learning borrowed 
without acknowledgment from Petrus Comestor, but also an 
amusing book, most rich in illustration of the traditions, 
popular superstitions, history, geography, and science of^its 
time. 

27. There was no service of the foreigner in Robert Grosse- 
teste, a man twenty-eight years younger than Gerald du Barri, 
who contended for the independence of the English Church as 
heartily as Gerald wished to contend for the independence 01 
the Church of Wales. Grosseteste, whose name was variously 
spelt, and who was called also Grosthead, made himself famous 



72 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1199 

among the English people, by continuing in his own way the 
labour towards Church reform, which had already found expres- 
sion in the writings of Nigel Wireker and Walter Map. Robert 
Grosseteste was born of poor parents at Stradbrook, in Suffolk, 
about the year 1175. He studied perhaps at Paris as well as 
at Oxford, where he graduated in divinity, and became master 
of the schools. Grosseteste was contemporary with the founders 
of those orders of friars, the Franciscans and Dominicans, who 
represented, in their first institution, a strong effort to give to the 
Church unity of faith and a pure Christian discipline. Dominic 
was five years older, Francis of Assisi seven years younger than 
Robert Grosseteste, who became, in 1224, at the request of 
Agnellus, the provincial minister of the Franciscans in England, 
their first rector at Oxford. 

Francis of Assisi, the son of a rich merchant, gave himself 
to the service of God by visiting with Christian love the leprous 
and plague-smitten haunts of the very poor and ignorant, from 
which the clergy held too much aloof. By his example he 
gathered others to his work of bringing religion home to the 
hearts of wretched men by works of love. Francis and his 
brethren were first organised into a distinct body about the year 
1209, when John was King of England. They abjured wealth 
and learning of the schools, that they might draw nearer 
to the poor, and trust the strength of Christian sympathy and 
Christian deeds for winning souls to God. It is remarkable that 
this abjuration of book learning opened a way to knowledge. 
Their mission of healing to the poor made the Franciscans stu- 
dents, of Nature. In energetic and devoted men the intellect 
could not remain inactive, and the Franciscans became good 
physicians. To the best of their opportunity they explored 
secrets of Nature; and we shall find them presently yielding to 
England in a pupil of Grosseteste's her first great experimental 
philosopher. 

Side by side with the Franciscans arose the Dominicans or 
Preaching Friars. The Spaniard Dominic was a devout theo- 
logian, whose deep conviction it was that, as there could be no 
salvation in heaven so there should be no mercy on earth for 
the heretic ; that heresy already formed must be uprooted ; 
and that its formation in after time was to be checked or pre- 
vented by the labours of a devout and well-trained order of 
preachers, able to demonstrate the truth of orthodox opinions 
and, by Church scholarship and strength of argument, to confute 



TOA.n. 1216.] LAYAMON 73 

doubts as they arose. For this reason Dominic set on foot the 
work of his Dominicans, which also was begun in the days when 
John was King of England, and was organised by Pope Innocent 
III. at the close of that crusade against Waldensian heresy in 
Languedoc, in which, when one of the leaders of the bloody 
work asked a Cistercian abbot how, after the storm of a 
town, he was to know heretic from faithful, " Slay them all," 
said the abbot, " and the Lord will know his own." King John 
had been dead eight years when Robert Grosseteste became 
head of the Franciscans at Oxford. During John's reign he had 
written Latin books of philosophy and Latin verse. The more 
important part of his life will have to be told in association 
with the other evidences of the course of English thought in the 
reign of Henry III. 

28. One other feature of our literature in the reign of John 
remains to be described, and that is the appearance of books 
written in the language of the people. Hitherto, since the 
Conquest, nearly all writing of mark had been in Latin ; and 
those books which were not in Latin were in French. But we 
begin now to find writers in English, and the earliest of these 
is Layamon. Layamon, the son of Leovenath, called in the 
later text of his poem, Laweman, the son of Leuca, was a priest 
who read the services of the Church at Ernley, now Areley 
Kings, three or four miles from Bewdley, in Worcestershire. 
Living in the days when Geoffrey of Monmouth's Chronicle 
and Wace's French metrical version of it were new books in 
high fame among the educated and the courtly, " it came to him 
in mind, and in his chief thought," that he would tell the famous 
story to his countrymen in English verse. He made a long 
journey in search of copies of the books on which he was to 
found his poem ; and when he had come home again, as he says, 
" Layamon laid down those books and turned the leaves ; he 
beheld them lovingly ; may the Lord be merciful to him !" 
Then, blending literature with his parish duties, the good priest 
began his work. Priest in a rural district, he was among those 
who spoke the language of the country with the least mixture of 
Norman French, and he developed Wace's " Brut * into a com- 
pletely English poem, with so many additions from his own 
fancy, or his own knowledge of West country tradition, that, 
while Wace's " Brut" is a poem of 15,300 lines, in Layamon's 
Brut, the number of lines is 32,250. Layamon's verse is the old 
First English un-rhymed measure with alliteration, less regular 



74 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1199 

in its structure than in First English times, and with an occa- 
sional slip into rhyme. Battles are described as in First English 
poems. Here, as in First English poetry, there are few similes, 
and those which occur are simply derived from natural objects. 
There is the same use of a descriptive synonym for man or 
warrior. There is the old depth of earnestness that rather gains 
than loses dignity by the simplicity of its expression. From 
internal evidence, it appears that the poem was completed about 
the year 1205. It comes down to us in two thirteenth-century 
MSS., one written a generation later than the other, and there 
are many variations of their text ; but the English is so distinctly 
that of the people in a rural district, that in the earlier MS. 
the whole poem contains less than fifty words derived from the 
Norman, and some of these might have come direct from Latin. 
In the second MS. about twenty of those words do not occur, 
but forty others are used. Thus the two MSS., in their 56,800 
lines, do not contain more than ninety words of Norman origin. 
In its grammatical structure Layamon's English begins for us 
the illustration of the gradual loss of inflexions, and other 
changes, during the transition of the language from First English 
to its present form. It has been called semi-Saxon. It is better 
called Transition English of Worcestershire in the beginning 
of the thirteenth century. 

29. A writer named Ormin, or Orm, began also, in the 
reign of King John, another English poem of considerable 
extent, called, from his own name, the Ormulum. He tells ot 
himself in the dedication of his book that he was a regular 
canon of the order of St. Augustine, and that he wrote in 
English at the request of Brother Walter, also an Augustinian 
canon, for the spiritual improvement of his countrymen. The 
plan of his book is to give to the English people in their own 
tongue, and in an attractive form, the spiritual import of the 
Church Services throughout the year. He gave first a metrical 
paraphrase of the portion of the Gospel assigned to each day, 
and added to each portion of it a metrical Homily in which it 
was expounded doctrinally and practically, with frequent bor- 
rowing from the writings of yElfric, and some borrowing from 
Bede. The metre is in alternate verses of eight and seven 
syllables, in imitation of a Latin rhythm ; or in lines of fifteen 
syllables with a metrical point at the end of the eighth, thus : — 

"This boc iss nemmned Ormulura, 
Forthi that Orm itt wrohhtc " 



TOA.D. i2 7 2.] THE OWL AND THE NIGHTINGALE. 75 

'Of the homilies provided for nearly the whole of the yearly 
service nothing remains beyond the thirty-second, and th e 
remains no allusion that points to the time when the work was 
written. Its language, however, places it with the earliest 
examples of Transition English, and it belongs, no doubt, to the 
reign of John, or to the first years of the reign of Henry III. 
It seems to be the Transition English of a north-eastern county, 
and the author had a peculiar device of spelling, on the adhe- 
rence to which by copyists he laid great stress. Its purpose 
evidently was to guide any half Normanized town priest in the 
right pronunciation of the English when he read these verses 
aloud for the pleasure and good of the people. After every 
■short vowel, and only then, Orm doubled the consonant. 

30. In the reign of Henry III. (1216 — 1272), which we have 
now reached, the production of books in the English language 
became more and more common. Some hold that a short 
Proclamation issued in this reign, in the year 1258, should be 
taken as representing the change from that form of Transition 
English which we have in Layamon, to a form which they call 
English, as distinguished from semi-Saxon. This shows how 
an ill-chosen name is able to confuse the understanding. 

There is a bright English poem called The Owl and the 
Nightingale, which tells how those birds advanced each against 
the other his several claims to admiration and the demerits of 
liis antagonist ; and how they called upon the author, Nicholas 
of Guildford, to be judge between them. Master Nicholas 
lets us know that from a gay youth in the world, he had passed 
into the Church, where his merits had been neglected, and that 
he was living at Portsham, in Dorsetshire. In this poem we have 
the rhyming eight-syllabled measure of many a French romance, 
but it is so distinctly English of a rural district, that its 1,792 
lines contain only about twenty words which are distinctly 
Norman in their origin. It remains to us in two transcripts 
made in the West of England, both of the thirteenth century. 
One of them is the same which contains the earliest MS. of 
Layamon, followed by a brief chronicle to the beginning of the 
reign of Henry III , and " The Owl and the Nightingale " in the 
same handwriting. There is reference in the poem to the death 
of a King Henry, who probably was Henry II. There can be 
very little doubt that " The Owl and the Nightingale " is rightly 
assigned to the reign of Henry III. 

Another of the early pieces of Transition English, of much 



76 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1216 

interest to students of the language, but of slight interest 
as literature, is the Ancren Riwle (Rule of the Anchoresses), 
which seems to have been written by a Bishop Poor, who died 
in 1237. It was intended for the guidance of a small house- 
hold of women withdrawn from the world for service of God, at 
Tarrant Keynstone, in Dorsetshire. 

To the reign of Henry III., and about the year 1250, be- 
longs an English poem kindred in spirit to the " Ormulum," 
and, indeed, illustrative of the same feature in English character 
which was marked at the outset of our literature by Csedmon's 
" Paraphrase." This is a version of the Scripture narrative of 
Genesis and Exodus. Like " The Owl and the Nightingale," it 
illustrates the adoption of rhyme into our native poetry, by use 
of the octosyllabic rhyming verse common in many French 
romances. The poem of " Genesis and Exodus " is by an un- 
known author, and represents East Midland Transition English 
of the middle of the thirteenth century. It has been suggested 
that the author of the " Ormulum " belonged to Lincolnshire ; 
the author of the " Genesis and Exodus " to Suffolk. In the 
4,162 lines of " Genesis and Exodus," there are only about fifty 
words of Norman origin. The writer begins by saying that 
men ought to love those who enable the unlearned to love and 
serve the God who gives love and rest of the soul to all 
Christians, and that Christian men should be glad as birds are 
of the dawn to have the story of salvation turned out of Latin 
into their own native speech. 

The same spirit among the people is represented, from the 
date of Layamon onward, by Homilies, metrical Creeds, Pater- 
nosters, Gaudia, or foys of the Virgin, and short devotional or 
moral poems, of which MSS. remains. There is also a Bestiary, 
in English, apparently of the same date, and produced in the 
same part of England as the metrical story of " Genesis and 
Exodus." The " Bestiary" is a version from a Latin " Physiologus," 
by a Bishop Theobald, and in its 802 lines, except one or two 
Latin names of animals, which had already been adopted in 
First English, there are not more than eight words of Romance 
origin. To what has been said of the early origin of books 
of this kind, when we found them imitated in First English, 
(ch. ii. § 12), it may be added that Epiphanius, a Jewish Christian 
bishop and opponent of Origen, referred, at the close of the 
fourth century, in his book against heresies, to the two natures 
of the serpent, with the phrase " as the Physiologues say ;" and 



toa.d. i2 7 2.] ENGLISH METRICAL ROMANCES. 77 

that, as collections of such natural history allegories multiplied, 
there came to be a sort of canonical rule as to the moral 
allegory connected with each animal. There was a "Physiologus" 
ascribed to Epiphahius. In the year 496 Gelasius II. declared 
at a Church 'Council that a " Physiologus," then ascribed to St. 
Ambrose, was apocryphal and heretical ; and Latin MSS. of 
such work date from the eighth century. Early in the twelfth 
century, a metrical "Bestiary" was written in French by Philippe 
de Thaun, and in the time of which we are now speaking, there 
was produced in France, " Le Bestiaire Divin de Guillaume, 
Clerc de Normandie." 

31. There was translation also of popular romances from 
French into English verse during the reign of Henry III. The 
most notable of these were " King Horn" and the " Romance of 
Alexander." 

King Horn belongs to an Anglo-Danish cycle of romance, 
from which the Norman trouveres drew material. Another of 
the tales of this cycle was " Havelok the Dane," formed into a 
French lay in Henry I.'s time, but translated some years later 
than " King Horn." Another tale of the same group, after- 
wards translated into English as a metrical romance, was that 
of " Guy of Warwick and Colbrond the Dane." Horn put to 
sea in a small boat, landed in Westernesse, where he became 
page to King Aylmer, and loved Aylmer's daughter Rimenhild. 
He was dubbed a knight, and achieved great things. Banished 
for his love, he bade Rimenhild wait for him seven years. 
Many things happened before and after King Horn's marriage 
with Rimenhild. While he was gone to recover his native land 
from the infidel, a false friend, Fykenild, seized his wife. But 
Horn went as a harper into Fykenild's castle, killed him, and 
recovered Rimenhild. 

King Alexander was a very famous subject of romance 
poetry. A Greek romance upon him had been written about the 
year 1060 by Simon Seth, keeper of the imperial wardrobe in 
the palace of Antiochus at Constantinople, founded upon Orien- 
tal legends that abounded among the Persians and Arabians as 
" Mirrors of Iskander," " The Two- Horned Alexander," &c. This 
Greek romance was translated into Latin, and from Latin even 
into Hebrew. It became also the groundwork of many French 
and English poems. In the year 1200 Gaultier de Chatillon 
turned it into an" " Alexandreis," which was one of the best 
Latin poems of the Middle Ages, and about the same time, at- 



78 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1216 

the beginning of the reign of John in England, the great French 
romance of Alexander was composed in nine books, containing- 
altogether about 20,000 of the twelve- syllabled lines since known, 
from their use in that poem, as Alexandrines. All the lines in 
one of its paragraphs, even though they may be a hundred, 
rhyme together. The Alexander romance was adopted in 
Spain, Italy, and even in Scandinavia. A German Alexandries r 
in six books, was produced during our Henry III.'s reign by a 
Suabian, Rudolph of Hohenems ; and towards the close of the 
same reign, about the year 1265, there was produced an English 
free version of the famous poem as the Romance of King 
Alexander, which has been ascribed without good reason, to an 
Adam Davie, Marshal of Stratford-at-Bow. 

To the reign of Henry III. also may belong the English 
metrical version of the romance of Sir Tristrem, ascribed to 
Thomas of Erceldoune, in the county of Berwick, the 
earliest Scottish poet, who was born about 12 19, alive in 1286, 
and dead before 1299. He was in repute in his own day not 
only as poet, but as prophet also. 

32. From the rapid development of an English literature in 
the language of the people, we now pass to other illustrations of 
the energy of English thought during the reign of Henry III., 
and return to Robert Grosseteste, whom we left (§ 27), at 
the date of his appointment, in 1224, as the first rector of the 
Franciscans in Oxford. He had been Archdeacon of Wilts, was 
then Archdeacon of Northampton, and became afterwards Arch- 
deacon of Leicester. At one time he was rector of St. Mar- 
garet's, Leicester. In 1232, after a severe illness, Grosseteste, 
who would no longer be a pluralist, gave up all his preferments 
except a prebend at Lincoln ; and in 1235 he was made Bishop 
of Lincoln, then the largest and most populous diocese in the 
country, and very famous for its theological school. It was as 
Bishop of Lincoln that Grosseteste began the most energetic 
part of his career as Church reformer. Strictly interpreting the 
duties of his office, he devoted himself to the suppression of 
abuses. Within a year of his consecration he had, after a visi- 
tation of the monasteries, removed seven abbots and four priors. 
Next year he was, in a Council held in London, supporting the 
proposal to deprive pluralists of all their livings except one. His 
strictness produced outcry. The canons preached against their 
bishop in his own cathedral; a monk tried to poison him. In 
1245 Grosseteste obtained the support of the pope for his visi- 



TOA.D. 1272.J ROBERT GROSSETESTE. 79 

tations; and in 1246 he obtained another bull from the pope to 
prevent scholars at Oxford from graduating in arts without 
examination. When his visitations were resumed, his unre- 
served inquiry into the morals of those who undertook the 
spiritual guidance of his diocese produced so much scandal that 
appeal was made to the king to check it. The king interfered 
by forbidding laymen to give evidence in such matters before 
Grosseteste's officials. Grosseteste battled against the greed of 
monks who seized for their monasteries possessions and tithes of 
the Church meant for the use of resident priests. But the 
monks made it worth the pope's while to be deaf to all the 
bishop's arguments upon that head. As he left the pope, Grosse- 
teste said aloud, so that his holiness might hear, " O money, 
money, how much you can do ! especially at the court of Rome." 
In 1252 Grosseteste caused a calculation to be made of the 
income of the foreign clergy thrust by the pope on English 
maintenance. It was 70,000 marks, three times the clear 
revenue of the king. In the following year, 1253, the last year 
of his life, Grosseteste made a famous stand against the avarice 
of Rome by refusing to induct one of the pope's nephews into a 
canonry at Lincoln. He died in the autumn of that year, 
accusing Rome of the disorders brought into the Church. He 
left his library to the Franciscans. The mere list of his own 
writings occupies three and twenty closely-printed quarto pages. 
He wrote a book of husbandry in Latin, of which there are also 
MSS. in French. He wrote sermons, treatises on physical and 
mental philosophy, commentaries on Aristotle, Latin and French 
verse, including a religious allegory of the Chateau d? Amour.. 
He applied also a rare knowledge of Greek and Hebrew to the 
minutest study of the Scriptures. He battled against the corrup- 
tion of the Church, not in the narrow spirit of an ascetic. Three 
things, he once told a Dominican, are necessary for temporal 
health : food, sleep, and liveliness. Heartily in accord with the 
movement represented by the poverty of the Franciscans, he 
said that he liked to see the friars' dresses patched. But when 
one of them, mistaking a particular means for the great end 
that was sought thereby, praised, in a sermon, mendicancy as 
the highest step towards the attainment of all heavenly things, 
Grosseteste told him that there was a step yet higher, namely, 
to support one's self by one's own labour. One intimate friend of 
Grosseteste's was especially struck by his courage in facing both 
the king and the pope to maintain right; another, the most 



8o 



A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a 



famous of his pupils, Roger Bacon, was impressed most by his 
marvellous and almost universal knowledge. 

33. Roger Bacon, born in 12 14, was in his cradle in 
Somersetshire when the barons obtained from King John his 
signature to Magna Charta. He belonged to a rich family, 
sought knowledge from childhood, and avoided the strife of the 
day. He studied at Oxford and Paris, and the death of his 
father may have placed his share of the paternal estate in his 
hands. He spared no cost for instructors and transcribers, 
books and experiments ; mastered not only Latin thoroughly, 
but also Hebrew and Greek, which not more than five men in 
England then understood grammatically, although there were 
more who could loosely read and speak those tongues. He was 
made Doctor in Paris, and had the degree confirmed in his own 
University of Oxford. Then he withdrew entirely from the civil 
strife that was arising, and joined the house of the Franciscans 
in Oxford, having spent all his time in the world and two thou- 
sand pounds of money in the search for knowledge. Roger 
Bacon's family committed itself to the king's side in the civil 
war which Henry III.'s greed, his corruption of justice, and 
violation of the defined rights of his subjects, brought upon 
him. The success of the barons ruined Bacon's family, and 
sent his mother, brothers, and whole kindred into exile. Mean- 
while the philosopher, as one of the Oxford Franciscans, had 
come under Grosseteste's care, had joined an order which 
prided itself in the checks put by it on the vanity of learning. 
But, in spite of their self-denials, the Franciscans, at Oxford 
and elsewhere, included many learned men who, by the daily 
habit of their minds, were impelled to give to scholarship a 
wholesome practical direction. They were already beginning 
to supply the men who raised the character of teaching at 
the University of Oxford till it rivalled that of Paris. Friar 
Bacon was among the earliest of these teachers, so was Friar 
Bungay, who lives with him in popular tradition. Roger Bacon 
saw how the clergy were entangled in barren subtleties of a 
logic far parted from all natural laws out of which it sprang. 
He believed that the use of all his knowledge, if he could but 
make free use of it, would be to show how strength and peace 
were to be given to the Church. And then the pope, who had 
been told of his rare acquirements and his philosophic mind, 
bade Roger Bacon, disregarding any rule of his order to the 
contrary, write for him what was in his mind. Within his 



TO A.D. 1272.] 



ROGER BACON. 8 2 



mind were the first principles of a true and fruitful philosophy. 
But to commit to parchment all that he had been pining to 
say would cost him sixty pounds in materials, transcribers, 
necessary references, and experiments. He was a Franciscan, 
vowed to poverty, and the pope had sent no money with the 
command to write. Bacon's exiled mother and brothers had 
spent all they were worth upon their ransoms. Poor friends 
furnished the necessary money, some of them by pawning goods, 
upon the understanding that their loans would be made known 
to his holiness. Bishop Grosseteste was now dead, and there 
was a difficulty between the philosopher and his immediate 
superiors, because the Pope's command was private, and only 
a relief to Bacon's private conscience. His immediate rulers 
had received no orders to relax the discipline which deprived 
Franciscans of the luxury of pen and ink. But obstacles were 
overcome, and then Roger Bacon produced within a year and 
a half, 1268-9, his Opus Majus (Greater Work), which now 
forms a large closely-printed folio ; his Opus Minus (Lesser 
Work), which was sent after the Opus Majus to Pope Clement, 
to recapitulate its arguments and strengthen some of its 
parts ; and his Opus Tertium (Third Work), which followed 
as a summary and introduction to the whole, enriched with 
further novelty, and prefaced with a detail of the difficulties 
against which its author had contended — details necessary to 
be given, because, he said, that he might obey the pope's 
command the friar had pawned to poor men the credit of 
the Holy See. These books, produced by Roger Bacon at 
the close of Henry III.'s reign, and when he was himself 
fifty-three years old, rejected nearly all that was profitless, 
and fastened upon all that there was with life and power 
of growth- in the knowledge of his time. They set out with a 
principle in which Bacon the Friar first laid foundations of the 
philosophy of Bacon the Chancellor of later time. He said that 
there were four grounds of human ignorance : trust in inade- 
quate authority ; the force of custom ; the opinion of the inex- 
perienced crowd ; and the hiding of one's own ignorance with 
the parading of a superficial wisdom. Roger Bacon advocated 
the free honest questioning of Nature ; and where books were 
requisite authorities, warned men against the errors that arose 
from reading them in bad translations. He would have had all 
true students endeavour to read the original texts of the Bible 
and of Aristotle. He dwelt on the importance of a study of 

G 



Si A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1216 

mathematics, adding a particular consideration of optics, and 
ending with the study of Nature by experiment, which, he said, is 
at the root of all other sciences, and a basis of religion. Roger 
Bacon lived into the reign of Edward I., and died in the year 1292. 
Contemporary with him was Michael Scot, of Balwirie, 
who travelled abroad, was honoured at the Sicilian court of 
Frederick II., translated into Latin the Arabian Avicenna's 
" History of Animals," and wrote a Mensa Philosophica about 
the time when Bacon was working upon his " Opus Majus." 
Michael Scot, the date of whose birth is unknown, died in 1291, 
a year before Roger Bacon. 

34. Side by side with this development of a true spirit in 
philosophy, the steady endeavour towards right and justice 
which arose out of the character of its people had enabled 
England to maintain the rights of subjects against all wrong 
doing of their kings. Progress made since the days of Henry II. 
is illustrated in the reign of Henry III. by the appearance of a 
jurist, Henry of Bracton, who wrote a book with the same 
title as Glanville's, written in Henry II.'s reign, Upon the Laws 
and Customs of England. Of Bracton himself it is only known 
that he wrote his treatise in the reign of Henry III., probably 
between the years 1256 and 1259, that it proves him to have 
been a lawyer by profession, deeply read in Roman law, and 
that he must have been the Justiciary Henry of Bracton men- 
tioned in judicial records of 1246, 1252, 1255, and other years, to 
1267 inclusive. He was a judge therefore from 1245 to 1267, if 
not longer. There is reason to think he was a clerk in orders 
before he became a lawyer. In his treatise he does not, like 
Glanville, avoid dealing with first principles. English law had, 
during the seventy years between Glanville's book (ch. iv. § 20) 
and Bracton's, been developed into a science, and the time was 
come for the first scientific commentary on its rules. Bracton 
painted accurately, in the five books into which his work is 
divided, the state of the law in his time, and he digested it into 
a logical system. The king's place in its system Bracton thus 
defined: "The king must not be subject to any man, but to 
God and the Law ; for the Law makes him king. Let the king, 
therefore, give to the Law what the Law gives to him, dominion 
and power ; for there is no king where Will, and not Law, 
bears rule." 

35. There is the same evidence of national growth in the 
increasing boldness of the chroniclers. Roger of Wendover, 



to a.d. 1272.] CHRONICLERS. 83 

in Buckinghamshire, was a monk of St. Albans, who became 
precentor of the abbey, and afterwards prior of Belvoir, a cell 
attached to St. Albans, from which office he was, about the year 
1 21 9, deposed for his extravagance. Recalled to St. Albans, Roger 
of Wendover died there about the year 1237. He wrote under the 
name of Flowers of History {Flores Historiarum) a History of 
the World from the Creation, in two books, the first extending to 
the birth of Christ ; the second to the 19th year of Henry III. 
The latter part of the chronicle, describing the forty or fifty years 
before 1235, is his own manly and impartial history of his own 
time. 

Matthew Paris a younger man, and also monk of St. 
Albans, who perhaps was called of Paris from having been 
there for study, made free use of Roger of Wendover's " Flowers 
of History " in his own larger chronicle, which he called Historia 
Major. Indeed, for his detail of events before 1235 he simply 
annexed Roger of Wendover with a few variations and addi- 
tions. From that date to 1273 Matthew Paris wrote his own 
fully detailed journal of the history of his own times, and 
claimed unsparing liberty in the discussion of events. Monk 
as he was, he spoke plain language of "the pope and the 
king, who favoured and abetted each other in their mutual 
tyranny." 

36. We now pass from the reign of Henry III. to that of 
Edward I. (1272 — 1307), at whose accession Dante was a child 
of seven years old. We must, therefore, glance abroad again 
before discussing the next stage of our own literature. We 
have seen (ch. iii. § 2) how, in our Henry II.'s time, throughout 
Europe writers were arising who spoke for the people ; and it 
has been said that there was in Europe a Court literature for the 
luxurious few, as well as a National literature for the many. 
The tales of the trouveres of Northern France, if written for the 
rich, were astir with action which gave pleasure to all lively minds, 
and they could be recited to the people at their merrymakings. 
The love-singing of the troubadours had no such currency. It 
•was a part of the idleness of the idle. 

In the twelfth century a chaplain at the French Court named 
Andre wrote a book on the " Art of Loving," wherein he cited 
and described incidentally the Courts of Love, with which, in 
Northern and Southern France, great ladies amused themselves, 
from the middle of the twelfth century until the end of the four- 
teenth. Andre quotes, among others, the Courts of Love of the 

G 2 



84 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1137 

ladies of Gascony ; of Ermengard, Viscountess of Narbonne ; 
of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, married in 1137 to Louis VII. 
of France, and afterwards wife of Henry II. of England. The 
troubadours and their historian, Jean of Notre Dame, speak of 
the Courts of Love established in Provence, at Pierrefeu, at Signe, 
at Romanin, at Avignon. Love verses were sung before these 
courts, love causes were heard with mock legal formalities, and 
judgments delivered with formal citations of precedents. These 
courts had also a code, said to have been established . by the 
king of love, and found by a Breton knight and lover in King 
Arthur's court tied to the foot of a falcon. Most noticeable in 
the decisions of these Courts of Love is the care taken by the 
ladies to divide their jest from earnest. The very first law of 
the code was that marriage does not excuse from love ; and the 
interpretation of the ladies' courts laid down that love and 
marriage are things wholly different. Sometimes the playful 
singing of a lady's praise, the jest of love which was sharply 
distinguished from all serious suit for marriage, did become 
serious. One case before the courts was that of a knight, A, 
who had sought from a lady leave to love after the playful 
fashion, and had been told by her that she had already a lover, 
B, but that she would willingly take A whenever B was lost to 
her. In her case the jest became earnest, and she married B. 
Then immediately A claimed his right to be her lover, accord- 
ing to her promise. She wished to withdraw from this kind of 
amusement, but was sued before Queen Eleanor's Court of Love, 
which decided in the prosecutor's favour, saying, "We do not 
venture to contradict the decision of the Countess of Cham- 
pagne, who, by a solemn judgment, has pronounced that true 
love cannot exist between those who are married to each other." 
But the nature of women does not change with the centuries ; 
and it is not possible that in these playful decisions, courts 
consisting of ten, twelve, or fourteen ladies of chief rank in 
a district meant to disgrace their sex. They meant the reverse. 
The love discussed in their courts and sung to them by the 
troubadours was idle amusement only ; and they took care that 
no lady who was chosen as the object of a rhymer's love verses 
should, therefore, be regarded as the object of his serious suit. 
If the suit was serious that was a private matter, and so was the 
relation between husband and wife. The distinction was made 
mockingly, but very firmly ; and the consequence was that the 
poet always addressed his public exercises on the theme of love 



toa.d. 1324.] LOVE POEMS. 85 

to some lady whom he had no thought whatever of marrying. 
The lady, who was often a married lady, looked upon her place 
in his verse simply as that of one who had received the high 
compliment of a dedication. No poet amused the public with 
his suit to the woman whom he sought to marry, or said to 
his own wife in his verses what it became him to say only in 
his home. Thus the ladies enjoyed the polite entertainment of 
love poetry, and kept it free from risk of compromising them 
before the world. 

The southern poets had taken from the Arabs their belief 
that love is the essential theme of song. Only love poems were 
knightly, chevaleresques ; all others, even those of religion, were 
" sirventes," songs for squires. Thus it became an exercise of 
ingenuity to express the sentiment of love with all possible 
variety. After Peter de Vinea had, in our Henry III/s time, 
invented what we now know as the sonnet, that form of poem 
became especially devoted to the use of those who exercised 
their ingenuity in expressing all phases of love : love in its first 
emotions ; love, happy, jealous ; the loved one walking, sitting, 
sleeping ; in health, in sickness, dead ; the lover in despair. 
Long sequences of sonnets so designed, or still more artificially 
ingenious in their way, had become common in the time of 
Dante's youth, and for many generations afterwards were 
written on this plan. There was so little call for real and 
earnest thought in such love-singing, that men of rank who 
had no poetry in their souls learnt to arrange the conven- 
tional ideas into musical word patterns. Henry VI., the son of 
Barbarossa, and the father of Frederick II., at whose Sicilian 
court, the spirit of song was fostered, this Henry VI. was a 
famous troubadour, and he gouged out women's eyes when, 
in 1 194, he kept cruel Christmas at Palermo. The character of 
this form of literature is also indicated by the edict of Clementina 
Isaure, Countess of Toulouse, who in 1324 instituted what were 
called the Floral Games. These games assembled at Toulouse 
the poets of France, and housed them in artificial arbours 
dressed with flowers. A violet in gold was the reward for the 
best poem, and the degree of Doctor was conferred on any one 
who was three times a prizeman. 

During more than thirty years of the reign of Henry III. 
literature was being fostered at the Apulian Court of Frederick II. 
Frederick cared little for pope or Church, or for crusading ; 
but when he found it worth his while to go to Jerusalem, where 



86 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1229 

the sultan gracefully yielded to him the Holy City by the treaty 
of 1229, Frederick took possession as with the shrug of a 
philosopher and man of the world who had a high respect for 
the learning and civilization of the Arabs. At his court in 
Sicily there was a welcome for all poets and all men of learning, 
whether Christians, Saracens, or Jews. For the Saracens he 
had especial liking, and took pains to maintain a good know- 
ledge of Arabic in his dominions. To him Michael Scot dedi- 
cated his translation of Avicenna's work upon Animals, and at 
his request Michael composed a treatise upon Physiognomy. 
Grosseteste was among Frederick's correspondents. Of the 
University of Naples Frederick was the founder. He had weak- 
nesses and vices, but his free encouragement of learning, alike 
of the East and West, the wholesome companionship at his Court 
of men who had much to learn one from another, and the gay 
encouragement of song, made Sicily, in the days of our Henry 
III., the birthplace of modern Italian literature. 

Fifteen years after Frederick's death Dante was born. 
With Frederick II. had arisen the Italian form of the old 
German struggle between Ghibelline (to the Germans Waib- 
lingen) and Guelf. In the summer of 1236, at the head of 
the Ghibelline party, Frederick prepared war against Northern 
Italy— against that part of Italy in which not only the Lombard 
League, but also the very rivalries and dissensions among and 
within its free cities, testified to the spirit of freedom that set 
noblest minds at work. Barbarossa had in vain struggled to 
force back the leagued Italian free cities under feudal government. 
In vain Frederick allied himself to the Italian feudal party. 
The popular party, then called that of the Guelfs, were without 
a leader, but it suited the pope's policy to befriend it. Its 
strength was drawn from the growing spirit of independence 
which caused prisoners of Brescia, bound to the machines 
advanced against the town, to bid their townsfellows strike 
fearlessly and count no man's safety of more worth than their 
country's honour. After Frederick's death, the pope and the 
Guelfs led armed revolt against the Italian rule of the House 
of Suabia. But the policy of Rome placed always the feuds 
and immediate worldly interests of the Papal Court above the 
larger interests of Italy ; and in 1264, the year before the birth 
of Dante, Pope Urban IV. brought the dull, cruel, and grasping 
Charles of Anjou into Italy, as King of Naples, and allied the 
name and cause of the Guelfs to the lowest forms of foreign 



toa.d. 1232.] STIR OF THOUGHT IN EUROPE. 87 

tyranny. The political theory of the Ghibellines was now that 
by acceptance of a strong imperial rule unity was to be secured, 
and a liberal chief, strong to contend against usurping tyrannies 
of priestcraft, would give life and law to society. The political 
theory of the Guelfs was that the proposed head of society 
would be a foreign master. They declared strongly for the 
citizen's individual right of self-government, and watched so 
jealously over municipal privileges, and each city's, each family's 
right to equality with its neighbour, that feuds between city and 
city, family and family — to which the Ghibellines pointed as 
justification of their different political view — arose out of the 
very energies that gave to Italy a Dante for her son. Men's 
souls were deeply stirred in contest upon questions involving the 
essential problems of society ; and out of the energy so roused, 
there came, as usual, the best expression of man's genius. The 
development of commerce in North Italy, which had been 
quickened by the Crusades, brought citizens into wholesome 
contact with all forms of life ; gave vigour of mind, quickened 
enterprise, and widened the sense of the worth of civil rights. 
Thus Florence throve. Within a generation before Dante's 
birth, its streets had been paved with stone, the Palace of Justice, 
the prisons, and the Bridge of the Trinity had been built. Greek 
painters also had been brought to Florence, whom young 
Cimabue saw at work in the chapel, and whose art was tran- 
scended by the genius of that Florentine. Dante was seventeen 
in the year of the Constitution of Florence, that expressed the 
political mind of this Athens of the Middle Ages. The Palazzo 
Vecchio was built when Dante was twenty-four years old. Five 
years later the builders were at work on the Baptistry and 
Cathedral ; and Dante was but in his thirty- fifth year when 
there were cast for the Baptistry Ghiberti's brazen gates, 
which Michael Angelo declared "worthy to be the gates of 
Heaven." 

If we look out of Italy to France we find there also the 
independent stir of thought. Guillaume de Lorris had begun, 
as a troubadour, between the years 1200 and 1230, or in the 
days of our King John and the earlier years of Henry III., an 
allegorical love poem, called the " Roman de la Rose." He 
died, leaving it a fragment of 4,070 lines, which had no special 
popularity. But in the days of Dante's childhood and youth, 
between the years 1270 and 1282, Jean de Meung, a poet, born, 
like Guillaume of Lorris, in the vallev of the Loire, but no mere 



bb A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1265 

troubadour, took up the unfinished " Romaunt of the Rose," and, 
by the addition of 18,000 lines, completed it in a new spirit. The 
timid grace of one young poet was followed by the bold wit of 
another, who was crammed with the scholarship of his time and 
poured it out in diffuse illustration of his argument, but who, a 
man of the people, alive with the stir of his time against 
polished hypocrisy, annoyed priests with his satire and court 
ladies with a rude estimate of their prevailing character. Under- 
lying all Jean de Meung's part of the " Romaunt of the Rose" is 
a religious earnestness that gave its verses currency, and made 
them doubly troublesome to those who dreaded free thought 
and full speech. 

Into the midst of all this energetic life Dante was born in 
Florence, a lawyer's son, in the year 1265, seven years before 
the close of the reign of our King Henry III. His father died 
during his early childhood, and he was left to the care of a rich 
mother, who caused him to be liberally trained. Lombardy was 
without a written language, and the choice of language for the 
poets of North Italy was between Provencal and Sicilian. 
Dante chose Sicilian, and blended music of the South with 
Northern energy. At first, in his early manhood, he wrote the 
"Vita Nuova" — the New or the Early Life — connecting, with a 
narrative of aspiration towards Beatrice, as the occasion of 
them, sonnets, and canzone, representing artificially, according 
to the manner of that time, various moods of love. Fifty yards 
from the house in which Dante lived was the house of Folco 
Portinari, father of the little Beatrice on whom Dante founded, 
not a set of personal love sonnets, but his ideal of a dawn of life 
and love distinguished "by the chastest purity. When the 
actual Beatrice died, in the year 1290, she was the young wife of 
Simon dei Bardi ; but this fact nearly concerned neither Dante 
nor the poem. At the very outset he describes his ideal as 
" the glorious lady of my mind," for she represented the pure 
Spirit of Love, Beatrice, the Blesser ; earthly love in the " Vita 
Nuova," heavenly love in the " Divine Comedy." There is the 
most careful exclusion of all fleshly longing from Dante's 
picture of the Spirit of Love that walks abroad on the same 
earth with us, while yet, to our hearts, the world is young. 
When, by the spiritual eye, she is seen no more in the street, 
Dante's small treason to her memory is checked by a dream of 
her as the nine years' old child in the crimson dress, who repre- 
sented the warm glow of love in the heart blessed with a child- 



TO a.d. 1292.] ITALIAN INFLUENCE ON LITERATURE. 89 

like innocence. Dante's unfinished ** Convito," continues the 
allegory of the " Vita Nuova " by showing how, after the actual 
vision of love in youth and early manhood has departed, the 
poet, or the soul of man, turns to a new love, and seeks consola- 
tion in philosophy. And so the spiritual sense of these works 
proceeds by definite steps upward to the higher mysteries of the 
" Divine Comedy." Here, after the early days of faith and love, 
•and when, after the first passage from emotions of youth to the 
intellectual enjoyments of maturer years, enthusiasm also for 
philosophy has passed away, Dante, or the Soul of Man repre- 
sented in his person, passes through worldly life (the wood of 
the first canto) into sin, and, through God's grace, to a vision of 
his misery— to the " Hell." But by repentance and penance — 
-" Purgatory " — the marks of the seven deadly sins are effaced 
-from his forehead, and the bright vision of Beatrice — heavenly 
love — whose handmaids are the seven virtues, admonishes him as 
he attains to " Paradise." There Beatrice, the Beatifier, Love that 
-brings the Blessing, is his guide to the end of the Soul's course, , 
the glory of the very presence of the Godhead, where a love that 
is almighty rules the universe. The date of the action of the 
'"Divine Comedy" is in the year 1300; and the whole develop- 
ment of the genius of Dante, which laid the foundation of Italian 
influence upon literature almost throughout Europe, belongs to a 
time corresponding to that of the reign of King Edward I. in 
England. 

Towards the end of that reign, Dante still living, Petrarch 
was born. As Dante was a child of seven at the accession of 
King Edward I., so Petrarch was a child of three at the acces- 
sion of King Edward II. Early in the reign of Edward II. 
Boccaccio was born; and in the reign of Edward III. we shall 
begin to find how great was the influence of these Italian writers 
upon English literature. 

37. John of Oxnead, a monk of the Abbey of St. Benet 
Holme, was our chief Latin chronicler who lived in the reign of 
Edward I. His Chronicle began with the year 449 and ended 
with the year 1292. For events after the Conquest he chiefly 
followed Roger of Wendover, with interpolations, which became 
long and important in the reigns of Richard I., John, and 
Henry III. He gave particular account of the injustice and 
cruelty with which the Jews were treated in his time, was full in 
3iis account of the barons' war with Henry III., and detailed 
afrom contemporary knowledge the wresting of Wales from the 



90 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1272 

last of the Llewellyns in 1282, and the coming out of the London 
citizens with horns and trumpets to meet the head of the slain 
patriot. 

Nicholas Trivet, son of one of the king's justices in eyre, 
was born about the year 1258, and became one of the Dominican 
or Preaching Friars. He wrote Latin Amials of the Six Kings 
of the House ofAnjou, ending in 1307 at the death of Edward I. 
His chronicle is well written, religious in its tone, and very 
trustworthy in its citation of testimony or transcripts of 
historical documents. 

Peter Langtoft, of Langtoft, in Yorkshire, a regular canon 
of Augustinians at Bridlington, wrote in French verse a Chro7iicle 
of England, from Brut to the end of the reign of Edward I. 
His inaccurate French was that of an Englishman who had not 
lived in France ; the first part of this chronicle abridged 
Geoffrey of Monmouth, professing to omit what Peter Langtoft 
took for fable, and to repeat only so much as he thought true. 
He then gave, from various authorities, the history of First 
English and Norman kings, down to the death of Henry III., 
and in the third part of his chronicle became a contemporary 
historian of the reign of Edward I. Writing in French for 
noblemen and gentlemen of England, Langtoft took especial 
care to make out the best case he could for the justice of King 
Edward's Scottish wars. 

38. Writing in English for the English common people, 
Robert of Gloucester, a monk of the abbey in that town, 
produced at the same time a rhymed Chronicle of England, 
from the siege of Troy to the death of Henry III. in 1272. It 
was in long lines of seven accents, and occasionally six, and 
was the first complete history of his country, from the earliest 
times to his own day, written in popular rhymes by an English- 
man. The language is very free from Norman admixture, and 
represents West Midland Transition English of the end of the 
thirteenth century. Part of the work must have been written 
after the year 1297, because it contains a reference to Louis IX. 
of France, as Saint Louis, and it was in 1297 that he was 
canonised. Robert of Gloucester wrote also rhymed Lives and 
Legends of the English Saints. 

Among other books written in English during the reign 
of Edward I., was the English version of The Lay of Havelok 
the Dane, which was made about the year 1280, and is one of 
the brightest and most interesting examples of the English of 



toa.d. 1307.] HAVELOK. ENGLISH POEMS. 91 

that time. It told how the young royal Havelok was saved by 
the fisherman Grim from the usurping Godard, and how, he had 
landed with Grim and all his family at the spot in England 
now called, after Grim, Grimsby. There he became a stalwart 
youth, and served as cook's boy in the kitchen of a usurping 
Earl Godrich at Lincoln, who held the English princess 
Goldeburgh much as Godard in Denmark had held Havelok. 
Havelok proved to be the stoutest man in England, and Earl 
Godrich, who had promised to wed the princess to the best man 
in the land, thought treacherously to keep the letter and to break 
the spirit of his promise, by making her the wife of the cook's 
boy. But then the royal virtues of young Havelok displayed them- 
selves. Both the usurpers were in due time confounded, and 
Havelok and Goldeburgh reigned sixty years in England. They 
had also fifteen sons and daughters, whereof every son became 
a king, and each daughter a queen. The seal of the borough of 
Grimsby to this day connects the town with the legend by 
showing a bold figure of Grim, with his defending sword over a 
small figure of the royal Havelok and his defending shield over 
a small figure of the royal Goldeburgh. From old time to this 
day, the boundary stone between Grimsby and Wellow has been 
called Havelok Stone, and Grimsby also contains an old Havelok 
Street. 

To nearly the same date belongs A Fragment 071 Popular 
Science, which colours with religious thought an attempt to 
diffuse knowledge of some facts in astronomy, meteorology, 
physical geography, and physiology. A Metrical Version of 
the Psalms into English was another of the productions of this 
time. It is known as the Northumbrian Psalter. Luxury of 
the monks was attacked with satire in an English poem of the 
Land of Cockaygne (named from Coquina, a kitchen), a form of 
satire current in many parts of Europe, which told of a region 
free from trouble, where the rivers ran with oil, milk, wine, and 
honey; wherein the white and grey monks had an abbey of 
which the walls were built of pasties, which was paved with 
cakes and had puddings for pinnacles. Geese there flew about 
roasted, crying " Geese, all hot ! " and the monks — as the song 
went on, it did not spare them. To the close of the reign of 
Edward I. belongs also a set of moralized proverbs, called the 
Proverbs of He?idying, in a Southern English dialect. Each 
proverb forms an appendix to a six-syllabled rhyming stanza, 
with the refrain added, " Quoth Hendying." 



92 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1272 

39. Less homely philosophy is represented by the writings of 
Duns Scotus and William Occam. Duns Scotus was the 
elder of the two. He died in 1308, and his work falls wholly 
within the period of Edward I.'s reign. Occam survived him 
nearly forty years. John Duns, called Scotus, and by the 
Parisians the Subtle Doctor, was, like Roger Bacon, a Franciscan 
friar. He was first educated by the Franciscans of Newcastle, 
who sent him to Oxford. There he first studied, and then 
taught, for three years, opposing the doctrines of Thomas 
Aquinas with a success that is said (fabulously) to have attracted 
to Oxford 30,000 students. The Franciscans then sent Duns to 
Paris, where he took the degree of Doctor. In 1307 he had 
charge of the Theological School at Toulouse — less liberal than 
that of Paris — and there he sustained, with two hundred argu- 
ments, the Immaculate Conception. In 1308 Duns Scotus died. 
The followers of Thomas Aquinas, who called themselves 
Thomists, called the followers of Duns Scotus Scotists, or, with 
a contemptuous application of their chief's name, Dunces. 
Thomas Aquinas held that the faculties were distinguished, not 
only from each other, but from . the essence of the mind, really 
and not nominally. Duns Scotus' denied! all real difference 
either between the several faculties or between the faculties 
and the mind, allowing only a nominal distinction between 
them. 

William Occam was a pupil of Duns Scotus, and also a 
Franciscan. As his master was called the Subtle, so he was 
called the Invincible Doctor, and he carried on, with a broader 
spirit of philosophy, the war of the Nominalists against the 
Realists. The doctrine of Scotus and Occam is that which has 
prevailed in the latter ages of philosophy. Occam especially 
distinguished himself by the practical good sense which he 
brought into acute discussions of logic and metaphysics, and 
those studies owed much of their safe advancement in his day 
to contact with the English character. Occam's philosophy was 
not all speculative. While he attacked powerfully the despotism 
of mere dogmas, and encouraged each thinker to individual 
inquiry, he gave a workaday turn to his philosophy by boldly 
arguing against the domination of the Pope in temporal affairs. 
He was persecuted, but he never flinched ; and he died firm to 
his sense of truth, at Munich, in 1347. 

40. We have passed with Occam from the reign of Edward I. 
through that of Edward II. (1 307-1 327), and shall do the same 



toa.d. 1338.] ROBERT OF BRUNNE. 93 

when speaking of Robert of Brunne, whose Handlynge Synne, 
written soon after the year 1300, is the last book of Edward I.'s 
time that has yet to be described. Robert Mannyng, of Brunne, 
now Bourn, seven or eight miles from Market Deeping, in 
Lincolnshire, was a canon of the Gilbertine order, who, from 
1288 to 1303, professed in the priory of Sempringham, where 
nuns and monks fulfilled in one house a common vow. After- 
wards he was removed to other Lincolnshire priories of the 
same order at Brimwake and Sixhill. "Handlynge Synne'Ms 
his translation of the French words, " Manuel des Peche's," 
forming the title of a book in French verse ascribed to Bishop 
Grosseteste, but really written in French by another Englishman, 
William of Waddington, a Yorkshire town two or three miles 
from Clitheroe. Of this book Robert of Brunne made a free 
amplified translation into English verse for the edification of 
the common people at their games and festivals. He omitted 
what he thought dull in his original, and added new stories ; the 
purpose of the work being to give religious instruction in the 
form of moral anecdotes or tales on the subject of the Ten 
Commandments, the seven deadly sins, sacrilege, the seven 
sacraments, and the twelve graces of thrift. Some years 
afterwards, between 1327 and 1338, Robert of Brunne, then 
living in the house of Sixhill, made, at the request of his prior, 
Robert of Malton, a popular translation into English verse of 
the French rhymning Chronicle of Peter Langtoft. It was 
begun at the time of the death of Edward II., written in the first 
years of Edward III., and designed, like the " Handlynge 
Synne," for wholesome recreation of the people at their merry 
meetings, because it became all Englishmen to know the 
history of their own land. 

If it be added that at this time, and throughout the fourteenth 
century, there was a continual reproduction in English verse of 
the most famous among the French Metrical .Romances, we may 
advance the narrative at once beyond the barren time of 
Edward II., with a glance at the earlier part of the career of 
Richard de Bury. 

41. Richard Aungervyle was born in the year 1281, at Bury 
St. Edmund's, in Suffolk, and has therefore usually been called, 
from his birthplace, Richard de Bury. His father was a 
Norman knight, who died in middle life, and left him to the care 
of his maternal^mcles, who sent him to continue his studies at 
Oxford. There he distinguished himself so much by his acquire- 



94 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1327 

ments that he was appointed tutor to Prince Edward, afterwards 
King Edward III. In that office Richard of Bury preserved at 
court, for some time, a discreet silence between conflicting 
parties, while he won the hearty goodwill of his pupil. In 1325, 
when Queen Isabel betook herself to Paris, Richard of Bury 
happened to be serving Edward II. as his treasurer, in Guienne. 
The time was now come for safe and energetic action in his 
pupil's interest. Richard Aungervyle at once gave up to the 
queen, for advancement of her cause, the money which he had 
collected in Guienne for Edward II. Edward's lieutenant in 
Guienne sent a troop of lancers to arrest the disloyal treasurer, 
who was pursued by them to the very gates of Paris, where he 
took refuge with the Franciscans. In September, 1326, Queen 
Isabel and her son landed in Suffolk with an army. Their 
declared object was the removal of the king's favourite Hugh de 
Spenser. Lancastrians and royalists, therefore, alike nocked to 
their standard ; but the result of the movement was the deposi- 
tion of King Edward II. by the next Parliament that met ; and 
thus, in January, 1327, the prince whom Richard Aungervyle 
had sedulously served, became, early in his fifteenth year, King 
Edward III. Eight months later, the deposed king was murdered 
in Berkeley Castle by two of his keepers, his son ruling at that 
time under the control of Isabel and Mortimer. Three years 
later, in 1330, Mortimer was impeached and hanged as a traitor, 
and Edward III. was king, free from dictation. 



CHAPTER IV. 

CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 

i. Edward III., aged fifteen, came to his throne in the year 
1327. Geoffrey Chaucer was born in the year 1328. Some 
think that the date of his birth should be placed about eleven 
years later, for a reason that will presently appear. Other men 
of great mark were Chaucer's contemporaries, differing little 
from him in age : John Gower, William Langlande, author of 
u The Vision of Piers Plowman," and John Wiclif. 

In their young days, Richard of Bury rose to the height of 
his good fortune, and produced a Latin treatise on the love of 



toa.d. 1344.] RICHARD OF BURY. 95 

"books and the right use of them, called Philobiblon, which is a 
pleasant prelude to the noble strain of literature that was about 
to follow. Whether Isabel and Mortimer ruled Edward, or 
Edward acted for himself, there was only favour and a full 
reward for his past services to be enjoyed by the king's old 
tutor who, at a critical time, had committed himself to the cause 
of queen and prince. He was at once made Steward of the 
Palace and Treasurer of the Wardrobe ; that office he resigned 
when in 1329 he was made Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. In 
1330, when his age was forty-nine, he was sent in great state as 
ambassador to Pope John XXII., at Avignon, and there met 
Petrarch, who was at that time twenty-six years old. Petrarch, 
knowing that Richard of Bury was a great scholar, who had col- 
lected the largest library in England, asked him for some infor- 
mation on the subject of the " farthest Thule," which Richard 
said that he thought he could find in one of his books when he 
got home, and promised to send, but, as Petrarch told one of 
his correspondents, he forgot to send it. He might well forget, 
for he was very busy. The pope had promised him the next 
bishopric vacant in England, and that proved to be the bishopric 
of Durham. Pope and king nominated Richard of Bury, but 
the Chapter resisted the pope's interference, and elected a very 
fit man from among themselves. The king was determined, 
and Richard of Bury, forced upon Durham as its bishop, 
was consecrated in December, 1333. Not long before this he 
had been appointed Treasurer of the Kingdom, and not 
many months later he was made Lord Chancellor. He was 
employed afterwards by the king as his ambassador, that he 
might use his wit in carrying out the peaceful policy that he 
advised. His wealth and influence were very great, and he 
made generous use of them. In politics his voice v/as on the 
side of peace and goodwill. When his desires for peace were 
frustrated, he closed his career as a statesman. In his diocese 
he was a most liberal friend to the poor. As a scholar he was 
the friend of all who sought knowledge, and gave to all true 
students who asked for it — with his hospitality while they were 
studying at Durham — free access to that valuable library which 
it had been the chief pleasure of his life to collect. He had 
used his private fortune and his influence in Church and State 
as a collector of books, applying to them the counsel of Solomon, 
" Buy wisdom, and sell it not." Travelling friars searched for 
him among the book chests of foreign monasteries. Suitors in 



96 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1344 

Chancery knew that the gift of a rare volume would induce the 
Chancellor, not to pervert justice but to expedite the hearing of 
their suits. The books, collected with enthusiasm, were not 
treasured as a miser's hoard. When he withdrew from participa- 
tion in the too warlike policy of Edward III., Richard de Bury, 
confining himself to the duties of his diocese, lived retired among 
his beloved parchments, still drawing to himself as chaplains 
and companions the most learned English scholars of his time. 
To be his chaplain, and by scholarship to win the household 
affection of a man so influential with the king, was a step to 
promotion sure enough to satisfy ambitious minds ; while life 
with Richard Aungervyle housed the scholar among books, and 
gave him hourly access to the best library in England. " It is 
to be considered," said this Bishop of Durham, in his Latin 
Philobiblon, written when Geoffrey Chaucer was sixteen years 
old, "what convenience of teaching is in books — how easily, 
how secretly, how safely in books we bear, without shame, the 
poverty of human ignorance. These are masters who instruct 
us without rod and cane, without words and wrath, and for no 
clothes or money. If you approach them they are not asleep ; 
if you question them they are not secret ; if you go astray they 
do not grumble at you ; they know not how to laugh if you are 
ignorant. O books, ye only are liberal and free who pay tribute 
to all who ask it, and enfranchise all who serve you faithfully !'' 
In his Philobiblon, Richard de Bury enforced the right spirit of 
study and right care of books, and it is noticeable that, orthodox 
bishop as he was, no book of the time spoke more severely than 
his of the degradation of the clergy, of the sensuality and igno- 
rance of monks and friars. The main object of Richard de 
Bury's work was practical. He was within a year of his death 
when he wrote it, and he desired not only to justify his life-long 
enthusiasm as a book collector, but to make the treasures which 
he had held in his lifetime as a trust for the benefit of all good 
scholarship in England, useful after his death for ever. 
Philobiblon ended, therefore, with a plan for the bequest of his 
books to Oxford on conditions that were to secure their per- 
petual usefulness, not merely to the particular hall which he 
proposed to endow in association with his library, but to the 
whole University. He did accordingly endow a hall, which the 
monks of Durham had begun to build in the north suburbs of 
Oxford, and did leave to it his famous library. Aungervyle's 
library remained at Durham College for the use of the university 



to a.d. 1349.3 THOMAS BRADWARDINE. 97 

until that college was dissolved in the time of Henry VIII. 
Some of the books then went to Duke Humphrey's library, and 
some to Balliol College ; some went to Dr. George Owen, the 
king's physician, when he and William Martyn obtained the site of 
Durham College — afterwards used for the foundation of Trinity 
College — from King Edward VI. 

2. Among the men of mark who passed through Richard of 
Bury's house as chaplains, the most famous were Thomas 
Bradwardine and Robert Holcot. 

Thomas Bradwardine, of an old family named after a 
village on the Wye still called Bredwardine, was born either at 
Chichester, or at Hartfield, in the diocese of Chichester, about 
the year 1290. He graduated from Merton College, and became 
afterwards Divinity Professor, and Chancellor of the University 
of Oxford. He was already chancellor of his university when he 
lived as chaplain and friend with Richard Aungervyle, Bishop 
of Durham. Through his friend's influence he became chaplain 
and confessor to Edward III., whom he attended during his 
wars in France. There the uncouth scholar, whose clumsiness 
of manner was a jest to the pope's nephew at Avignon, would 
address, as priest and patriot, the English army on the eve pf 
battle. The king annulled the election when Bradwardine was' 
first chosen archbishop by the monks of Canterbury, saying 
that he " could ill spare so worthy a man, and never could see 
that he wished himself to be spared." But very soon the see fell 
vacant a second time, and then, in the year 1349, when Chaucer's 
age was twenty-one, Bradwardine was aeain elected. This 
time the office was accepted, and Bradwardine came to Eng- 
land, where, forty days after his consecration, and before he was 
enthroned, he died of the Great Plague, then traversing Europe. 
At Oxford Bradwardine had written on speculative geometry 
and arithmetic, on proportions of velocities, and had formed a 
rather thick volume of astronomical tables. But his great work 
was founded on University lectures against the Pelagian 
heresy, written later in life, and this was his De Causa Dei — 
" On the Cause of God against Pelagius," in which he treated 
theological questions mathematically, and was considered to 
have produced a masterpiece of doctrinal argument. As the 
book is now printed, it forms a massive folio of 876 closely- 
filled pages. Bradwardine thus earned from the pope the title 
of the Profound Doctor, and from Chaucer the allusion in his 
Nun's Priest's Tale : 

H 



gS 4 FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1300 

" For I ne cannot bolt it to the bran 
As can the holy Doctor Augustin, 
Or Boece, or the Bishop Bradwardin." 

Robert Holcot, who was also one of Richard of Bury's 
chaplains, also was among the victims of the Plague in 1349, 
He was born and educated at Northampton, became a Domini- 
can, taught theology at Oxford, and, when he died, was general 
of the order of the Austin Friars. He wrote many volumes. 
In those on scholastic philosophy he followed Duns Scotus 
and William Occam as a defender of Nominalism, and he 
contributed to mediaeval theology a famous work in four 
books, Super Sententias (On Opinions), in which he undertakes 
to answer a series of questions upon points of faith. Holcot 
also wrote while Chaucer, a bright student, was growing into 
manhood. 

Another of Richard de Bury's chaplains was Walter 
Burley, who produced a library of treatises, was an expert 
scholar m Aristotle, and, like Holcot, maintained the more 
healthy philosophy of what might be called the English school 
against the realists. 

3. John of Gaddesden, in Hertfordshire, had been phy- 
sician to Edward III. when he was prince, and when he had 
Richard of Bury for his tutor. In the reign of Edward III. he 
was the king's physician ; and he was the first Englishman who 
held that office. He wrote a famous compilation of the whole 
mediaeval practice of physic, chiefly as derived from the 
Arabians by himself and by Gilbertus Anglicus and others of 
his predecessors, with additions from his own experience. He 
called his book the "English Rose" — Rosa Anglica — because a 
treatise of medicine published some years before in France had 
been called the Lily. His book is shrewd, learned, and amusing 
to the moderns, who laugh at such a remedy for epilepsy as a 
boar's bladder boiled, mistletoe, and a cuckoo. 

4. Monastic chroniclers were active still during the reign of 
Edward III. John of Trokelowe wrote, very early in this 
reign, some valuable An?ials of the reign of Edward II. from 
1307 to 1323. From that date they were continued by Henry 
of Blaneford with a fragment that came to an abrupt end in 
the year 1324. Some years later Robert of Avesbury, who 
kept the Register of the Archbishop's Court at Canterbury, 
began a history, De Mirabilibus Gcstis Edwardi III. (Of the 
Admirable Deeds of King Edward III.), which carried from the 



toa.d. i 3 6i.] CHRONICLERS. RALPH HIGDEN. gg 

birth of Edward III. in 131 3 to 1356 a short detail of public 
events, with simple transcripts of original documents and 
extracts from letters. 

John of Fordun, a village in Kincardine, was a patriotic 
Scot, secular priest and chaplain of the cathedral of Aberdeen. 
He had not graduated in the schools. In the reign of 
Edward III. John of Fordun wrote a Scotichronicon, or 
Chronicle of Scotland. It began with Shem, Ham, Japheth, 
and the origin of the Scots, and was brought down to the 
year 1360, in a manner that in some degree forsook the 
method of monastic annals, and made an approach to a formal 
history. 

In England Ralph Higden finished his Polychronicon 
about the year 1361 ; and at the close of the reign of Edward III. 
William Thorn was at work on a Latin Chronicle of Canter- 
bury Abbey. 

5. Ralph Higden has interest for us not only as a 
chronicler. His name has been variously spelt. Ranulphus or 
Ralph, appears sometimes as Radulphus or Randall; and 
Higden, by transition from Higgeden, has become Higgened or 
Higgenet, if the common belief be true that Ralph Higden, who 
wrote in his later years the " Polychronicon," is the Randall Hig- 
genet who in his earlier days wrote the Chester miracle plays. 
Ralph Higden became a Benedictine monk of St. Werburgh in 
Chester about the year 1299, and he is believed to be the Randall 
Higgenet of the same abbey, of whom there was a tradition that 
he thrice visited Rome to get the Pope's leave for the acting of 
his miracle-plays at Chester in the English tongue. Leave 
having been obtained, the plays were said, in a note added at 
the end of the sixteenth century to a MS. copy of the proclama- 
tion of them, to have been first acted at Chester in the mayoralty 
of Sir John Arnway (1327 — 1328), which would be about the date 
of Chaucer's birth. Higden's Polychronicon, in seven books, 
was so called, he says, because it gave the chronicle of many 
times. Its first book described the countries of the known 
world, especially Britain ; its second book gave the history of 
the World from the Creation to Nebuchadnezzar ; the next book 
closed with the birth of Christ ; the fourth book carried on the 
chronicle to the arrival of the Saxons in England ; the fifth pro- 
ceeded to the invasion oi the Danes ; the sixth to the Norman 
Conquest; and the seventh to Higden's own time in the reign of 
Edward III., his latest date being the year 1342. He died in 

H 2 



IOO A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1300 

1363, and long after his death the " Polychronicon" stood in 
high credit as a sketch of universal history, with special reference 
to England. 

Although not beyond doubt, it is very likely that the date 
assigned to the first acting at Chester of MIRACLE PLAYS in 
English is right, and that Ralph Higden was the author of the 
series. Since the days of Stephen and Henry II. religious 
entertainments of this form had been growing in popularity. A 
twelfth-century MS., found in the town library of Tours, contains 
three Anglo-Norman miracle-plays, as old, or nearly as old, as 
the plays of Hilarius, already described (ch. hi. § 9). The stage 
directions illustrate the first removal of the acting from the in- 
side to the outside of the church. This must soon have become 
necessary, if it were only for accommodation of the increasing 
number of spectators. For the acting of those plays of which 
a MS. was found at Tours, scaffolding was built over the steps 
of the church, and the audience occupied the square in front. 
Out of the heaven of the church, Figura — God — passed to Adam 
in Paradise, upon a stage level with the highest steps of the 
church door. From that Paradise Adam and Eve were driven 
down a few steps to the lower stage that represented Earth. 
Below this, nearest to the spectators, was hell, an enclosed place 
in which cries were made, chains were rattled, and out of which 
smoke came ; out of which also men and boys dressed as devils 
came by a door opening into a free space between the scaffold- 
ing and the semicircle of the front row of spectators. They 
were also directed now and then to go among the people, and 
passed round by them sometimes to one of the upper platforms. 
The original connection of these plays with the Church service 
was represented by the hymns of choristers. 

The next step in the development of the miracle-play was 
hastened by the complaint that the crowds who came to witness 
the performance, on an outside scaffolding, attached to the 
church, trampled the graves in the churchyards. Decrees were 
made to prevent this desecration of the graves, and the advance 
probably was rapid to the setting up of detached scaffolding for 
the performance of the plays — still by the clergy, choristers and 
parish clerks — upon unconsecrated ground. 

In London the parish clerks had formed themselves into a 
harmonic guild, chartered by Henry III. in 1233, and theii 
music was sought at the funerals and entertainments of the 
great. As miracle-plays increased in popularity, the parish 



toa.d. 1378.] MIRACLE PLAYS. IOI 

clerks occupied themselves much with the acting of them. 
Chaucer's jolly Absalom, of whom we are told that 

" Sometimes to shew his lightness and maistrie 
He playeth Herod on a scaffold high," 

was a parish clerk. 

The strongest impulse to a regular participation of the laity 
in the production of these plays seems to have been given by 
the Church when, in 1264, Pope Urban IV. founded, and in 
131 1 Clement V. firmly established, the festival of Corpus 
Christi in honour of the consecrated Host. This was the one 
festival of the Church wherein laity and clergy walked together. 
The guilds of a town contributed their pictures, images, and 
living representatives of Scripture characters to the procession, 
and the day was one of common festival. From the parade of 
persons dressed to represent the Scripture characters, it was an 
easy step to their use in the dramatic presentation of a sacred 
story. The festival of Corpus Christi, always held on the first 
Thursday after Trinity Sunday, which is eight weeks after 
Easter, was a holiday of brightest summer time. It came but a 
fortnight after the older and yet more popular festivities of 
Whitsuntide, and Whitsuntide and Corpus Christi soon were 
established as customary times for the out-of-door performance 
of mysteries or, as we called them, miracle-plays, by guilds of 
towns. 

But, even in Chaucer's lifetime, such plays were still being 
acted by the clergy." Both clergy and laity were actors in the 
middle of the thirteenth century, when in that " Manuel des 
Pe'ches," which in the time of Chaucer's childhood Robert of 
Brunne translated as " The Handlyng Synne," it was declared 
to be sin in the clergy to assist at any other plays than those 
which belonged to the Liturgy and were acted within the church 
at Easter and Christmas. This author especially condemned 
participation by the clergy in plays acted in churchyards, streets, 
or green places. A century later, in 1378, when Chaucer was 
fifty years old, the choristers of St. Paul's Cathedral petitioned 
Richard II. to prohibit the acting of the History of the Old 
Testament, to the great prejudice of the clergy of the Church, 
who had spent considerable sums for a public representation of 
Old Testament plays at the ensuing Christmas. 

In the hands of the English guilds — which stood for the rising 
middle classes of the people — miracle-plays received a develop- 
ment peculiar to this country. Instead of short sequences of 



IC2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1300 

three or four plays, complete sets were produced, and they told 
what were held to be the essential parts of the Scripture story 
from the Creation of Man to the Day of judgment. The num- 
ber in each set may have corresponded to the number of guilds 
in the town for which it was originally written. Each guild was 
entrusted permanently with the due mounting and acting of one 
play in the set. Thus, at Chester, the tanners played " The 
Fall of Lucifer ;" the drapers played " The Creation and Fall, 
and the Death of Abel ;" "The Story of Noah's Flood" was 
played by the water leaders and the drawers of Dee. Among 
the possessions of each guild were the properties for its miracle- 
play, carefully to be kept in repair, and renewed when necessary. 
Actors rehearsed carefully, and were paid according to the length 
of their parts. They wore masks, or had their faces painted in 
accordance with the characters they undertook. The player of 
the devil wore wings and a closely-fitting leather dress, trimmed 
with feathers and hair, and ending in claws over the hands and 
feet. All the other actors wore gloves, or had sleeves continued 
into hands. The souls of the saved in the day of judgment wore 
white leather ; the others, whose faces were blacked, wore a 
linen dress suggestive of fire, with black, yellow, and red. Thus 
we have, among the miscellaneous items in old books of the 
Coventry guilds, a charge for souls' coats ; one for a link to set 
the world on fire ; and " paid to Crowe for making of three 
worlds, three shillings." The stage furniture was as handsome 
in thrones and other properties as each company could make it. 
They gilded what they could. Hell mouth, a monstrous head 
of a whale, its old emblem (chap. ii. § 12), was painted on 
linen with open jaws — sometimes jaws that opened and shut, 
two men working them — and a fire lighted where it would give 
the appearance of a breath of flames. By this way the fiends 
came up and down. 

The acting of one of these great sequences of plays usually 
took three days, but was not limited to three. In 1409, in the 
reign of Henry IV., the parish clerks played at Skinner's Well, 
in Islington, for eight days, " matter from the Creation of the 
World." In this country the taste for miracle-plays was blended 
with the old desire to diffuse, as far as possible, a knowledge ol 
religious truth ; and therefore the sets of miracle-plays, as acted 
by our town guilds, placed in the streets, as completely as might 
be, a living picture Bible before the eyes of all the people. Such 
sequences of plays were acted in London, Dublin, York, New- 



to a. d. i 5 3o. J THE CO VENTR Y PLA VS. 1 03 

castle, Lancaster, Preston ; Kendal, Wakefield, Chester, Coventry, 
and elsewhere. The set used in one town might be adopted by 
another. Many sets must have been lost, but three remain to 
show how thoroughly the English people sought to use the 
miracle-play for the advancement of right knowledge. These 
three are known as the Chester, Wakefield, and Coventry plays. 
Those which were acted at Wakefield have been called the 
''Towneley" Mysteries, because the sole existing MS. of them 
belonged to the Towneley family. 

The Chester Plays were a series of twenty-four, written, as 
we have seen, by a monk of St. Werburgh's in Chester, probably 
Ralph Higden, and first acted in 1327 or 1328. 

There is some reason to think that the Wakefield Plays were 
produced by a monk of the cell of Augustinian canons at Wood- 
kirk, four miles north of Wakefield, and there is clear evidence 
that they were written to be acted by the Wakefield guilds. 
There are thirty-two plays in the Wakefield series, perhaps not 
all from the same hand, but most of them distinguished among 
other plays of the kind by unusual ability ; there is breadth of 
humour where that was called for, and in other places a true 
natural pathos. 

The Coventry Plays are forty-two in number, the work of a 
duller mind. Of the three sets they are the least interesting, 
and there is reason to doubt the statement, first made in the 
seventeenth century by a librarian on a fly-leaf of the MS., that 
these were the plays acted at Coventry. The guilds of Coventry 
did act plays ; and it is to Coventry that we are indebted for 
much valuable information on the details of the acting from the 
entries still preserved in its guilds' books. But this evidence 
proves also that the plays acted by the guilds of Coventry were 
not those which we now call Coventry mysteries. A religious 
house at Coventry may possibly have produced a second set 
Wherever written, they came, no doubt, from a house dedicated 
to the Virgin Mary; for in the pains taken to give prominence 
to the Virgin we find the most characteristic feature of this 
series of plays. 

The spectator who had taken his place betimes — by six 
o'clock in the morning — at a window or upon a scaffolding, 
to see the miracle-plays, would have first the great decorated 
stage upon six wheels, which was to present the Creation, rolled 
before him. He would receive from that such living impression 
as it was meant to convey, and when it rolled, away to begin the 



104 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. i 3 oo 

series at some other part of the town before another concourse 
of spectators, the next pageant would follow to present to him 
the story of the death of Abel. That would pass, and then 
would come a lively presentment of the story of the Flood. 
Sometimes more than one stage was necessary to the acting of a 
play. The Old Testament series would be founded on those 
parts of Scripture which told of the relations between God and 
man, and pointed to the Saviour. The New Testament series 
would represent the life of Christ, still showing what the Church 
taught to be man's relation to the world to come, and closing 
with the Day of Judgment. The acting was not confined to the 
stages, but in some places blended with the real life of the town. 
The Magi rode in through the streets, sought Herod on his 
throne, and addressed him from their horses ; then rode on and 
found the infant Christ. At another time a procession travelled 
through the streets leading the Lord before the judgment seat of 
Pilate. Everything that was a part of Bible story was presented 
and received with deep religious feeling. The coarseness of 
coarse men, slayers of the Innocents, tormentors, and execu- 
tioners, was realised in a way that — whatever we may now think 
of it— had no comic effect upon spectators. If in France the 
manner of acting which brought those who performed devils' 
parts into too constant and familiar relations with the audience 
deprived them of terror, it was not so in England. Our evil 
spirits came only when there was fit occasion, as tempters, as 
bringers of evil dreams, as the possessors of lost souls. But 
since the strain of deep and serious attention for three long 
successive days could not be borne by any human audience, 
places of relaxation and laughter were provided, always from 
material that lay outside the Bible story. Thus Cain might 
have a comic man ; Noah's obstinate wife was an accepted 
comic character ; and between the .Old Testament and New 
Testament sections of the series there was a distinctly comic 
interlude, the Shepherd's Play. 

The Shepherds? Play perhaps arose out of a custom, which 
certainly existed in the Netherlands, of blending the perform- 
ance of a great mystery in the church with the daily life of the 
people in the world outside. On Good Friday the scenes of the 
Passion were represented in the church ; on Easter day, the 
Resurrection : on the intervening Saturday, there came, in the 
Netherlands, with the throng of the fair that gathered about 
every great Church celebration, criers who sold salves to women 



TOA.D. is8o.] THE SHEPHERDS' PLAY. I05 

dressed as the three Marys ; while, always with some ultimate 
reference to the sacred time, there were acted in the open 
market, peasant comedies, with thumping and abuse. So, when 
the Nativity was acted in church on Christmas morning, the 
Shepherds' Plays may have been at their beginning acted out of 
doors on Christmas Eve. The first notion of the Shepherds' 
Play was a homely realisation of the record that " there were in 
the same country, shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch 
over their flocks by night." Simple shepherds were represented 
first, talking together, and their talk was sometimes of the hard- 
ships of the poor, of wrongs to be righted ; then came one 
who was especially the comic shepherd, and jesting began, with 
wrestling or some other rough country sport. After that, each 
would bring out his supper. They were shepherds of the same 
country with the spectators of the play. In the Chester play 
they spoke of eating meat with Lancashire bannocks, and of 
drinking Alton ale. Jest having been made over the rude feast, 
there floated through the air, from concealed choristers, the song 
of the angels. At first the shepherds were still in their jesting 
mood, and mimicked the singing ; then they became filled with 
religious awe, went with their rustic gifts to the stable in which 
the infant lay, and, after they had made their offerings, rose up , 
exalted into saints. In the Wakefield series there are two Shep- 
herds' Plays, so that the actors might take either. In one of 
them the comic shepherd is a sheep-stealer, and an incident 
which must have excited roars of laughter from a rough and hearty 
Yorkshire audience, is so cleverly dramatised, that, apart from 
the religious close which can be completely separated from it, 
this Wakefield Shepherds' Play may justly be accounted the 
first English farce. Nevertheless, as we shall find, the origin 
of the modern drama must not be traced to the miracle-play. 
There is no more than a distant cousinship between them. 
The miracle-plays, as thus adopted by the English people, 
remained part of the national life of England, not only through- 
out Chaucer's lifetime, but long afterwards. In Chaucer's time, 
even the Cornishmen had such plays written for them in the old 
Cymric of Cornwall ; and miracle-plays were still acted at 
Chester as late as the year 1577 ; at Coventry as late as 1580, 
when Shakespeare was sixteen years old, and the true drama 
was rising from another source. 

6. There will be little more to say of our home literature 
during the former half of the reign of Edward III., that is 



106 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1333 

during the boyhood and youth of Chaucer, when two North of 
England men, Laurence Minot, and Richard Rolle, of Hampole, 
have been included in the sketch. One wrote of war, the other 
of religion. 

Laurence Minot was a poet who in Northern English 
celebrated victories of Edward III. over the Scots and the 
French, from the battle of Halidon Hill, in July, 1333, to the 
capture of Guines Castle, in January, 1352.* His war-songs 
were linked together by connecting verses. When he had 
celebrated the defeat of the Scots at Halidon Hill, which caused 
the surrender of Berwick, he exulted in his second song over 
the avenging of Bannockburn ; then celebrated the king's expe- 
dition to Brabant, in 1338 ; proceeded to the first invasion of 
France ; the sea-fight of Sluys or of the Swyne ; the siege ot 
Tournai ; a song of triumph for the great battle of Crecy, in 
1346 ; songs of the siege of Calais, and of the battle of Neville's 
Cross (October, 1346), in which David King of the Scots was 
taken prisoner. Then followed his celebrations of victory at sea 
over the Spaniards in 1350, and lastly, of the taking of Guines 
Castle, in 1352, when Chaucer was twenty-four years old. 
Probably Minot died soon afterwards, as he did not sing of the 
memorable events of the next following years. He was our first 
national song writer, and used with ease a variety of rhyming 
measures, while he retained something of the old habit of 
alliteration. 

7. Richard Bolle, known also as the Hermit of Hampole, 
was born, about the year 1290, at Thornton in Yorkshire. He 
was sent to school, and from school to Oxford, by Thomas 
Neville, Archdeacon of Durham, and made great progress in 
theological studies. At the age of nineteen, mindful of the un- 

* New Style. — An Act of Parliament of the year 1752 introduced " New Style " 
by bringing the English reckoning of dates into conformity with that of countries 
which had adopted Pops Gregory XIIL's reform of the calendar, a reform first insti- 
tuted in 1582, and then at once adopted in France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Flanders, 
and Portugal. Protestant Germany did not accept this reformation by a pope till 1699 ; 
Protestant England held aloof till 1752. F>esides the rectificatii of the day of the 
month, which then was eleven days behind the reckoning in foreign countries, the 
Act of 1752 abolished the custom, begun in the twelfth century, and until then in use 
in England, not in Scotland, of reckoning the 25th of March as the first day of the 
legal year, while the 1st of January was, according to the popular reckoning by the 
Julian Calendar, accounted New Year's Day. Before 1752, therefore, any date in a 
public record or official document, falling in January or February, or in March, to 
the 24th inclusive, would be ascribed to the year preceding that in which we should 
now reckon it. Thus the capture of Guines Castle was dated January, 1351. I give 
all such dates according to the present way of reckoning. 



toa.d. 1352.] THE HERMIT OF HAMPOLE. 1 07 

certainty of life, and fearing the temptation to sin, he returned 
home, and one day told a beloved sister that he had a mighty 
desire towards two of her gowns, one white the other grey. 
Would she bring them to him the next day in a neighbouring 
wood, and bring with them a hood her father used in rainy 
weather ? When she did so, he took off his own clothes, put on 
his sister's white dress next his skin, drew over it the grey dress 
with its sleeves cut off, thrusting his arms through the armholes, 
hooded himself with his father's rain-hood, and having thus 
made himself look as much like a hermit as he could, ran away, 
while his sister cried, " My brother is mad!" He went then, 
so dressed, on the vigil of the Assumption, into a church, ana 
placed himself where the wife of a Sir John de Dalton used to 
pray. When Lady de Dalton came with her servants, she 
would not allow them to disturb the pious young man at his 
prayers. Her sons, who had studied at Oxford, told her who he 
was. Next day he assumed, unbidden, the dress of an assistant, 
and joined in the singing of the service ; after which, having 
obtained the benediction of the priest, he mounted the pulpit, 
and preached such a sermon that many wept over it and said 
they had never heard the like before. After mass, Sir John de 
Dalton invited him to dinner ; but he went, because of humility, 
into a poor old house at the gate of the manor, till he was urged 
by the knight's own sons to the dinner table. During dinner he 
maintained a profound silence ; but after dinner, Sir John, having 
talked with him privately, was satisfied of his sanity ; he there- 
fore furnished the enthusiast with such hermit's dress as he 
wished for, gave him a cell to live in, and provided for his daily 
sustenance. The Hermit of Hampole, thus set up in his chosen 
vocation, became, while Minot was singing the victories of 
Edward III., the busiest religious writer of his day, and con- 
tinued so till 1349, when he died, and was buried in the Cister- 
cian nunnery of Hampole, about four miles from Doncaster, near 
which he had set up his hermit's cell, and which after his death 
derived great profit from his reputation as a saint. He wrote 
many religious treatises in Latin and in English, and he turned 
the Psalms of David into English verse. A version of the 
Psalter into English had been made about nine years before, in 
1327, by William of Shoreham. Richard Rolle also ver- 
sified part of the book of Job, and produced a Northern English 
poem in seven books, and almost ten thousand lines, called The 
Pricke of Conscience (Stimulus Conscientise). Its seven books 



108 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 132S 

treat — 1. Of the Beginning of Man's Life. 2. Of the Unstable- 
ness of this World. 3. Of Death, and why Death is to be 
Dreaded. 4. Of Purgatory. 5. Of Doomsday. 6. Of the Pains 
of Hell. 7. Of the Joys of Heaven. The poem represents 
in the mind of an honest and religious monk that body of 
mediaeval doctrine against which, in some of its parts — and 
especially its claim for the pope or his delegates of power to 
trade in release from the pains of purgatory— the most vigorous 
protest of the English mind was already arising. 

8. To the year 1340, which is about the date of Hampole's 
" Pricke of Conscience," belongs a prose translation by Dan 
Michel of Northgate, into Kentish dialect, of a French treatise, 
" Le Somme des Vices et des Vertues," written in 1279 by Frere 
Lorens (Laurentius Gallus) for Philip II. of France. The 
English translation is entitled The Ayenbite (Again-bite, Re- 
morse) of Inwit (Conscience). It discusses the Ten Command- 
ments, the Creed, the seven deadly sins, how to learn to die, 
knowledge of good and evil, wit and clergy, the five senses, the 
seven petitions of the Paternoster, the seven gifts of the Holy 
Ghost, and other such subjects, with more doctrine and less 
anecdote than in the " Manuel des Peches " or " Handlynge 
Synne," which was a work of like intention. 

9. In the year of the death of Richard Rolle of Hampole, 1 349, 
John Wiclif was five-and-twenty years old, William Langland 
little younger, Geoffrey Chaucer about one-and-twenty, John 
Gower little older, and a famous Scottish poet of their day, John 
Barbour, was thirty-three years old, according to the earliest 
date assigned to his birth, nineteen according to the latest. It 
was then also seven-and-twenty years since Sir John Mandeville 
set out upon his adventures in the world. Young Chaucer had 
begun to sing when Mandeville, by nearly thirty years his senior, 
wrote the story of his travels. In the same year, 1349, Dante 
had been dead twenty-eight years, but the vigour of Italian 
literature was being maintained by Petrarch and Boccaccio, 
Petrarch then forty-five years old and Boccaccio six-and-thirty. 

Geoffrey Chaucer was probably the son of a Richard 
Chaucer, vintner, of London, who lived in the Vintry ward, and 
had a house and tavern in Royal Street, now College Hill, not 
far from the church of St. Mary Aldermary. In that church he 
was buried in 1349, when Geoffrey, if born in 1328, would have 
been twenty-one years old. Richard had a son John, who was 
also a vintner, and who may have been Geoffrey's elder brother. 



to a.d. 1350.] GEOFFREY CHA UCER. 109 

Chaucer's arms did not connect his family with any noble house. 
A perpendicular line divided the shield into halves, and it was 
crossed by a transverse bar. On one side of the middle line the 
bar was red on a white ground, on the other side white on a 
red ground. Thomas Fuller says that some wits had made 
Chaucer's arms to mean "the dashing of white and red wine 
(the parents of our ordinary claret), as nicking his father's pro- 
fession." Probably they were right. Arms were not granted to 
merchants until the reign of Henry VI. ; but long before that 
time wealthy merchants of the Middle Ages bore their trade-marks 
upon shields. The vintners, or wine-tunners, to whose body 
Richard Chaucer belonged, were in the days of Edward III. a 
prosperous body, merchant vintners of Gascoyne yielding to. 
London several mayors, one of whom, in 1359, feasted together 
at his house in the Vintry the four kings of England, France, 
Scotland, and Cyprus. 

The date usually assigned to Chaucer's birth, 1328, is 
inferred from the inscription on his monument in Westminster 
Abbey. This monument, an altar tomb under a Gothic canopy, 
was not erected until the year 1556, when Nicholas Brigham, a 
small poet who reverenced the genius of Chaucer, built it at his 
owft expense. But we know from Caxton that there was an 
earlier inscription on a table hanging on a pillar near the poet's 
burial-place ; and Brigham can hardly have done otherwise than 
repeat on his new tomb the old record that Chaucer died on the 
25th of October, 1400, and that his age was then seventy-two. 
This date is in harmony with what we know of Chaucer's life 
and writings. 

Chaucer's writings show him to have been a student to the 
last; we cannot therefore ascribe all his knowledge to the 
education he had as a youth. But his early writings show a 
range of culture that could have come only of a liberal edu- 
cation. There is no direct evidence that he studied at Oxford 
or Cambridge. If he went to either University, probably it was 
to Cambridge, for in his " Court of Love" he makes his 
Philogenet describe himself as "of Cambridge, clerk;" and in 
the opening of his Reve's tale he alludes familiarly to the 
brook, mill, and bridge, which were " at Trompington, not far 
fro Cantebrigge." But there are no such familiar references to 
Oxford in his verse, though it must not be forgotten that the 
poor scholar sketched with sympathetic touches in the Prologue 
to the " Canterbuiy Tales" was a clerk of Oxenforde. 



IIO A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1348 

Nothing trustworthy is known of Chaucer's occupation in the 
world during the first years of his manhood. He was a poet, 
we know, and perhaps while he was translating the famous 
"Roman de la Rose" (ch. iii. § 36)— he tells us himself that he 
was its translator — he may have been earning money in the 
Vintry ward. Chaucer read in the earlier part of his life the 
French literature then most in request, and by his translations 
earned a balade of compliment from Eustache Deschamps with 
the refrain ; ' Grant translateur, noble Geoffroi Chaucier." It is 
very likely that Chaucer worked at his translation of the 
Romaunt of the Rose when he was training himself in his voca- 
tion as a poet, and that he laid it aside as he felt more and more 
strongly the impulse towards independent song. He did not 
translate selections, but went straight on with the work till he 
abandoned it. Of the 4,070 lines which were the work of Guil- 
laume de Lorris, Chaucer gave, in 4,432 lines, a complete trans- 
lation into English verse, of the same metre, happily fitting 
English to the French, or now and then expanding the original 
thought in a version that is close without servility. Of the 
18,002 lines which were the work of Jean de Meung, Chaucer 
translated on as far as verse 5,169 of the whole poem fully, and 
even with slight amplification. There he left off, only append- 
ing one passage levelled against hypocrisy in friars, from a 
much later part of the work. A fellow-feeling with Jean de 
Meung may have caused young Chaucer to translate this in 
advance, while he was still labouring towards a complete ver- 
sion of one of 'the most famous poems in the fashionable 
literature of his time. The fashionable taste for French court 
poetry is reflected from the greater part of the verse written by 
Chaucer in his early manhood. But it is with the higher 
strain of the Italian literature that his genius feels its affinity 
as he attains full strength. Every young poet must acquire 
the mechanism of his art by imitation, and the fashion among 
poets in his younger days caused Chaucer to learn his art, in 
the first instance, as an imitator of the trouveres. Before 
the age of forty he had perhaps not fully outgrown the influ- 
ences of his early training. But when he had passed the age 
of forty Chaucer's writing shows, with the best qualities of his 
own independent genius, that where he looked abroad at all 
for a quickening influence it was not to France, but to the 
great Italian writers, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. 

Besides the " Romaunt of the Rose," we may probably place 



toa.d. I354-] THE COURT OF LOVE. Ill 

Chaucer's Translation of Boethius, who had been translated 450 
years earlier by King Alfred (ch. ii. § 18), as a work of his youth. 
It reads like a student's exercise ; and it is very remarkable that 
the interspersed "metra" of the original did not tempt the 
young poet to exercise his skill in verse. 

Chaucer's first original work was probably The Court of 
Love, a poem which so clearly derives its allegorical form 
from a study of the " Roman de la Rose," that it might most 
naturally have come into the mind of Chaucer while he was 
at work on his translation of that poem. But, through forms 
which he was to outgrow, Chaucer already spoke like himself. 
In this " Court of Love" he struck the key-note of his future 
harmonies. The most characteristic feature of his poetry at 
once appears in it. The author is represented as " Philogenet, 
of Cambridge, clerk," ashamed to think that he is eighteen years 
old and has not yet paid service at the Court of Love. He 
journeys thither, and what does he find? Venus, of course, is 
the goddess worshipped. But under her, the mythical Admetus 
and Alcestis, through whom marriage was idealized, are King 
and Queen of Love, and they live in a castle painted within and 
without with daisies. This reading of love, and the use of the 
daisy as its type, is Chaucer's own, repeated sometimes in form, 
and in spirit pervading all the work of his life. For Chaucer 
alone in his time felt the whole beauty of womanhood, and felt 
it most in its most perfect type, in wifehood with the modest 
graces of the daisy, with its soothing virtues, and its power of 
healing inward wounds. Physicians in his day ascribed such 
power to the plant which, by Heaven's special blessing, was 
made common to all, the daisy, outward emblem also of 
the true and pure wife in its heart of gold and its white 
crown of innocence. That is what Chaucer meant when 
he told in later writing of his reverence for the daisy, and 
identified Alcestis with it. Why Alcestis? The old fable 
said that Admetus was the son of Pheres, founder of Pheras, 
and one of those who took part in the Calydonian boar hunt 
and the Argonautic expedition. He sought marriage with 
Alcestis, daughter of Pelias, and was accepted by her father on 
condition that he came to claim her in a chariot drawn by lions 
and boars. This he did by help of Apollo. But, because he 
forgot to sacrifice to Diana, he found in his bridal chamber 
snakes rolled in a lump. Apollo appeased the goddess, and also 
obtained of the Fates deliverance from death for his friend 



112 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a. d. 1328 

Admetus if, when the last hour came, his father, mother, or wife 
would die for him. This Alcestis did ; but she was brought 
back from the dead by Hercules. In this fable, the lions and 
boars, which were to be obedient to the rein before the bride 
was claimed, meant passions to be tamed ; and the next incident 
was of like significance, the story being, to its close in an ideal 
of wifely devotion, throughout a mythical upholding of true 
marriage. In his " Court of Love" Chaucer worked upon the 
lines of the French poets, introduced even a code distinctly 
founded upon that of the Courts of Love, which were in his time 
still popular in France (ch. iii. § 36); but it was not in him to 
adopt the playful fiction of these Courts. He had what we 
might now call his own English sense of the domestic side of 
their one courtly theme, not represented even by the English 
literature of his day ; and at once he became, alone in his own 
time, and more distinctively than any who followed him, the 
reverencer of the daisy as he understood his flower, the poet of 
a true and perfect womanhood. 

Of less interest, but still important, is another point to be 
noted in Chaucer's Court of Love. It includes stanzas trans- 
lated from one of those poems with which Boccaccio was then 
delighting every educated reader of Italian who could buy or 
borrow copies. It is also in the peculiar seven-lined stanza 
which should be called Chaucer's stanza, since, probably in the 
course of such translation, it was evidently formed by him out 
of the octave rhyme which Boccaccio was then first introducing 
into literature. 

10. We are now passing gradually from that first of the FOUR 
Periods of English Literature which may be called, from 
its most obvious external character, the Period of the Formation 
of the Language ; and we enter gradually upon a second, which 
we may call the Period of Italian Influence. 

The spirit of our literature remains the same from first to 
last. But in outward fashion — in costume of thought as of 
bodies — there are marked variations in the course of time. As 
a student of the history of dress could tell, sometimes very exactly, 
from the clothes worn by the figure in a portrait when the 
person lived who was there painted, so the student of the history 
of literature learns to tell, sometimes very exactly, from the dress 
worn by a thought — that is to say, from the fashion of its utter- 
ance — at what time it was spoken. If a book be written in Early 
English, which we can interpret only after special study, we 



toa.d. 1374-1 PETRARCH. 113 

have, of course, an outward sign that it was written during the 
Period of the Formation of the Language. Minuter study of the 
language in its early stages will make it possible to infer from 
the language of the book, often with great accuracy, at what 
date, and even in what part of England, it was written. In 
Chaucer's time the English of our towns had approached so 
closely to the modern form that, with slight help from a 
glossary, poems of his maybe widely enjoyed by those who 
have no critical knowledge of the English of the fourteenth 
century; but English of the rural districts, older in form 
although the same in date, they find it much less easy to under- 
stand. We cannot say that we have passed out of the Period of 
the Formation of the Language at the time when a new outward 
characteristic, afterwards to become the one most prominent, is 
beginning to appear. At first, in the time of Chaucer, we see 
this only as an influence of the best writers of Italy upon the 
best writers in England. 

With Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio began the widespread 
influence of Italy over the forms of literature almost throughout 
Europe. When Chaucer was born, in 1328, Dante (ch. iii. § 36) 
had been dead seven years, but Petrarch and Boccaccio were 
then living — one a young man and the other a boy — each with 
his work before him. At that date Petrarch was twenty-four 
years old, Boccaccio fifteen. They were Chaucer's contempo- 
raries, but were older men, the work of whose manhood came 
with the fresh impulse of a new delight upon the mind of 
Chaucer in his youth. Although Boccaccio was nine years 
younger than Petrarch, he survived him but a year, Petrarch 
dying in 1374, Boccaccio in 1375, when Chaucer was within 
three or four years of fifty. % 

11. Francis Petrarch^ born at Arezzo, was, like Dante, of 
the Florentine Republic. He was born in a time of party strife, 
which caused his family to settle, with many other Italians, at 
Avignon, when he was nine years old, and about four years after 
a papal court had been established there. Young Petrarch 
studied old Latin authors with the patriotic sense that they were 
the forefathers of his countrymen. From the age of fourteen to 
the age of eighteen he was at Montpellier to study law, but he 
neglected law and gave his heart to the old Latins, taking, then 
and always, a particular delight in collecting manuscripts of 
their works. From the age of eighteen to the age of twenty-one 
or twenty-two Petrarch was studying law at Bologna. Then 

I 



TT4 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1328 

his father died, and he returned to Avignon. His mother died 
soon afterwards, and both Francis and his brother Gerard were 
robbed of their inheritance by a dishonest executor. From 
about this time — from the age of twenty-three — Petrarch began 
to write sonnets to Laura. For means of livelihood he was 
obliged to look to the patronage that would give him a benefice 
in the Church, and this he found in the friendship of a young 
member of the powerful Colonna family who had been his 
fellow-student at Bologna. His friend, young as he was, came 
as a bishop, to Avignon ; Petrarch and he became comrades 
again, and through him Petrarch obtained the help he needed. 
He travelled. When he was thirty-one his friend and old fellow- 
student gave him a canonry at Lombes — the place of which 
he was bishop — and wrote to him about the same time of the 
Laura whom he had been celebrating in his sonnets, that many 
believed her to be a work of his imagination, and that his love 
was the Laurea, the laurel crown, for which he laboured. 

The lady to whom these exercises in love-poetry were dedi- 
cated in the usual way was a Laurette de Noves, who, at the age 
of eighteen, married Hugues de Sade, a young gentleman of 
twenty. He belonged to one of the chief families in Avignon, 
and she was married two years before Petrarch first met her. 
While Petrarch sang of Laura, she became the mother of 
eleven children — seven sons and four daughters. We have 
seen (ch. iii. § 36) that the customs of the Courts of Love com- 
pletely shut out any notion of a personal suit towards the lady 
who was complimented by the dedication to her of a series of 
pieces of this sort. If doubt on the matter had been possible, 
Madame de Sade's position at Avignon would, in the case of 
Petrarch, have effectually settled it. Perhaps she owed, in some 
degree, the compliment of dedication to the fact that she gave 
the poet the right name for the ideal of his verse. As Dante's 
ideal would be best expressed through the name of Beatrice 
(ch. iii. § 36), so Petrarch's may have caused him to seek some 
lady who was worthy of his compliment, and who was named 
Laura. Boccaccio, who is the oldest good authority concerning 
Petrarch, believed with his friend the Bishop of Lombes, that 
Laura was an allegory for the Poet's Laurel. When at the age 
of thirty-three Petrarch bought himself a cottage and two little 
gardens at Vaucluse, about three miles from Avignon, and settled 
there, he was not himself single. There was born to him in 
that year a son, who lived to the age of twenty-four. There was 



toa.d. I375-] BOCCACCIO. 115 

born to him also, some years afterwards, a daughter, Francesca. 
The rest of Petrarch's life was that of a poet, patriot, and 
scholar. His heart glowed, and his verse glowed often, with 
love of his country. He was ashamed of the corruptions of the 
papal court at Avignon, and earnest for the pope's return to 
Rome. At the age of thirty- seven he was crowned at Rome as 
Poet Laureate, and received at Paris the like honour, so winning 
his Laurel. There was a tradition that Virgil, Horace, and 
Statius had been so crowned in the Roman Capitol, and the 
custom, said to have vanished by decay of the Roman Empire, 
was alleged to have only been revived in the thirteenth century. 
But it was Petrarch who thus first gave life to the office of Poet 
Laureate. At that time Petrarch was at work upon a Latin epic 
on the deeds of the elder Scipio. On this Latin poem— his 
"Africa" — he chiefly relied for the immortality which he did not 
suppose that what he wrote in his own mother tongue could 
give. Seven years after he was laureated, Petrarch throbbed 
with hope for Italy. Cola Rienzi then became master of Rome, 
as tribune of the people. Petrarch could live no more in papal 
Avignon, and he went to his own country. At Parma he heard of 
the downfall of the tribune, whom the people had deserted. The 
Colonnas, too, were fallen. "No other ruling family on earth is 
dearer to me," he said ; " but dearer to me is the public, dearer 
is Rome, dearer is Italy." In 1350, when his age was forty- 
six, and Chaucer, a youth of two-and- twenty, was training him- 
self in song, translating " The Romaunt of the Rose," and 
adventuring a sustained flight of his own in " the Court of 
Love," Petrarch first visited the Florence from which his father 
had been exiled. Thence Boccaccio, who had long admired 
his genius, sent forward a Latin poem to welcome him, then 
came himself to meet him, took him to his house, and estab- 
lished a friendship that continued to the end of Petrarch's life. 
Boccaccio was, in those days, at work on his "Decameron ;" and 
by two narrative poems in Italian had already laid the founda- 
tion of an influence yet stronger than Petrarch's on the literature 
of succeeding times. 

12. Giovanni Boccaccio was the son of a Florentine merchant. 
His mother was a Parisian, and his father had lived for a time 
in Paris. At seven years old Boccaccio had made verses ; but 
his father meant that he should thrive by trade, and he was 
placed under a trader, with whom he lived six years, and 
travelled much. His master said that he was of small capacity, 

I 2 



Il6 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1341 

because he was not apt for the business he was then learning. 
He was set, therefore, to study canon law, that being a very 
lucrative profession, and spent nearly another six years in 
proving himself to be unsuited for that. But the new studies 
had enabled him to master Latin. As he would not make a 
lawyer, young Boccaccio's father put him back into trade, and 
sent him to Naples, where King Robert held court in a spirit 
that would have tempted men less apt than Boccaccio to a 
career of letters. At the court of King Robert he heard 
Petrarch discourse of poetry before his crowning wit£j the laurel 
wreath. There also Boccaccio sang in praise of Fiammetta, for 
whom he then wrote his " Filocopo," a version of one of the 
current French metrical romances — that of "Flore and Blanche- 
fleur" — into Italian prose, prolix with invocation, love discourse, 
and episode. But this was followed by another work, dedicated 
to Fiammetta, telling in Italian and in octave rhyme, under the 
title of the " Teseide," that story of Palamon and Arcite, which 
was Englished afterwards by Chaucer, and leads the series of 
his " Canterbury Tales/' as " The Knight's Tale." Boccaccio 
was in his twenty-eighth year when he produced this poem. 
Chaucer was then a boy of thirteen. Boccaccio's Italian 
Theseid was in modern literature the first long narrative 
heroic poem by a man of genius told straight through without 
allegory, without verbiage, with simple reliance on its human 
interest. Its charm was felt wherever Italian was read, and the 
music also of its new stanza, the octave rhyme. It laid the 
foundation of modern epic romance. After writing this, Boc- 
caccio, who had returned to his father in Florence, laid the 
foundation also of pastoral poetry in his '" Ameto," "Admetus, 
Comedy of the Nymphs of Florence" in prose, mixed with 
rhyme. He represented Admetus as one of rustic unformed 
mind, civilised by the contemplation of the highest earthly 
beauty, Lucia or Lia ; discoursing with seven nymphs, by whose 
names and descriptions known ladies were figured, but who alle- 
gorically represent the seven sciences ; and raised by his sense 
of earthly beauty, Lucia, to a sense and worship of the heavenly- 
beauty, Fiammetta. 

The polished Latin eclogue and rude farces of Italian vil- 
lagers blended in the foundation of these first pastoral dialogues 
which, according to Boccaccio's example, were produced in Italy 
during the next hundred years, with speakers who were nymphs, 
shepherds, satyrs, demigods. 



to a.d. 1348.] CHAUCER'S STANZA. 117 

In 1344, when his old father married again, Boccaccio re- 
turned to Naples. King Robert was dead, and his immoral 
granddaughter Giovanna reigned in his stead. She encouraged 
men of letters in her way, and sought of Boccaccio licentious 
tales. She revived all literary love-fashions. Justice was dead 
in Naples, but the queen's authority was upheld in the Courts 
of Love. In one of those Courts a question arose one day as to 
which one of three wishes, if he might have one only, a true 
lover should desire : sometimes to see his lady, sometimes to 
discourse of her, or to think softly of her within himself. Boc- 
caccio argued for the thinking ; but when his lady left Naples 
he questioned the truth of his judgment, and produced, in her 
absence, his second epic romance, his " Filostrato." This was 
on the love-story of " Troilus and Cressida," once more a sus- 
tained tale in octave rhyme, told rapidly and gracefully, depend- 
ing wholly upon human interest, but reflecting the low morals of 
the court for which it was produced. The charm of manner 
was undeniable, and by his two narrative poems, the "Teseide" 
and " II Filostrato," Boccaccio established in Italy octave 
rhyme, a measure of his own creation, though there had been an 
occasional chance use of it, as by Jehan de Brienne, King of 
Jerusalem, more than a century before Boccaccio was born. 
Boccaccio alone established it as the national measure for use 
in the telling of heroic or romantic tales by the great poets of 
later time. Boccaccio was about thirty-four or thirty-five years 
old when he wrote his " Filostrato," Chaucer about twenty. 

13. In Chaucer's "Court of Love" there is a close transla- 
tion of two stanzas from the " Filostrato,"' besides fainter echo 
of its music and of that of the "Teseide" here and there. 
Chaucer afterwards gave his own English rendering of both 
these poems, and may have begun in his youth to practise him- 
self in verse by translation of some parts of them. In doing so 
he gave seven lines of English to the eight lines of Italian, and 
formed out of the octave rhyme of Boccaccio by striking out its 
fifth line, a measure of his own, not less complete in its har- 
mony. In each measure the lines are of ten syllables. Putting 
like letters to stand for rhymes, the rhyming in the eight lines of 
Boccaccio's stanza runs abababcc, in which the system of 
the harmony is obvious. In the old Sicilian octave rhyme the 
verse had simply alternated. Boccaccio turned the closing lines 
into a couplet, and so gave to the whole measure a sense of per- 
fectness, while adding to its music. Omission of Boccaccio's fifth 



Il8 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1348 

line and its rhyme made, Chaucer's stanza run a b a b b c c. 
Here there are seven lines, three on each side of a middle line, 
which is that upon which all the music of the stanza turns. It 
is the last of a quatrain of alternate rhymes, and first of a qua- 
train of couplets. The stanza thus produced has a more delicate 
music than the Italian octave rhyme out of which it was formed, 
and it remained a favourite with English poets till the time of 
Queen Elizabeth. Because it was used by a royal follower of 
Chaucer's, it has been called " rhyme royal." Let us rather call 
it Chaucer's stanza. 

14. Boccaccio's "Filostrato" was soon followed by "The 
Decameron," which he was writing at Florence when, in 1350, 
Petrarch became his guest there for a time, and the friendship 
between them was established. The terrible days of the Great 
Plague of 1348-9 were fresh in men's minds. It was the same 
plague of which, in England, Bradwardine and Holcot died. 
Madame de Sade — Petrarch's Laura — had been also among its 
victims. Boccaccio made this plague-time in Florence the 
groundwork of his plan for a collection, in Italian prose, of the 
best stories he could find to tell. He imagined that during the 
ravages of plague, seven fashionable ladies and three fashionable 
gentlemen withdrew from its perils, and killed time in telling 
stories to one another as they lounged in a beautiful garden 
some miles distant from the town. Each told a tale on each of 
the ten days of "The Decameron," and this was Boccaccio's 
contrivance for linking together a series of a hundred tales, 
which became widely famous, called forth many imitations, 
and produced a form of literature to which we owe the design of 
Chaucer's " Canterbury Tales." 

The literature of many succeeding generations also bears 
witness to the influence of Boccaccio's Latin prose treatises, 
and of those of Petrarch in a less degree, upon imaginations of 
the poets. 

15. Chaucer's "Court of Love "was court poetry; and the 
next evidence we have of the course of his life shows that he had 
obtained footing at court as an attendant upon the young princes, 
Lionel and John. Lionel of Antwerp, second son of Edward 
III., was eight years younger than his brother Edward the 
Black Prince, and two years older than his next brother, John, 
born at Ghent, in 1340, and called, therefore, John of Gaunt. 
The king had a fourth son, Edmund, who was a year younger 
than John, and a fifth son, Thomas, who was an infant when Iris 



toa.d. 1358.] THE ASSEMBLY OF FOULES. II9 

brothers were young men. So far, as regards his court service, 
Chaucer's life and poetry are especially associated with the 
friendship and patronage of John of Gaunt ; and we come now 
to a group of his poems which seems to have been distinctly 
written for this prince. Prince Lionel was married, when but a 
boy, in 1352, to Elizabeth Countess of Ulster; and in a frag- 
ment of a household book of hers, containing entries of some 
expenses in the years 1356-9, the name of Chaucer occurs only 
in 1357 — once in April, once in May, and once in December — at 
a time when another entry shows that John of Gaunt was a 
visitor at Hatfield. The first entry points to preparations for 
court ceremonies of St. George's Day, in 1357, against which 
day the Round Tower at Windsor had been completed in order 
that the feast of the Round Table of the Knights of the Garter 
might be celebrated with an unexampled splendour for the two 
prisoner guests, King John of France and King David of 
Scotland, who were both, at that festival, among the tilters in 
the lists. Chaucer's service may only have been transferred for 
the occasion by Prince John to grace the following of his sister- 
in-law ; but it may be that Chaucer was attached first to the 
service of Prince Lionel and thence transferred to that of John 
of Gaunt. In the entries of 1358 and 1359 upon the fragment 
of the Princess Elizabeth's household book, Chaucer's name 
does not appear ; and 1359 was the date of the marriage of 
John of Gaunt, with which a group of Chaucer's poems seems 
to be connected. 

On the 19th of May, 1359, John of Gaunt, under his first title 
as Earl of Richmond, and being then nineteen years old, married 
Blanche, aged also nineteen, second of two daughters of Henry 
Duke of Lancaster, the first prince of the blood after the children 
of the king. 

16. Chaucer's Assembly of Foules was most probably a 
poem written for John of Gaunt in 1358, during his courtship of 
this lady. If so, the argument implies that when she was 
eighteen there were three noble suitors for the hand of the great 
heiress ; that one of them, whose cause the poet advocates, was 
the king's son ; and that her marriage was postponed for a year. 
The poem is, like " The Court of Love," in Chaucer's stanza, , 
and is in the form of a dream, opening and closing with sugges- 
tion of the author as a close student of books. He always reads, 
he says ; he surely hopes so to read that some day he shall be 
the better for his study, " and thus to read I will not spare." 



JiO A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 135S 

In the opening of his poem, Chaucer represents himself as 
reading with delight a beautiful fragment of the sixth book of 
Cicero on the Republic, which contains the doctrine of the soul's 
immortality in "The Dream of Scipio" (Somnium Scipionis). 
To this fragment a wide influence was given among educated 
readers of the Middle Ages — an influence which even Dante felt 
— through the commentary made upon it by Macrobius, a Neo- 
platonist grammarian of the fifth century, who connected with 
it his discourses on the constitution of the universe. " The 
Dream of Scipio " may, therefore, be named with " The Romaunt 
of the Rose," as the work which, next to it, had chief influence in 
determining a fashion of court literature for allegorical incidents 
in form of dream. We find the fashion illustrated in " The 
Assembly of Foules " and other of the earlier works of Chaucer, 
and in the literature of succeeding time, until the great develop- 
ment of new thought and new forms of writing in the days of 
Queen Elizabeth. 

In telling the dream which forms the story of " The Assem- 
bly of Foules," Chaucer shows, as in " The Court of Love," the 
enjoyment with which he had then received the narrative poems 
of Boccaccio. Sixteen stanzas of the " Teseide," which de- 
scribe Cupid at a fountain tempering his arrows, and the 
crouched Venus herself, are translated in sixteen stanzas of 
" The Assembly of Foules," and they are translated in a way 
that places beyond question Chaucer's knowledge of Italian. 
The turns of phrase make it quite evident that Chaucer wrote 
with the Italian original before him. 

In the dream story of his poem, Chaucer personified Nature 
as she had been personified in the thirteenth century by Alain 
de l'lsle in a popular Latin book of his, written in prose mingled 
with verse, and called the " Book of the Complaint of Nature " 
(De Planctu Naturae). The character of Genius who comes to 
confess Nature in the latter part of the " Roman de la Rose " was 
taken from this work. It was the origin also of Genius who 
acts as the confessor in John Gower's " Confensio Amantis." 
Chaucer frankly cited Alain as his authority for the personifi- 
cation of Nature in his poem, where she sits enthroned, on 
Valentine's Day, calling the birds to choose their mates. The 
first hint of Chaucer's plan seems to have come to him from a 
passage in Alain's book, which describes Nature's changing robe 
as being in one of its forms " so ethereal that it is like air, and 
the pictures on it seem to the eye a Council of Animals. Here 



toa.d. 1359.] COMPLAINT OF THE BLACK KNIGHT. 121 

the eagle " — and so forth. In Chaucer's " Assembly of Foules," 
or, as it is sometimes called, " The Parliament of Birds," Nature 
held as chief of the birds to be mated a female eagle, of which 
the poet celebrates the grace and beauty. The worthiest was to 
begin the suit. There spoke then " a tercel eagle, as ye know 
full well, the fowl royal, above you all in degree," through whom 
Chaucer expressed in allegory the suit of John of Gaunt. And 
when this eagle had declared his love, " another tercel eagle 
spake anon, of lower kind," and yet again a third. Hereupon 
Chaucer exercised his sense of humour by representing the 
opinions of other classes of birds upon this suit in particular and 
love in general. Nature, bidding the quarrel cease, called on 
the lady eagle to speak for herself, but counselled her to take the 
royal tercel. She answered, timidly, that she must wait another 
year. Nature, therefore, counselled the three suitors to wait 
patiently — " A yere is not so longe to endure " — and proceeded 
to the pairing of the other birds. Since we have direct evidence 
that a year before John of Gaunt's marriage Chaucer was in the 
service of one of the young princes — for he was in attendance 
upon Lionel's wife — it is almost a matter of course that he should 
have exercised his known skill as a poet for the pleasure of his 
friends at court in gracing the suit of Prince John for the hand 
of Lady Blanche. 

Chaucer's Complaint of the Black Knight, which is also 
written in Chaucer's stanza, professes to record what the poet 
heard of the complaint of a knight whom false tongues had 
hindered of his lady's grace. The poem ends with a direct 
appeal to her for whom it was written on her knight's behalf — 
" Princess, pleaseth it your benignity," &c. This, probably, was 
a poem designed for John of Gaunt to present to his lady 
on occasion of some small misunderstanding incident to days of 
courtship. It is a court poem of French pattern, thoroughly 
conventional, expressing unreal agonies by the accepted formulas. 
It is conventional even in the use of the usual " Envoy," with 
no more change of form than transformation of the customary 
" Prince " into " Princess." In every French province there 
used to be a sort of courtly academy of verse-writers, called the 
" Puy d' Amours," of which the president was called the Prince. 
Poets recited to him their verse, and addressed him in these 
last lines, which were called " l'Envoy," or " le Prince." In the 
" Complaint of the Black Knight," the natural genius of Chaucer 
appears only in some touches at the close. 



122 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1359. 

17. But throughout the poem known as Chancers Dream 
there is a delicate play of fairy fancy. It is in the light octo- 
syllabic rhyme, which came in almost with the first English 
poems written after the Conquest (ch. iii. § 30), telling how the 
poet found himself in dream the only man in a marvellous island 
of fair ladies, whose queen was gone over the sea to a far rock to 
pluck three magic apples, upon which their bliss and well-being 
depended. But she returned, and with her came the Poet's 
Lady, by whom the Queen of that Isle of Pleasaunce had found 
herself forestalled. The Poet's Lady had been found already on 
the far rock with the magic apples in her hand. A Knight also 
had there claimed the unlucky Queen as his ; but the Poet's 
Lady had comforted her : had graciously put into her hand one 
of the apples, and had brought in her own ship both Queen and 
Knight home to the pleasant island. There its fair ladies all 
knelt to the Poet's Lady. The Knight would have died of the 
Queen's rigour if she had not revived him by some acts of kind- 
ness, after which she was resolved to bid him go. But then 
there were seen sailing to that island ten thousand ships ; and 
the God of Love himself made all resistance vain. Many 
Knights landed, and the Queen ©f the Isle, being overcome, 
presented to the Lord of Love a bill declaring her submission. 
The God of Love also paid homage to the Poet's Lady, and 
himself pleading to her the Poet's cause, laughed as he told her 
his name. The first of the two dreams which form the poem 
ended with a festive gathering before the Lord of Love, visible 
in the air, and the departure of the Poet's Lady, to whom the 
Queen of the Island offered to resign her power if she would but 
stay. The despairing poet followed her ship through the water ; 
was rescued, was comforted, and came happily home. But 
with that the first dream ended. In the next he was again upon 
the island, where, between the knights and ladies, marriage was 
arranged. The Queen's Knight, who was a prince, was to go 
home and make ready for the wedding. The poet travelled 
with him in a barge — ■ 

" Which barge was as a marines thought, 
After his pleasure to him brought." 

But there were delays, and when the knights returned, behind 
their time, they found the Queen and many of the ladies dead of 
despair, while those who were not dead were dying. The Prince 
hereupon stabbed himself, and also died. The Prince, and the 



a.d. 1359.] CHAUCER'S DREAM. 1 23 

Queen, and the dead ladies were all carried over the sea for 
burial within a royal abbey. There, as the dead lay in state, a 
bright bird perched on the hearse of the Queen and sang three 
sweet songs. An old knight, by a sudden movement of his 
hand, startled the bird, which, in its haste to fly out, beat itself 
dead against a painted window. Other birds gathered outside 
with noise of lament. One presently brought a green flowerless 
herb. The herb grew suddenly, flowered, and yielded seed. 
One of the seeds was put by a bird into the beak of the dead 
songster, who at once stood up and pruned himself. The 
abbess, with the other seeds, restored the dead Prince, Queen, 
and ladies to life. There was, three months after this, a marriage 
festival ; and all, except the Poet, had been thus happily married, 
when, during a whole day, they besought of the Poet's Lady 
grace for him also. She yielded, and their marriage was to be 
that night. Then the happy poet was led by the host of the 
happy in joyous procession into a great tent that served for 
church, and there was solemn service, with rejoicing afterwards, 
of which the loud sound woke him from his dream. He was 
alone then, in the old forest lodge, where he had slept, and was 
left in grief to pray that his Lady would give substance to his 
dreaming, or that he might go back into his dream and always 
serve her in the Isle of Pleasaunce. He ended his verse with a 
balade, bidding his innocent heart go forth to her who may 
" give thee the bliss that thou desirest oft." 

Although this brief note of its plan does not suggest the deli- 
cate grace of the poem, it is enough to show that Chaucer's Dream 
could not have been intended, as some have thought it was, for 
a celebration of the marriage, in May, 1359, of John of Gaunt, 
represented by the Knight, to Lady Blanche, represented by the 
Queen of the Island. If that had been its purpose, Chaucer 
would not have made it a chief feature of the poem that he 
places his own lady high above the Lady Blanche. If the poem 
had any personal reference at all, it must have been written for 
the pleasure of Philippa, daughter of Sir Paon de Rouet, of 
Hainault, who was king-at-arms for the province of Guienne. 
This young lady was in the service of Philippa Queen of Eng- 
land, who also was of Hainault. Queen Philippa was the 
daughter of a Count of Hainault, and after her, following a 
common fashion of loyalty, the lady who became the wife of 
Chaucer seems to have been named. 

18. Five months after John of Gaunt's marriage Chaucer 



124 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1359 

bore arms. Laurence Minot did not live to include among his 
war-poems a celebration of the Battle of Poitiers, fought in Sep- 
tember, 1356. In May of the next year the Black Prince entered 
London in triumph, with John King of France his honoured 
guest and prisoner. France was distracted by the Jacquerie, 
bred of the utter misery and ruin of her peasantry, and by the 
contending factions of her nobles. But the regency of France 
refused to endorse her captive king's assent to the hard condi- 
tions of peace offered by his conqueror, and at the end of 
October, 1359, Edward III. sailed again to France, with the 
largest and best army raised in England for more than a cen- 
tury. In the ranks of that army every able-bodied courtier must 
have been compelled to march. Geoffrey Chaucer was enrolled 
in it, and then he first bore arms. 

Evidence of this fact is associated with a statement upon 
which those critics rely who do not accept the year 1328 as the 
date of Chaucer's birth, but hold that he was born many years 
later. There was in Chaucer's time a long suit, still famous in 
heraldic records, between Richard Lord Scrope, of Bolton, and 
Sir Robert Grosvenor, of Cheshire, as to the right of bearing 
certain arms ; azure, a bend or. The Constable and Marshal of 
England pronounced, in 1390, a decision, with a saving clause 
which permitted the loser of the suit, in consideration of the 
goodness of his case, to bear the disputed arms within a bordure 
argent. This was disallowed by the king. Record remains that 
at one of the many sittings of the heralds to hear evidence upon 
this much ado about nothing, Geoffrey Chaucer was a witness. 
He gave his evidence on the 12th of October, 1386, when 
his age, if he died in 1400 at the age of seventy-two, was fifty- 
eight. But in the record of his evidence he is described as 
" Geffray Chaucere, Esquier, del age de xl ans et plus, armeez 
par xxvij ans" (aged forty and more, and having borne arms for 
twenty-seven years). Here it will be observed that upon the 
point essential to the cause the record is exact. Chaucer was 
asked how long he had borne arms, and his answer is precisely 
entered, twenty-seven years. According to that reckoning his 
bearing of arms dated from 1359, and the evidence he proceeded 
to give on Scrope's behalf did, in fact, go back to what he saw 
in the year 1359, when he was with Edward's army in Brittany, 
and before he was taken prisoner. But wc know that Chaucer 
was not asked his age, for upon that point, which was not at all 
material to the case, no definite statement was set down. The 



toa.d. 1369.] THE BOOK OF THE DUCHESS. 1 25 

reporter perhaps glanced at the witness, and set down for age 
"forty and more," before putting the more material question. 
Upon the age of a man in middle life the estimates differ widely, 
according to the sense and eyesight of those who make them, 
and as men differ widely in the period at which they begin to 
show signs of decay. Chaucer was healthy, genial, and cheerful. 
It may well have been enough for a rough estimate of his age to 
set down that he was on the wrong side of forty — "forty and 
more." References made to his old age in Chaucer's later 
life forbid us to be misled by the bad guess of an unknown 
reporter. 

19. The great army with which Geoffrey Chaucer marched, 
when he first bore arms, in 1359, laid unsuccessful siege to 
Rheims, advanced on Paris, of which it burnt the suburbs, and 
there suffered famine so severe that it was forced to a retreat, 
hasty as flight, towards Brittany, leaving a track of dead upon 
its way. Over the suffering host then broke, near Chartres, a 
great storm, in which King Edward vowed to God and the 
Virgin that he would make peace. It was in Brittany that 
Chaucer became prisoner to the French. King Edward ful- 
filled his vow. The Peace of Bretigni was signed in May, 
1360, and solemnly ratified at Calais in the following October. 
The peace would cause release of prisoners ; but nothing is 
known of Chaucer's life for the next seven years. At the end of 
that time, in 1367, when he was thirty-nine years old, he was 
still attached to the king's household, and he received in that 
year a salary of twenty marks for life, or until he should be 
otherwise provided for, in consideration of his former and 
future services. The buying power of money changes with the 
course of time ; and Chaucer's twenty marks under Edward III. 
would be worth about ^140 under Victoria. 

20. In 1369 John of Gaunt lost his mother, his brother Lionel, 
and his wife. In service of her mistress, Queen Philippa, the 
Philippa to whom Chaucer was married had obtained, three years 
before the queen's death, a pension of ten marks. The death of 
John of Gaunt's wife, Duchess Blanche, in September, 1369, after 
ten years of marriage, was lamented by Chaucer in his Book of the 
Duchess, a court poem, in eight-syllabled rhyming verse, with the 
customary dream, May morning, and so forth, the romance figure 
of Emperor Octavian, from the tale of Charlemagne, and a chess 
play with Fortune imitated, almost translated, from a favourite 
passage of the " Roman de la Rose." Thus far a follower of 



126 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1369 

the court fashions, Chaucer is in this poem himself a celebrater 
of that home delight of love over which Alcestis was queen under 
Venus. It is faithful wedded love that the " Book of the 
Duchess" honours. We have here also the individual portrait 
of a gentlewoman who had been the poet's friend, and in whom 
he had seen a pattern of pure womanly grace and wifely worth. 
The Duchess Blanche left one son, about three years old, who 
became King Henry IV. To him, in his childhood, Chaucer 
must have been familiar as his father's household friend, and, 
doubtless, often welcome as a playfellow. 

21. In the spring and summer of 1370 Chaucer was abroad 
on the King's service. In 1370 John of Gaunt married again. 
Enriched by the inheritance of his first wife, he had become, 
after her father's death in the Plague of 1361, the greatest land- 
owner in England, with estates in eighteen English counties, be- 
sides several in Wales, and the most beautiful of English palaces, 
that of the Savoy, which his late father-in-law had rebuilt from the 
ground. Then he was made Duke of Lancaster, was Earl also 
of Richmond, Leicester, Lincoln, and Derby. By right of his 
second wife he claimed new dignity, and called himself a king. 
Pedro the Cruel, whom the Black Prince, at the cost of his own 
health and life, replaced on the throne of Castile and Leon, had 
been unable to retain it. He was assassinated. His throne was 
usurped ; but he left two daughters in Aquitaine, the eider of 
whom, Constance, was his lawful heir. Her John of Gaunt 
married, and at once called himself, as her husband, King of 
Castile and Leon. His brother Edmund secured at the same 
time the reversion of this chance of a throne by marrying Isabel, 
the other daughter of King Pedro. Chaucer and his wife were 
both in the service of the titular King and Queen of Castile. Of 
Castile and Leon, John of Gaunt had the title of a king without 
the rule ; but of England, he obtained the rule without the royal 
title, and while this power of his lasted his goodwill made 
Chaucer prosperous. 

In November, 1372, Chaucer — henceforth entitled an esquire 
— was made one of a Commission that was to proceed to Italy 
and treat with the duke, citizens, and merchants of Genoa for 
the choice of some port on the English coast at which the 
Genoese might establish a commercial factory. Upon such 
business he was in Italy, both at Florence and Genoa, in the 
year 1373. This was a year before the death of Petrarch : the 
vear also in which Petrarch wrote that moralised Latin version 



toa.d. I375-] CHAUCER AND JOHN OF GAUNT. 127 

of Boccaccio's tale of Griselda, which was afterwards followed by- 
Chaucer in his " Clerk's Tale," and of which he made his Clerk say- 
that it was " learned at Padua of a worthy clerk . . . Francis 
Petrarch, the laureate poet." Chaucer is likely to have sought 
speech with so great a master of his art. He might also, during 
this visit to Italy, have spoken with Boccaccio, then living at 
Venice, and within but two years of his death, for Petrarch died 
in 1374, Boccaccio in 1375. Our own poet was home again at 
the close of November, 1373, and was paid for his service and 
expenses ^92, which would be worth more than ^900 in present 
value. In April of the next year, 1374, on St. George's Day, a 
grant was made to Chaucer of a daily pitcher of wine from the 
hands of the king's butler. This he received till the accession of 
Richard II., when, instead of the wine, twenty marks a year were 
paid as its money value. Less than two months after the grant 
of daily wine, Chaucer owed also to John of Gaunt's goodwill a 
place under Government as Comptroller of the Customs and 
Subsidy of Wool, Skins, and Tanned Hides in the port of London. 
The rolls of his office were to be written with his own hand, and 
none of his duties might be done by deputy. Only three days after 
he had been enriched with this appointment, John of Gaunt 
made in his own name a personal grant to Chaucer of ^10 (re- 
presented now by ,£100) a year for life, payable at the manor of 
Savoy, in consideration of good service rendered by Chaucer and 
his wife Philippa to the said duke, to his consort, and to his 
mother the queen. In November of the following year, 1375, 
Chaucer received, from the crown, custody of a rich ward, Ed- 
mund Staplegate, of Kent ; and this wardship brought him a 
marriage fee of ^104, represented now by ten times that 
amount. Two months later Chaucer obtained another wardship 
of less value ; and in another half-year he was presented with 
the fine paid by an evader of wool duties, a gift worth more 
than ,£700 of our money. 

22. This was just after the death of the Black Prince, who 
had used some of his last remaining strength in opposition to 
his father's government as wielded by his brother John. He had 
been in opposition, partly because he shared the popular dislike 
of the court party, and resented his father's vassalage to Alice 
Perrers, partly because he felt the interests of his son Richard 
to be crossed by the ambition of his brother John. The foreign 
wars had been costly and disastrous, the people had made John 
of Gaunt answerable for England's failure and distress. A Par- 



138 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1375 

liament supported by the Black Prince had opposed him, and 
was called by the people the " Good Parliament ;" but after the 
death of the king's eldest son, its last independent act was to 
resist effectually John of Gaunt's endeavour to procure the 
exclusion of female heirs to the throne, and so make himself 
next in succession to his nephew Richard. During the last year 
of the reign of Edward III., from the close of 1376 to June, 1377, 
when the king died, Chaucer was twice employed on secret ser- 
vice ; the second time with Sir Thomas Percy, afterwards Earl 
of Worcester, upon a mission to Flanders. 

John of Gaunt seems to have had no love for the wife Con- 
stance whom he married only for hope of a kingdom. Chaucer's 
wife had a sister Catherine, young widow of a Sir Hugh Swin- 
ford, of Lincoln, and she also became attached to the household 
at the half-royal court of the Savoy. She had charge of the 
children. Catherine Swinford became John of Gaunt's third 
wife after the death of Constance in 1 394. The relation between 
them was then hardly closer than it had been, but Catherine's 
children, three sons and a daughter, born before marriage, were 
then declared legitimate ; and through them Chaucer's sister- 
in-law became great- grandmother of Margaret Countess of 
Richmond, mother of Henry VII., and ancestress of the later 
sovereigns of England. 

23. The works of Chaucer hitherto described form a distinct 
group, marked by the predominating influence of French court 
poetry. His individuality is shown from the first, as in the hon- 
our paid to marriage, though his models are not of the best, and 
they do not quicken the development of independent strength. 
But as Chaucer became more and more familiar with the great 
poets of Italy, their vigorous artistic life guided his riper genius 
to full expression of its powers. When he had passed forty, and 
his visit to Italy had quickened his sense of Italian literature, he 
was, from that time forth, at work with matured power outside 
the limits of the fashionable French writing of his time. His 
genius, more akin to that of the great poets of Italy, acquired 
new freedom of expression. In his Troilus mid Cressida, which 
is a free version of Boccaccio's " Filostrato," out of octave 
rhyme into Chaucer's seven-lined stanza, the English poet not 
only so dealt with the baser incidents as to breathe pure air 
through an unwholesome tale ; and even somewhat spoilt the 
iirst charm of the story-telling by interpolation of good counsel ; 
but, for love of honesty, he so transformed the character 01' 



toa.d. I377-] TROILUS AND CRESS I DA. 1 29 

Pandarus in every respect as to make of it a new creation, rich 
with a dramatic life that is to be found, outside Chaucer, in no 
other work of imagination before Shakespeare. Chaucer may- 
have been at work upon his poem, which is in five books, and 
3,251 lines, in the last years of the reign of Edward III. Ripe- 
ness of age is indicated not only by the breadth and depth of 
insight shown in the character painting, but may be inferred 
also from the grave didactic tone that interrupts from time to 
time the light strains of a love-story. " Such fine hath Troilus 
for love," says Chaucer, at the close : — "Young fresh folks, he or 
she, look Godward, and think this world but a fair. Love Him 
who bought our souls upon the cross, and whose love never will 
be false to you. Such stories as this, the old clerks tell of the 
world's wretched appetites, and of the guerdon for travail in 
service of the heathen gods : 

" O moral Gower, this book I direct 

To thee, and to the philosophical Strode, 
To vouchsafe there need is to correct, 
Of your benignities and zeales good." 

And the book ends with a prayer that Christ may make us 
worthy of His mercy. 

24. Before carrying this outline of Chaucer's work into the 
reign of Richard II., we have to complete our sketch of English 
literature in the time of Edward III. The " Moral Gower" 
and the " Philosophical Strode," to whom Chaucer dedicated 
" Troilus and Cressida," do not come down to posterity with 
equal fame. Ralph Strode has an undying name only because 
Chaucer has mentioned him, and there is reason to think that 
he taught one of Chaucer's sons. He was a Dominican of 
Jedburgh Abbey, who had sought knowledge in France, Ger- 
many, and Italy, had visited the Holy Land, and was in highest 
credit as a theologian and philosopher about the year 1370. He 
wrote verse also, both Latin and English. Some of his books 
have been printed in Germany, but none in England. 

25. John Grower was a gentleman of Kent, close kindred 
to a knight, Sir Robert Gower, who had property in Suffolk and 
elsewhere, and who was buried in Brabourne Church, five miles 
from Ashford. The date of John Gower's birth is not known, 
but he survived Chaucer eight years. If Chaucer died at the 
age of seventy-two, and his friend was of equal age with him, 
Gower died at the age of eighty. It is more likely that he was 
younger than older. John Gower was well educated, wrote with 

J 



130 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1324 

ease in French, Latin, or English, and used coat armour at a 
time when such matters were looked to. In 1365 he was a 
feoffee of the manor of Aldington in Kent, and had a rental of 
ten pounds out of the manor of Wigborough, in Essex. In 1368 
and 1369 he was acquiring the manor of Kentwell, in Suffolk, 
which had formerly been the property of Sir Robert Govver. 
Towards the close of the reign of Edward III., Gower signed a 
deed relating to that manor of Kentwell, and another of his 
manors fifteen miles from Kentwell. In that deed he was 
described as of Otford, Kent. Among the pleasant hills, then, 
of Otford, where in his time the Archbishops of Canterbury 
had an old favourite seat, Gower was at home in the reign of 
Edward III., as a country gentleman, who had neither wish nor 
need to live^at court. He wrote in these his earlier days verse 
not merely according to the fashion of France, but in French. 
There remains a collection of his French exercises in love-poetry, 
Balades, a form of Provencal verse not in the least related to the 
Northern ballad. A balade is a love-poem in three stanzas of 
seven or eight (usually seven) lines, and a final quatrain. The 
last syllables of the two first lines of each balade are rhymed 
with throughout the whole poem, except in the refrain that 
should be repeated at the close of every stanza. That iterated 
last line usually has a distinct rhyming sound, and one of the 
two next preceding lines rhymes with it. Thus the rhyming 
might run ababcbc | ababcbc | ababcbc | bcbc. 
There were many such elaborate devices for the rhyming of 
short pieces by the Provencal and other singers of the South. 
Of these the sonnet only can be said to have survived. Gower 
wrote five of his balades for those who " look for the issue of 
their love in honest marriage." The other forty-five are of the 
usual kind, mere variations on the given theme, " universal to 
all the world, according to the properties and conditions of 
lovers who are diversely experienced in the fortune of love." 
Gower wrote also three long poems ; one in French, one in 
Latin, one in English. The one in French is lost. It was 
divided into twelve books, treating of the vices and virtues, and 
of the various degrees of men seeking — as a contemporary de- 
scribed it — to teach, by a right path, the way whereby a trans- 
gressed sinner ought to return to the knowledge of his Creator. 
That first work, called the Speculum Meditantis (Mirror of one 
Meditating), was written, no doubt, in the reign of Edward III., 
for the second work was produced early in the reign of 



TOA.d. I377-] GOWER— WICLIF— LANGLAND. 13 1 

Richard II. The lost French poem would, in that case, be the 
book which earned for the poet from his friend Chaucer the 
name of " Moral Gower." 

26. John Wiclif, born in Yorkshire about 1324, was in 
1361 master or warden of Balliol College, Oxford, and was in 
that year presented by his college to the rectory of Fylingham, 
in Lincolnshire. Soon afterwards he resigned his mastership, 
and went to reside on his living. He was presently made 
Doctor of Divinity. He had a quick mind in a spare, frail 
body, and at the time when William Langland, of whom we 
shall have next to speak, was writing in like spirit his " Vision 
of Piers Plowman," Wiclif was showing his pure desire to restore 
a spiritual Church. John of Gaunt was then ready, as head 
of the feudal party at court, to humble the pride of the prelates 
who claimed temporal power. He welcomed, therefore, the 
most innocent and self-denying Wiclif as a fellow-combatant ; 
and when, in 1376, at the close of the reign of Edward III., 
Wiclif was cited as a heretic to appear at St. Paul's before the 
appointed ecclesiastical judges, he went thither with John of 
Gaunt and Percy, the Earl Marshal of England, as supporters 
This led to a brawl. The populace judged Wiclif by his com- 
panions, and saw in him one of the people's enemies. Yet he 
was already quietly engaged with others upon that Translation 
of the Bible which was not completed until after the death of 
Edward III. As nothing came of the proceedings at St. Paul's, 
the monks, who also looked on Wiclif as their enemy, obtained 
the pope's injunction to the prelates and the university to renew 
process against him ; but before the pope's bulls could reach 
England Edward III. was dead, and the next following changes 
were in Wiclif s favour. 

27. Of like mind with Wiclif was William Langland, 
who, in Edward III.'s reign, was essentially the poet of the 
people. William Langland, the author of the Vision of Piers 
Plowman, is said, in a handwriting of the fifteenth century upon 
one of the MSS. of that poem, to have been born in Oxfordshire, 
at Shipton-under-Wychwood, the son of a freeman named Stacy 
de Rokayle, who lived there as a tenant under Lord le Spenser. 
On another MS. the author of the poem is named William W., 
possibly William of Wychwood (?) John Bale, writing in the 
middle of the sixteenth century, made the poet's Christian name 
Robert, wherein certainly he erred ; and said that he was born at 
Cleobury Mortimer, in Shropshire, wherein, perhaps, he erred 

J 2 



132 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1360 

also. The opening of his poem leads us to infer that William 
Langland was bred to the Church, and was attached at one time 
to the monastery of Great Malvern. But he married, and seems 
only to have performed minor offices of the Church. The forty- 
three remaining MSS. of his great poem represent it, with many 
variations, in three well-defined stages of completeness, indicating 
that throughout his life the author was extending and enriching 
it. In the portion first written there are references to the Treaty 
of Bretigny, in 1360, to the great pestilence of 1361, and to a great 
storm which occurred in the evening of Saturday, January 15th, 
1362. The work must, therefore, have been begun about that 
time. In the later continuation of the poem there is reference to 
a day in April, in 1370, and to the accession of Richard II., in 
1377. As in this part of the poem Langland calls his age forty- 
five, he was not born earlier than 1332. He came to London, 
for in the latest continuation of the poem he speaks of himself as 
living poorly in Cornhill by the performance of small clerical 
duties. If Langland was the author of a poem on the Deposition 
of Richard II., which has been not unreasonably ascribed to him, 
he was alive in 1399. 

28. The Vision of Piers Plowman speaks the mind of the 
main body of the English people of its time. It is a vision of 
Christ seen through the clouds of humanity — a spiritual picture 
of the labour to maintain right and uphold the life spent upon 
duty done for love of God. The poem is in the mystical number of 
nine dreams, and, in its completest form, twenty-three " passus." 
Apassus is a division of a poem so named from the Latin pander e 
(to spread out, unfold) ; hence, to unfold in speaking, as when 
in the " ^Eneid " it is said of Anchises, " Ordine singula pandit." 
Without rhyme, unless by accident, and with alliteration in First 
English manner, a national poet of vivid imagination has here 
fastened on the courtly taste for long allegorical dreams, and 
speaks by it to the humblest in a well-sustained allegory, often 
of great subtlety, always embodying the purest aspirations. 
Everywhere, too, it gives flesh and blood to its abstractions by 
the most vigorous directness of familiar detail, so that every 
truth might, if possible, go home, even by the cold hearthstone of 
the hungriest and most desolate of the poor, to whom its words 
of a wise sympathy were recited. Langland dreamt of a fair field 
full of folk — the World and its people — among whom the maid 
.Meed (worldly reward) was about to be wedded to Falsehood. 
Theology forbad the marriage, and the question of it was tried 



to a.d. 1377.] THE VISION OF PIERS PLOWMAN. I33 

before the king in London. The allegory is the first of the 
sequence of dreams forming the whole vision, rich in lively- 
picturing of the conditions of men in the world, and plain of 
speech as to the duties of kings. 

The poet slept again, and saw in his second dream again the 
fair field full of folk, to whom now Reason was preaching that 
the pestilence and the south-west wind on Saturday at even came 
to warn them of their sin and pride. After a time Repentance 
prayed, and then Hope blew a horn, at which the saints in 
heaven sang, and a thousand men cried up to Christ and His 
pure mother that they might know the way to Truth. They in- 
quired of a pilgrim fresh from Sinai, who said that he had never 
heard such a saint asked after. Then suddenly a Plowman put 
forth his head and said that he knew Truth as naturally as a 
clerk his books. Piers Plowman is thus first introduced in the 
poem as type of the poor and simple to whom the things of 
God are revealed, and gradually, within fifty lines, passes into 
the Christ who came as one of low estate to guide the erring 
world. Truth granted a bull of pardon to those who had 
worked faithfully with Piers the Plowman at the half-acre he 
had to plough and sow by the highway. The terms of this bull 
lead to the allegorical search for Do-well, since they are based 
on the text of Matthew xxv. 46 — " They who have done well 
shall go into life eternal." A priest impugned the worth of 
such a pardon, and raised a dispute that awoke the dreamer by 
its noise. 

What meant the dream? The pope granted passes into 
heaven ; but to trust to these 

Is noght so siker for the soul, 
Certes, as is Do-well. 

He would search, therefore, for Do-well ; and in his next dream, 
the third, was told by a man like himself, whose name was 
Thought, what were Do -well, Do-better, and Do-best. Do-well, 
man's natural goodness, follows him who is true of tongue and 
earns his bread by honest labour, takes only that which is his 
own, and is not drunken or disdainful. Do-better adds to these 
qualities of natural right and justice the higher Christian graces ; 
he is meek as a lamb, .helpful to others, has broken the bags of 
Avarice, and has given the Bible to the people. Do-best is 
above both, and bears a bishop's cross. Him Do-well and Do- 
better have crowned as their king. Thought sent the dreamer to 
Wit (knowledge), who told him that Do-well lives in the Castle 



134 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [.a.d. 1360 

(of Man's Body) made by Kynde (Nature) who dwells therewith 
his bride Anima (the Soul). Anima has Do-well to defend her 
borders; Do-better, daughter of Do-well, for her handmaid ; and 
Do-best for her spiritual guide. Dame Study, the wife of Wit, 
was displeased at the telling of these mysteries to the unlearned ; 
but she was appeased, and passed the dreamer on to Clergy, who 
told him of the evils and abuses in the Church, and prophesied 
that there should come a King who would put monks to penance 
for the breaking of their rule. " And then shall the abbot of 
Abingdon and all his issue for ever have a knock of a king and 
incurable the wound." 

William Langland was, we shall find, not alone in the forecast 
of the inevitable issue of the growing worldliness among those 
who should have been the guardians of religion. 

From his third dream the poet was awakened by a sense of 
shame while he was disputing with Reason. One came to him, 
Imagination, when he was awake, and told him that if he had 
been patient he would have heard from Reason what he had 
been told by Clergy. In his next dream, the fourth, Conscience 
comforted him, and took him to dine with Clergy, where the 
meats were psalms and texts, and there was talk again of 
Do-well, Do-better, and Do-best, Clergy referring to one Piers 
Plowman, who had made light of all knowledge but love, and 
saying that Do- well and Do-better were finders of Do-best, who 
saves men's souls. Patience said he had been told that Disce 
(learn) was Do-well, Doce (teach) was Do-better, and Dilige 
(love) was Do-best. The dreamer went on, with Conscience 
and Patience, to discover more. Then he met on the way 
Haukyn the Active Man, too busy to clean his coat : he sleeps 
in it. But Conscience told him how it might be cleaned, and 
Patience told him of a meat that never failed, though no man 
ploughed or sowed for it. The dreamer looked and saw that it 
was a piece of the Paternoster, called Thy-Will-be-Done. 
"Take it, Haukyn," said Patience, "and eat this when thou 
hungerest, or when thou art chill or wet ; fetters shall never 
chafe, nor great lords anger, nor prison harm thee." The sound 
of Haukyn's weeping broke the dream. 

In the next dream, the fifth, Anima (the Soul) spoke with the 
poet, and after lamenting the avarice and luxury of churchmen, 
bade him go straight to Christ, figured in 

Piers the Plowman, 
Petras in Christus, 



to a. d. 1377-3 SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE. 1 35 

the allegory passes to the tree bearing the fruit of Charity, which 
grows in a garden held by Freewill, under Piers the Plowman. 

The next dream, the sixth, introduces Faith and Hope, with 
Charity in the person of the Good Samaritan. 

In the seventh dream the poet saw one like both to the 
Samaritan and to Piers Plowman riding barefoot on an ass's 
back, and was told by Faith that it was Jesus gone to joust with 
the foul fiend in the garb of Piers the Plowman. The rest of his 
dream was the story of Piers the Plowman as the Saviour. 

In the eighth dream this identification was continued. Christ 
was identified also with Do-well in His natural childhood ; with 
Do-better when He healed and helped all that asked Grace of 
Him ; with Do-best from the time when His wounds were touched 
by the doubting Thomas. And Grace, it was said, gave to Piers 
the Plowman on earth a team of four oxen, which were the Four 
Evangelists, and four stots, Austin, Ambrose, Gregory, and 
Jerome, who, with two harrows, an old and a new (Testament), 
followed Piers's plough. And Grace gave the seed that should 
be sown :: the spirits of prudence, and of temperance, and of for- 
titude, and of justice. Thus ended the spiritual search ; but 
over the heavenly vision of Piers Plowman there again rolled 
the dark mists of earth. Piers was attacked by Pride. Con- 
science counselled his followers to defend themselves in the 
Castle of Unity (the Church). The pope, whom " God amend/' 
plundered the Church. The king claimed all he could take. 

In the next and last dream, the ninth, Antichrist came in a 
man's form to waste the crop of Truth. Within the Castle of 
Unity Flattery got entrance as a physician. Thus Conscience 
was ousted, saying — 

" Now kynde (i.e., nature) me avenge, 
And send me hap and heele, 
Till I have Piers the Plowman." 

So, with the object of his search yet unattained, through the 
turmoil and disaster of those days of Richard II., in which the 
poem was completed, the poet sent his last thought heavenward, 
and built his last hope for the world upon a search for Christ. 

29. In completing the account of this important poem we 
have passed out of the reign of Edward III. into that of his 
grandson ; but we are not free to discuss the reign of Richard II. 
while the famous traveller, Sir John Mandeville, remains un- 
noticed. He represented in the reign of Edward III. the English 
spirit of adventure. By five-and-twenty years and more an 



I3& A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1356 

older man than Chaucer, Gower, Wiclif, and Langland, he was 
born at St. Albans in the beginning of the fourteenth century, 
and it was in the reign of Edward II., on Michaelmas Day, 
1322, that he set out upon his Travels. Five years later, when 
Edward III. became king, Sir John Mandeville was still abroad. 
He tells us that he visited Tartary, Persia, Armenia, Lybia, 
Chaldea, and a great part of Ethiopia, Amazonia, India the 
Less and the Greater, and isles that are about India. For 
more than thirty years he had been absent, when he came home, 
as he said, in spite of himself, to rest ; " for rheumatic gouts 
that distress me fix the end of my labour against my will (God 
knoweth)." On his way home he showed to the pope what he 
had written in Latin about the marvels and customs he had 
seen or heard of. The pope showed the book to his council, 
and it was approved. After his return Sir John Mandeville em- 
ployed his forced leisure in turning his Latin book into French, 
and then again into English. This he did in 1356, thirty-four 
years after he had sailed from England ; and at a time when 
Chaucer, at court, had perhaps done little more than translate 
the " Roman de la Rose," and write his " Court of Love ;" 
when Gower might have written a balade or two ; and Wiclif 
and Langland, one at Oxford, and the other possibly at Malvern, 
were two young and earnest men, with the chief labours of their 
lives before them. 

Mandeville's book was planned with distinct reference to the 
wants of pilgrims to Jerusalem, and contrived to subordinate 
accounts of the remotest travel to the form of what we might 
call a Travellers' Guide to Jerusalem by four routes, with a Hand- 
book to the Holy Places. The wonderful things told do not 
in themselves convict Mandeville of any wilful untruth. He tells 
of what was seen by him as matter of knowledge ; in the miracles 
narrated to him he put faith ; and all other marvels of which he 
heard he tells only as matter of hearsay. He says that he and 
his men served the Sultan of Babylon in Avar against the 
Bedouins, and had from him letters which gave admission to 
the least accessible of the Holy Places at Jerusalem. He says 
also that for fifteen months he and his men served the Great 
Chan of the Tartars of Cathay (China). 

But if Sir John Mandeville visited Cathay and India, and 
wrote from his own knowledge of what he saw there, he must 
then have had for a travelling companion a Lombard Franciscan 
friar, Odoric of Pordenone, in Friuli. Odoric was about fourteen 



toa.d. 1384.] WICLIF'S TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE. 1 37 

years older than Mandeville, and he started on his travels about 
five years earlier, remaining absent until 1330. He was in 
Western India soon after 1321, and spent three of the years 
between 1322 and 1328 in Northern China. In much of his 
travel he had an Irish friar for companion. On his return to 
Italy, in 1330, Odoric told the story of his travels, and it was set 
down in Latin by a brother of his order. He died in the follow- 
ing year. The resemblance between the narratives of Odoric 
and Mandeville concerning travel in the far East is so very close 
that the two men have been spoken of as travelling companions. 
Mandeville, in describing the Perilous Valley, says that he had 
with him " two worthy men, friars of Lombardy, who said if any 
man would enter they would go in with us." Sir John Mande- 
ville's " Travels" were written more than twenty years later than 
Odoric's, and it is in the resemblances between these two books 
that we find most reason to doubt Sir John's veracity. It is not 
unreasonable to ask whether he saw more of Cathay or India 
than he found upon the pages of the Lombard friar. 

30. We may now pass into the reign of Richard II. (1377- 
x 399)- The first event in its literary history is the completion 
by John Wiclif (§ 26) of his Translation of the Bible. In the 
year 1360 the English people had in their own current language 
no part of the Bible but the Psalter. Twenty years afterwards, in 
1380, the devoted labour of Wiclif and his fellow-workers had 
produced a complete English Bible, including the Apocrypha. 
Wiclif began with Comments on the Gospels, and in the Pro- 
logue to the Gospel by Matthew strongly urged that the whole 
Scripture ought to be translated for the use of the laity. Then 
he translated Clement of Lanthony's "Harmony of the Gospels.'* 
Versions of the Epistles followed. The version of the Gospels 
was taken out of Wiclif's " Commentaries;" Acts, Epistles, and 
Apocalypse were added; names of translators being studiously 
kept out of sight, for this was a labour against custom and 
against authority disposed to argue by oppression. It was while 
finishing his translation that Wiclif, whose chief work had been 
a Latin one, " De Dominio Divino," began to forsake the use of 
Latin, and wrote English tracts. In 1381 he issued a paper of 
twelve propositions against transubstantiation. In 1382 the 
Dominicans, or Black Friars, who were the custodians of ortho- 
doxy, had in their house at London a Council at which twenty- 
four conclusions selected from Wiclif 's writings were condemned. 
He was banished from the University. In 1384 Wiclif was 



138 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1381 

summoned to appear before the Pope ; but he was then dying 
from paralysis, and on the last day of that year he obeyed his 
summons to appear before a higher judgment seat. 

31. John Gower (§ 25) in the earlier days of Richard IL 
was still a wealthy country gentleman at home in Kent. He was 
acquiring two new manors in Norfolk and Suffolk, and he had 
still an interest in land near Wigborough, in Essex, when the 
men of Kent, under Wat Tyler, and the men of Essex, with Jack 
Straw for their priest, the excommunicated priest John Ball 
being also one of the company, rose in rebellion. Gower's 
home was in the midst of the district out of which, in May, 1381, 
the tumult sprang. 

The boy Richard, but eleven years old, had come, in 1377, 
to a troubled throne. The people were suffering. The French 
and Spaniards harassed the English coasts, destroying towns 
and interrupting trade. John of Gaunt urged to Parliament the 
needs of the country ; and the Parliament, forgetting all old 
grudges, voted liberal supplies, only appointing two merchants 
as treasurers to protect the public money from misuse. John 
of Gaunt then achieved in Brittany a costly failure. The Scots 
broke truce. The Government had spent all, and was heavily in 
debt. Parliament now resolved to meet two-thirds of the debt 
with a poll-tax of three groats upon each person above fifteen 
years of age. It was the second poll-tax within five years, and 
the sufferings of the people had then brought them to the verge 
of the next of the three great plague years of the fourteenth 
century. Each is associated with a piece of literature. The 
Great Plague of 1348-9, which killed Holcot and Bradwardine 
(§ 2), and Petrach's Laura, suggested the groundwork of Boc- 
caccio's " Decameron." The plague of 1360-1 was one of the 
miseries which caused William Langland to write the " Vision 
of Piers Plowman." The state of England immediately before 
the plague of 1382 is the subject of the poem written by John 
Gower on the occasion of the Jack Straw rebellion. There were 
other bad years, notably one in 1373, and there was no year in 
which the plague was altogether absent. But in 1381 the people 
had suffered patiently, until the farming of the heavy poll-tax 
gave them to be ground under it by men who looked, of course, 
to their own want of mercy for the profits of their speculation. 
But when, stung to rebellion, this English mob swarmed out of 
Kent and Essex to Blackheath, and threatened London, its 
demands were simply : that all should be free ; that they should 



TOA.D. 1382.] GOWER'S VOX CLAMANTIS. 1 39 

not be restrained from buying and selling wherever they could 
find a profitable market ; that there should be a fixed rental of 
land ; and a general pardon. Later experience condemns but 
one of their four points. These unhappy men, of whom many 
were seeking honestly to find the right, and some sought no 
more than a mischievous revenge on those whom they believed 
to be oppressors, poured into South wark on the 12th of June, 
destroyed the Marshalsea, sacked the archbishop's palace, 
crossed London Bridge next morning, destroyed Newgate, laid 
waste John of Gaunt's rich palace of the Savoy, and threw into 
its flames one whom they found taking to himself some of its 
gold and silver. At the worst they were not thieves, but wild 
and ignorant avengers. On the 14th the young king met the 
rebels at Mile End, and conceded their demands. The great 
body of them at once retired. But the men stung to a fierce 
despair by- private suffering, with all the baser portion of the 
crowd, remained. These, breaking into the Tower, where the 
men of mark in the state had taken refuge, murdered the Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury and other lords. This was the rabble met 
by the king at Smithfield on the 17th of June, when Wat Tyler 
was stabbed by Walworth the mayor, and the young king, only 
fifteen years old, won the generous trust even of this worst 
remnant of the rioters. When they bent their bows, crying 
"They have killed our captain, slay them all," young Richard 
galloped up to them and said, " What are you about, my friends? 
Tyler was a traitor ; I am your king. Follow me." They fol- 
lowed, and he led them into the clutch of a troop of soldiers, 
whom he would have set upon them if Sir Robert Knolles had 
had not been more merciful and wise than his young master. 
But submission was made, the concessions were revoked ; the 
insurrection was avenged with cruelty upon the people. Then 
came on them the terrible plague year, 1382. 

32. These were the events which drew from John Gower his 
best poem, the Vox Clamantis (Voice of One Crying), in seven 
books of Latin elegiacs. In its first book Gower told of the 
revolt allegorically, in the form of a dream of beasts who have 
changed their nature. But if, he says, he is in an island of dis- 
cord, let there be strife without and peace within his doors, and 
let him seek the less for worldly occupation. A voice admonished 
him quickly to write what he had seen and heard ; for dreams 
often contain warnings of the future. 

In his second book, being awake, he did begin to write, in- 



140 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. i 3 8r 

voking no muse but the Holy Spirit. If he seem unpolished to 
the reader, let the reader spare the faults, and look to the inner 
meaning of his work. And again and again he asks that the 
soul of his book, not its mere form, be looked to. The eye is 
blind, he says, and the ear deaf that convey nothing down to 
the heart's depths ; and the heart that does not utter what it 
knows is as a live coal hid under ashes. The Voice of One 
Crying shall be the name of his volume, because there are 
written in it the words that come of a fresh grief. Then he went 
on to utter what was in his heart. There is no blind fortune 
ruling the affairs of men ; they go ill or well according to the 
manner in which men fulfil their duties before God. As we do, 
so we rejoice or suffer. There is no misfortune, no good luck. 
Whatever happens among us, for good or ill, comes with our 
own doing — " nos sumus in causa." The object of Gower's 
" Vox Clamantis " was, therefore, to set the educated men, 
readers of Latin, to the task of finding that disease within our 
social body of which the Jack Straw rebellion was but a 
symptom ; his plan was to go through all orders of society, and 
ask himself wherein each fell short of its duty. 

This he began to do in the third book, which has, like the 
second, a most earnest prelude. " I do not," Gower says, "affect 
to touch the stars, or write the wonders of the poles ; but rather, 
with the common human voice that is lamenting in this land, 
I write the ills I see. In the voice of my crying there will 
be nothing doubtful, for every man's knowledge will be its best 
interpreter." Then follows a passage which ought to be quoted 
by all teachers who would train young Englishmen to write. 
Gower prays that his verse may not be turgid ; that there may 
be in it no word of untruth ; that each word may answer to the 
thing it speaks of pleasantly and fitly ; that he may flatter in it 
no one, and seek in it no praise above the praise of God. 
" Give me that there shall be less vice, and more virtue for my 
speaking." 

Then he divided society into three classes, represented by 
clerk, soldier, and ploughman, and began with an unsparing 
review of the vices of the higher clergy of his time. Christ was 
poor ; they heap together wealth. Christ gave on earth peace ; 
they only stir up wars. Christ gave freely ; they are as locked 
boxes. He lived to labour, but they take their ease ; Christ was 
gentle, they are impetuous. He walked in humility ; they walk 
in pride. Christ was full of pity ; they wreak vengeance. Christ 



toa.d. 1382.] GOWER'S VOX CLAMANTIS. 141 

was chaste ; they seldom live modest lives. He was a good 
shepherd, but they devour the sheep. They with full stomach 
praise the fasting of our Lord. We seek and worship wealth. 
The poor man shall be a fool, though he speak with the lips of 
Cato, and Dives shall be a wise man although he know nothing. 
There is no poor wise man. If the poor man be wise, he is a 
poor man and nothing else. " To this mind," said John Gower, 
" the prelates conform themselves more than to the mind of 
Christ." He referred to the split in the papacy ; and, orthodox 
conservative country gentleman as he was, he cried, " O head 
of the Church, recall the times of Christ, and see whether there 
be in them any example like that which ye follow. A clergy 
withdrawn from the law of piety has made that the tail of the 
Church which used to be its head ; its health is its disease ; its 
life its death ; its lifting up its fall ; its law its error ; and its 
own father its enemy." 

The fourth book of the " Vox Clamantis," as well as the third, 
was given to a review of the corruption of all orders of the clergy. 
In speaking of the friar, Gower wrote, " A man may serve one 
of three masters, God, the world, or the Apostate Devil. We 
see that the friar does not obey God's rule. He says that he 
is not of the world, that he should do a layman's duties to his 
country. It is the devil's yoke, then, that he wears. The only 
order true to its decretals is that consecrated once on a time 
by Brother Brunellus" (ch. iii. § 12). 

In the fifth book of his " Vox Clamantis," Gower turned to 
the soldier, and to the pure idea of his knightly honour. Then 
he spoke of the serf, dull in ignorance and vice, who tilled the 
earth ; and of the hired servants, who could scarcely be held for 
a month to their engagements. " They disdain to eat common 
food, find salt meat hurtful, quarrel with the cooking, grumble 
when there is no roast, say they are none the better for their 
beer or pease, and will not come again if you do not set a better 
dinner before them to-morrow. The poor son of poverty creates 
himself a lord out of his own stomach, and obeys none other. 
Loving no man, and not knowing that there is a God, if justice 
were not armed with terror, he would soon trample like a beast 
over his master." So wrote even a generous and true-hearted 
gentleman, in the days of Richard II. Alas for the poor, when the 
best minds are more conscious of the need of the strong hand to 
keep them down than of the duty of the helping hand to raise 
them ! The fruits of the earth, gathered by the labourers, are 



142 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [ad. 1309 

passed from land to land by the merchants. Gower went on, 
therefore, to review the merchants and their frauds. 

The sixth book of his poem he gave to the lawyer ; and from 
condemnation of injustice in high places, turned with direct 
address towards the king himself. "An unlearned boy-king," 
said Gower, " is negligent of the moral deeds by which the man 
grows out of the boy. A youthful assembly follow him as their 
leader, with such counsels as he wills to have. Elder men 
humour him for their greed, and the king's court contains all 
that is vicious. Error encompasses the boy on every side." In 
plain and direct words the boy was warned of his duty. His 
notorious addiction to the pleasures of the table was not forgotten. 
" Be free also, O king," said the poet, " from the sin of gluttony ; 
drive out the inertness and oppose the promptings of the flesh, 
and strongly lay hold on the good way." The example of his 
father the Black Prince was set before Richard. Avoiding war 
without just cause, kind rather than austere, seeking wisdom, 
subject to God, who alone is to be feared, let him live in love 
of God and of his neighbour ; ready for death ; great in the eyes 
of his subjects as he was found humble in the eyes of God. 

The seventh and last book of Gower's " Vox Clamantis " 
applied Nebuchadnezzar's dream to the state of society in Eng- 
land ; man's hard avarice being the iron in the feet of the image, 
and his lusts the clay. Man being the microcosm, the world around 
him will be good or bad, as he is good or bad. Prelates, curates, 
priests, scholars, monks, friars, soldiers, merchants, lawyers, were 
degenerate. Gower declared, with this, his especial love for 
the land of his birth. He repeated that what he had written was 
not his own complaint, but the voice of the people revealed to 
him in his dream. It touches only the guilty ; and may each 
correct his own fault where he finds it. " Here," he says, " is the 
voice of the people ; but often where the people cries, is God." 
And in the " Vox Clamantis " we do hear the voice that through- 
out the literature of the English people labours to maintain 
the right and to undo the wrong. 

33. But why did Gower, a true son of the Church, speak as 
he spoke in this poem of the pope ? In this he shared a wide- 
spread feeling that, as William Langland represented, ruin must 
come to the pope and a "knock of a king" to the Abbot oi 
Abingdon, unless the lives of pope and clergy were amended. 
Seventy years of the popes at Avignon — begun in 1309— were 
followed by a schism in the Church. The years at Avignon and 



to a.d. 1378.] QUESTIONS OF CHURCH REFORM. 1 43 

the succeeding schism quickened the stir of independent 
thought against a pope's claim to hold absolute and irresponsible 
authority. The removal to Avignon had been provoked by the 
absolutism of Boniface VIII. He had written to Philip the 
Fair of France, " We will you to know, that you are subject 
to us, in things spiritual and things temporal/' Philip had 
answered, " Be it known to your supreme fatuity, that in things 
temporal we are subject to no one." In his bull "Unam 
Sanctam," Boniface had set forth obedience to the pope as 
necessary to salvation. He had afterwards put Philip under 
ban. Perhaps his energy was tainted with the madness which 
became declared in his last days. It awakened reasoning 
as to the pope's position in the Church, and created a division 
of Church politics into French and Italian. French policy 
prevailed. 

The Archbishop of Bordeaux, bribed with the papacy to serve 
the King of France, as Clement V. refused to go to Rome. Thus 
began the seventy years of a French papacy, which had a court 
more scandalous than that of Rome, and set up claims of abso- 
lute dominion as loud as those of Boniface, though mainly 
urged, in servitude to France, against the German Emperor. 

The intellect of France, then represented by the University 
of Paris, laboured to restore peace to the Church. In his 
" Defensor Paris," Marsilius of Padua, who had been rector 
of the Paris University, argued that it was heresy in the pope 
to claim against the German Emperor a power to absolve 
from obedience to laws of God. He condemned as devilish a 
pope's absolution of subjects from oath of allegiance to their 
sovereign. " Christ only," said Marsilius, " is the rock on which 
the Church is built." Peter was not the chief apostle. No 
bishop of a particular province is declared by the Gospel to 
be Peter's successor ; but, rather, he is the true successor to 
Peter and the other apostles who comes nearest to them in 
holiness of life. As for the popes of his time, shutting their 
doors against humility and poverty — the true companions of 
Christ — " they," said Marsilius, " are not friends, but enemies 
of the Bridegroom." 

Gregory XI. died in 1378, two years after his return to 
Rome with those cardinals who would follow him. His Italian 
successor, Urban VI., disappointed expectation. Pride and 
passion took the place of his peaceful asceticism, and the car- 
dinals, being mostly French, declared by a majority that his 



144 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1378 

election was invalid, because made under constraint. So they 
forbade obedience to him, and in 1378 — three years before the 
date of the " Vox Clamantis " — made Robert of Cambray Pope 
Clement VII. 

For the next forty years there were two popes at a time. 
Many in Europe were then ready to say, "If two popes, why not 
twelve ? " and the most earnest defenders of the principle which 
had based safety of the Church upon the maintenance of one 
supreme visible head saw no way to peace but by submitting 
rival claims of irresponsible authority to the judgment of a 
general council of men who were less than popes. 

It was about three years after the beginning of the schism that 
John Gower, a devout orthodox churchman, hostile to Lollards, 
declared in his Vox Clamantis, that a clergy withdrawn from 
the law of piety had made that the tail of the Church which 
used to be its head. " Its health," he said, " is its disease ; its 
life its death ; its lifting up its fall ; its law its error ; and its 
own father its enemy." The Concilium Pads of Henry of 
Langenstein, a professor of theology in Paris, is of the same 
date as the event which produced Gower's Vox Clamantis. It 
urged the healing of schism by a general council, taking its 
authority from the Divine Head of the Church, and passing 
resolutions only in His name; and said, '"See to it whether 
horses, hounds, falcons, and the useless servants of the clergy 
be not now, far more than the Christian poor, eating up the 
heritage of the Church." Of Boniface IX., who, in 1389, 
succeeded Urban VI., one record tells that even during mass 
this or that secretary would be coming to him with some report 
about money, his living god. He it was who despatched into all 
countries that enormous staff of hucksters in indulgences upon 
whom, Chaucer poured scorn in the Prologue to his " Canter- 
bury Tales." 

Meanwhile the University of Paris urged that both popes 
should resign, or else submit their claims to arbitration, and that 
if they would do neither of these things a General Council 
should be called ; but the pope who rejected all the three paths 
towards peace should be declared a heretic. 

In the first year of the fifteenth century, Nicholas of 

Clamanges, Bachelor of Theology in the Paris University, and 

not long afterwards secretary to Benedict XIII., issued a book, De 

Ruina Ecclesio?,\n which he declared the evil of the Church to have 

rown from the depraved lives of the clergy, and discussed the 



toa.d. 1396.] JOHN BARBOUR. 145 

vices of the various orders, as John Gower had done in the Vox 
Clamantis. He saw, like Gower, cause and effect in the world's 
affairs ; and, failing immediate reform, he looked forward to the 
day of a sharp remedy for evils that had grown with wealth and 
luxury of the high clergy. Timely reform alone could avert the 
issue of all this misdeed in persecution of the Church by the 
secular power, and its deprival of usurped rights and possessions. 
For this revolution Nicholas of Clamanges urged that men less 
blinded might see the foundations laid in divers ways. The 
chief duty, he said, of the theologian is to preach from the study 
of the Scriptures, looking at the Fathers but as rivulets descend- 
ing from that fountain head. The doctrine was, according to 
the spirit of the University of Paris working through the natural 
diversity of minds, expressed by one party with moderation, by 
another with uncompromising purpose of subjecting papal abso- 
lutism to control of Councils and producing other of the changes 
sought by more advanced reformers. The University of Toulouse 
represented those who maintained faith in the pope's supreme 
authority, and resisted changes in the Church law of a former 
time. And so the controversy stood during the later days of 
Gower and of Chaucer. 

34. But the best as well as the worst mind of Europe found 
its voice upon the lips of cultivated churchmen. In Scotland 
John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, had, in the year 
1375, half written his poem of the Bruce. This work, complete 
at the beginning of the reign of Richard II., represented the 
bright spirit of liberty maintained by that Scottish war of inde- 
pendence (a.d. 1294 — 1324) which had produced in the days of 
Edward I. a Wallace, in the days of Edward II. a Bruce, and 
in the days of Edward III. a poet in John Barbour, who, as 
he turned Bruce into a hero of romance, wrote with full heart : 

" Ah, Freedom is a noble thing ! 
Freedom makes man to have liking ; 
Freedom all solace to man gives : 
He lives at ease that freely lives." 

John Barbour, born perhaps in 1316, possibly as late as 1330, 
was, in 1357, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, and so remained until 
his death, in 1396. King Robert II. of Scotland gave him two 
pensions, one of ^10 a year for life, payable out of the customs 
of Aberdeen, the other, in reward for his poem, 20s. a year, pay- 
able for ever from the rent of the land and fisheries which 
Aberdeen held from the crown. Besides his Bruce, which is a 

K 



146 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1377 

romance of more than 13,000 rhyming eight-syllabled lines, 
Barbour wrote a book, which is lost, of the " History of Scottish 
Kings," from Brut and his son Albanac downward. He wrote 
also many thousand lines of Lives of Saints, which have been 
lately found. 

In his great poem on King Robert the Bruce Barbour dealt 
with events so recent that he could quote for one incident the 
authority of an eye-witness, Sir Allan Cathcart, by whom he had 
heard it told. Bruce died in 1329, or less than fifty years before 
Barbour sang of him. He came to life again in the poem as a 
knightly hero, able to defend a pass against 300 men of Gallo- 
way ; and the true course of his story was followed faithfully, 
though rather with the freedom of a poet than the literalness of 
a chronicler. Beyond his day in contempt of astrology, and 
otherwise very free from superstition, Barbour yet boldly gave a 
touch of the diabolical to the policy of King Edward II. by 
making him take counsel with a fiend. 

35. While in the North this vigorous Archdeacon of Aberdeen 
still lived and wrote, and the other famous poets of the South 
were Langland and Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer was, during 
the reign of Richard II., chief in renown. Of his ditties and 
glad songs the land full filled was over all. Then it was that he 
wrote the House of Fame. The poem, in three books of octo- 
syllabic rhyme, opened with a dream of the Temple of Venus, 
which is of glass, in a wide wilderness of sand. The poet, pray- 
ing to be saved from phantom or illusion, was carried up by an 
eagle like that which swooped in dream upon Dante in the ninth 
canto of the " Purgatory." We have passed into the second 
period of Chaucer's life, when the great Italian poets are far 
more to him than the small singers of France ; and in the 
" House of Fame " we find very distinct traces of the influence of 
Dante on the mind of a great fellow-poet. In Chaucer there 
was, indeed, no gloom ; but he penetrated none the less 
deeply to the heart of human life because he had faith in God's 
shaping of the universe, was kindly and ever cheerful, and knew 
how to be wise without loss of the homely playfulness that comes 
of bright fancy and a heart at ease. The eagle of the poem 
declared himself the poet's friend, though he was heavy to carry. 
Was Jove going to make a star of him ? Chaucer asked. No, 
said the eagle ; Jove has no thought yet of making a star of you. 
But you have taken pains with your love-singing, and have been 
a quiet student, therefore you are being taken up to see the 



toa.d. 1383.] CHAUCER'S HOUSE OF FAME. J47 

House of Fame. You hear little about your neighbours, said 
the eagle to him. When you have done the reckonings of your 
day's office work (over the books relating to the customs and 
subsidy of wools, skins, and tanned hides in the port of London) 

" Thou goest home to thine house anone, 
And allso dumb as a stone 
Thou sittest at another book 
Till fully dazed is tny look, 
And livest thus as an hermite, 
Although thine abstinence is lite" (i.e. little). 

Chaucer enjoyed life and good fare ; but the man of genius wins 
only by hard work a fame that is to live through many centuries, 
and Chaucer, happy among books, which are men disembodied, 
as among men in the flesh, was a hard-working student. As for 
the House of Fame, which he was permitted to look into, he 
found it, he said, the place between heaven, earth, and sea, to 
which all rumours fall ; and his description of it began with a 
reminiscence of the invocation at the opening of Dante's " Para- 
dise." But in invoking " Apollo, God of Science and of Light," 
Chaucer modestly avoids following Dante in the suggestion that 
he will crown himself with a few leaves of Apollo's laurel. He 
says only that he will go 

" Unto the next laurer I see 
And kiss it, for it is thy tree." 

Then Chaucer described the House of Fame as he saw it on a 
rock of ice, inscribed with names of men once famous. Many 
were melted or melting away ; but the graving of the names of 
men of old fame was as fresh as if just written, for they were 
" conserved with the shade." The description of the House is 
one of the brightest creations of Chaucer's fancy. There is a 
grand suggestiveness, a true elevation of thought, in the plain 
words that conjure up images, clearly defined and brightly 
coloured, which do not rise only to melt in air and be no more. 
They pass into the reader's inner house of thought and live there. 
Of the goddess who sat within, some asked fame for their good 
works, and were denied good or bad fame. Others who had de- 
served well were trumpeted by slander. Others obtained their 
due reward. Some, who had done, well, desired their good works 
to be hidden, and had their asking. Others made like request, 
but had their deeds trumpeted through the clarion of gold. 
Some who had done nothing asked and had fame for deeds only 
to be done by labour ; others, who had asked like favour, were 



148 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1382 

jested at through the black clarion. Chaucer himself refused to 
be petitioner. Enough, if his name were lost after his death, 
that he best knew what he suffered, what he thought. He would 
drink, he said, of the cup given to him, and do his best in his own 
art. From the House of Fame he was taken by the eagle to the 
whirling House of Rumour, full of reports and of lies shaped as 
shipmen and pilgrims, pardoners, runners, and messengers. 
Every rumour flew first to Fame, who gave it name and dura- 
tion. In a corner of this House of Rumour Chaucer saw men 
crowding about one who told love-stories. The clamour about 
this shadow of himself awoke him from his dream. Then being 
awake he remembered how high and far he had been in the 
spirit. 

" Wherefore to study and read ahvay 
I purpose to do day by day." 

36. Among the love-songs which made Chaucer famous were 
his translation from "The Romaunt of the Rose" and his 
" Troilus and Cressida." Not content with all that he had done 
to give womanly delicacy to the character of Cressida in the 
earlier part of the poem, and to draw the noblest moral from her 
fall, he felt even yet that the beauty of pure womanhood was 
clouded by her story. He set to work, therefore, upon The 
Legend of Good Women with the avowed purpose of satisfying 
by his writings his own sense of what is good and just. But the 
suggestion even of this series of poems Chaucer derived from 
Boccaccio, whose collection of 105 stories of Illustrious Women, 
told briefly and pleasantly in Latin prose, includes nearly all of 
those whom Chaucer celebrated ; a remarkable omission being 
that ideal wife Alcestis, long since enshrined in our poet's verse 
as Queen of Love. Chaucer's stories of good women probably 
were written in various years, and represent the steadiness with 
which he paid, through life, what he calls reverence to the Daisy. 
The Prologue, written in or after 1382, says that it was his delight 
to read in books, and that he was not easily drawn from his 
studies except in May, when the flowers begin to spring. And 
then of all the flowers it was above all the Daisy that he loved — 

So glad am I, when that I have presence 
Of it, to doon it alle reverence 
As she that is of alle floures flour, 
Fulfilled of all virtue and honour, 
And ever alike fair and fresh of hue, 
And I love it, and ever alike new, 
And ever shall, till that mine herte die." 






TO A.r>. 1384.] THE LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN. I49 

Chaucer alone, among those who wrote ditties to the Marguerite 
or Daisy, sang of the flower as an emblem of womanly truth and 
purity, of a gentle and devoted wife, with heart of gold and a 
white crown of innocence. As he sought his Daisy, and greeted 
it as he could — 

" Kneeling alway till it unclosed was 
Upon the smale, softe, swote grass " — 

he heard (here varying his allegory in the praise of woman's 
innocence) the birds escaped from the net of the fowler who 
would have betrayed them with his sophistry ; and then the poet, 
who sang " I ne clepe not innocence folye," feigned that he slept 
near the daisy on fresh turfs, and saw in dream the God of Love 
leading a Queen, Alcestis, like the daisy, clad in royal 

"habit green. 
A fret of gold she hadde next her hair, 
And upon that a white coroune she bare, 
With flourouns small." 

After Alcestis came " the ladies good nineteen," who were said in 
Chaucer's " Court of Love " to form her following. These all 5 
when they saw the daisy, knelt and sang with one voice hail 
and honour to the flower that bare the praise of them all in its 
white emblem crown. But then the God of Love saw where the 
poet lay too near to his own flower. He had translated " The 
Romaunt of the Rose;" he had sung of the faithless Cressida. 
Alcestis pleaded for him that he might have been falsely accused. 
He had served as he could, and here follows a list of some of 
Chaucer's earlier writings. It includes already that version of 
Boccaccio's " Teseide " — the story of Palamon and Arcite — which 
the poet afterwards placed first in the series of Canterbury 
Tales. It includes also another of the Canterbury Tales, " The 
Life of Saint Cecile." This is a metrical translation from the 
Golden Legend, which appeared in the collection as " The Second 
Nun's Tale." Alcestis obtained grace for the poet on condition 
that year by year as he lived he should spend time in making a 
glorious legend 

"Of goode women, maidenes, and wives, 
That weren true in loving all their lives." 

As it was added that the book, when finished, was to be given, on 
behalf of Alcestis, to the Queen at Eltham or at Shene, we 
know that this Prologue could not have been written before 
1382, when Richard II. married Anne of Bohemia. 

37. The next work of mark completed in the reign of 



[50 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d, 137& 

Richard II. was a Translation of Higderts Polychronicon 
(§ 5), completed in 1387 by John Trevisa. Trevisa was 
a Cornishman, educated at Oxford, who became vicar of 
Berkeley, in Gloucestershire, and chaplain to Thomas fourth 
Lord Berkeley. Afterwards he was canon of the collegiate 
church of Westbury. As a clergyman he was no friend to the 
monks. In the course of his life he had been to Germany and 
Italy, but he spent most of his days in Gloucestershire, where 
he occupied his leisure in translation of useful books out of 
Latin into his mother tongue. He is said to have died in 1412. 
Trevisa's translation of the " Polychronicon " was made for 
Lord Berkeley, and was preceded by Trevisa's own Dialogue on 
Translation between a Lord aiid a Clerk j that is to say, his 
patron and himself. Trevisa translated from Occam " A 
Dialogue between a Soldier and a Clerk," and from Fitzrauf, 
Archbishop of Armagh, a sermon preached at Oxford in 1357 
against the. Mendicant Friars. Fitzrauf was, in his day, one of 
the friends of Richard of Bury (§ 1), and was accused to 
the pope by the Mendicant Friars, against whom he preached 
this sermon about two years before his death. Caxton, who 
first printed Trevisa's translation of the " Polychronicon," said 
that he had also translated the Bible ; and it is thought possible 
that this translation may be still extant at Rome. Trevisa, who 
was a shrewd man, added a few short explanatory notes to his 
translation of the " Polychronicon," which is notable as one of 
the earliest specimens of English prose. 

38. Chaucer and Gower were supreme and almost alone as 
representatives of English Literature during the second half of 
the reign of Richard II. The year in which Trevisa finished 
his translation of Higden was a critical time for the king and 
country, and for Chaucer too. Thus far Chaucer had prospered. 
In 1378, within a year after the accession of Richard II., he 
had been twice sent abroad on diplomatic service — in January, 
with the Earl of Huntingdon to France, to treat of the king's 
marriage ; and in May, with Sir Edward Berkeley to Lombardy, 
to treat on affairs concerning the king's war, when the shores of 
England lay at the mercy of the French and Spaniards. In 
1382 the friendship of John of Gaunt had procured for Chaucer 
another office under Government. Retaining his post as Comp- 
troller of Wool Customs, he became also Comptroller of the 
Petty Customs in the port of London, with liberty to do the 
work of that office by deputy. In February, 1385, he was 



toa.d. 1387.] TREVISA. CHAUCER IN TROUBLE. 151 

released from all compulsory work for his salaries by being 
allowed to appoint a permanent deputy in the office of Wool 
Customs. Such was the course of Chaucer's outward life at the 
time when he wrote " The Legend of Good Women." In 1386 
he sat as one of the members for Kent in the Parliament which 
met on the 1st of October, he and his colleague being allowed 
for their expenses at the rate of eight shillings a day (money of 
that time) for sixty-one days. The French were then threaten- 
ing England with invasion ; and the great barons, headed by 
the king's uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, were active for the 
overthrow of the king's corrupt administration. John of Gaunt 
was then away with an army in Portugal, upon affairs arising 
out of his relation to Castile. 

In the Parliament which had Chaucer — acting,, of course, 
with the king's party — among its members, there arose a trial of 
strength. After three weeks of struggle, Richard was compelled 
to abandon his Chancellor, the Earl of Suffolk, to a prosecution 
by the Commons, and to submit himself for twelve months to a 
Commission of Regency. Two famous noblemen of the day, 
the Earl of Gloucester and the Earl of Arundel — whom Gower 
celebrated as the "Swan" and the "Horse" when after- 
wards he followed the course of their policy with patriotic 
sympathy in his " Tripartite Chronicle " — as leaders of the 
Opposition, were included in this Commission. It was to in- 
quire into the conduct of officials of all kinds, and into gifts 
and pardons granted in the name of the Crown ; it was to hear 
and decide on all griefs of the people which could not be 
redressed by common course of law ; and to provide for all 
abuses such remedies as might seem to it good and profitable. 
The Commission was appointed on the 19th of November. 
It began with an examination of the accounts of officers em- 
ployed in the collection of the revenue. On the 10th of 
December it dismissed Chaucer from his office of Comptroller 
of the Wool Customs. Ten days later it dismissed him also 
from his other office of Comptroller of the Petty Customs. 

Chaucer and Gower were old friends, good friends together ; 
but in relation to the politics of the time so differently placed 
that Gower, in his country-house, a quiet and independent 
looker-on, hailed with enthusiasm the success of those whose 
day of power brought ruin to Chaucer. 

39. During at least a part of the year's rule of this Commis- 
sion of Regency Chaucer seems to have been in Guienne with 



152 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1387 

John of Gaunt, who was there marrying Philippa, his daughter 
by his first wife, Duchess Blanche, to King John I. of Portugal. 
The marriage was graced by Chaucer with his poem of The 
Flower and the Leaf. The Flower and the Leaf represented 
two of the badges usual in mediaeval heraldry. A flower, the 
rose, is the badge of England ; a leaf, the shamrock, is the 
badge of Ireland. In Chaucer's time there was a current argu- 
ment in chivalry as to the relative significance of leaves and 
flowers. Eustache Deschamps, nephew and pupil of Guillaume 
Machault, with an eye to the roses of England, wrote in honour 
of Philippa, upon the occasion of the wedding, a poem giving to 
the flower superiority over the leaf, as having fairer scent, 
colour, and promise of fruit. There can be but little doubt 
that Chaucer's poem was, from the English side, a return com- 
pliment to the bridegroom. John of Portugal, a man of thirty, 
had fought for his throne, and owed both that and his wife to 
success in battle. He was a soldier king, who lived to be called 
John the Great ; and Chaucer's poem, written in the person of a 
lady — the bride elect — gives the chief honour to the laurel, meed 
of mighty conquerors. " Unto the leaf," she says, " I owe mine 
observaunce." 

40. To this part of Chaucer's life may belong also the poem 
of The Cuckoo and the Nightingale. Master Nicholas of 
Guildford had sung (ch. iii. § 30) of the contest overheard by him 
between the owl and nightingale about two hundred years before 
Chaucer sang of what he also had overheard between the 
nightingale and cuckoo. But two hundred years before Chaucer 
the birds were rude ; each bragged of himself, and made con- 
temptuous attacks upon the other. The only question was, 
which is the better bird? Now, in the contest between nightin- 
gale and cuckoo, the cuckoo indeed is a bird of bad manners, 
but he does not affront the nightingale with personalities. He 
is rude because he flouts at love, which is the subject of discus- 
sion. The poem is based on a popular superstition that they 
will be happy in love during the year who hear the nightingale 
before the cuckoo. If they hear the cuckoo first it is the worse 
for them. No date can be suggested for the poem, which seems 
to belong to Chaucer's second period, and like " The Flower 
and the Leaf," which was no doubt written in 1387, during the 
days of terror for the king's party, shows that Chaucer was a 
man whom no adversity could sour. 

41. On the 19th of November, 1387, the year's power of 



toa.d. i 3 88.] THE TESTAMENT OF LOVE. 1 53 

the Commission was to expire. Richard, resolving to arrest and 
send for trial his most obstinate opponents, entered London on 
the ioth. Next morning he learned that his uncle Gloucester, 
with the Earls of Arundel and Nottingham, was advancing in 
force upon London. Before London these lords were joined by 
John of Gaunt's son, Henry Earl of Derby. They were joined 
also by the Earl of Warwick, whom Gower in his " Tripartite 
Chronicle" has celebrated as the Bear. In England there was 
civil war. The insolent court favourite, Robert de Vere, Duke 
of Ireland, marching to the king's aid with troops raised near 
Chester, was met and defeated at Radcot Bridge by young 
Henry Earl of Derby. The king, preparing to keep Christmas 
safely in the Tower, was surrounded by troops, when the Lon- 
doners fled, and he was soon compelled to make submission. 
Next year, at the beginning of February (1388), a Parliament 
met in London, which some called " The Merciless," and some 
" The Wonderful Parliament," and which sat till Whitsuntide. 
It hanged Chief Justice Tresilian and the ex-Mayor Sir Nicholas 
Bramber ; hanged or beheaded many more ; banished obnoxious 
justiciars ; and compelled the king to swear assent to all these 
judgments. 

If Chaucer wrote The Testament of Love during this reign of 
terror for the men of the king's party, Chaucer was among the 
imprisoned, and but narrowly escaped the gallows. Whoever 
wrote that book, which has been long ascribed to Chaucer, was 
arrested and imprisoned by this Parliament ; when in prison was 
ever sought to declare against his late associates, and had such 
evidence of murderous designs produced to him that " if they 
were not seen they might be felt." The prisoner, whoever he was, 
therefore, told frankly as much as he knew ; which, he adds, was 
no more than those who said he had played false to them owned 
to be true. Whether the prisoner was Chaucer or not Chaucer, 
he must have felt that life and liberty were not worth giving for 
such men as those were shown to be who had been chief plotters 
on the king's side during the past year. John of Gaunt's son 
Henry, whom Chaucer had known from childhood, though 
he had not then influence enough with the Parliament to save 
old Sir Simon Burley from the scaffold, could speak with effect 
to Chaucer if he was the prisoner, who in this prose work, " The 
Testament of Love," solaced captivity after the manner of 
Boethius (ch. ii. § 18), by feigning that Love came to him in 
his cell and held discourse with him, preaching the divinity in 



154 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 138S 

manhood, and saying to him, " If thou work, thou art above all 
things save God alone." Let him seek the Pearl beyond price. 
The prisoner complained of the hard dealings of fortune. They 
have taught him, said Love, to know his friends; and if that 
Pearl shine to himward, he is more blessed than in worldly joy. 
The spiritual teaching of the book includes a passage that might 
be Chaucer's in its respect for women. These are its closing 
words : " He that them annoyeth doth his own shame ; it is a 
comfortable pearl against all teens (sorrows). Every company is 
mirthed by their present being. Truly I wist never virtue but 
a woman was thereof the root." The author of " The Testament 
of Love" was a Londoner, and had also been, like Chaucer, em- 
ployed under Government ; for he says, " While I administered 
the office of common doing, as in ruling the stablishments 
emonges the people, I defouled never my conscience for ne 
manner deed, but ever by wit and by counsel of the wisest, the 
matters weren drawen to their right ends." 

If Chaucer did not write " The Testament of Love " — and 
it is likely that he did not — we have no evidence of his im- 
prisonment by those who had deprived him of his Government 
offices. But we have evidence that he was pinched severely 
in his fortunes at the time of the sitting of the Merciless Par- 
liament; for on May Day in this year, 1388, he was obliged 
to raise money on his two pensions, which were then cancelled 
and assigned to a John Scalby. What matter ? Chaucer 
dined worse, and set to .work upon the " Canterbury Tales." 

42. In Guienne his friend John of Gaunt was repeating the 
last move in his chess play with fortune, and securing in 1388 a 
political match for Catherine, only daughter of his wife Con- 
stance, and inheritor of her pretensions to the Spanish crown. 
He married her to Henry, son and heir of the reigning King of 
Castile; and from this couple, established thus as Prince and 
Princess of Asturias, the line came down of Spanish sovereigns 
for many generations. 

King Richard, in May, 1389, suddenly asked his uncle 
Gloucester how old he was ; and, being told that he was in his 
twenty-second year, said he must then certainly be of age to 
manage his own concerns. So he dismissed his council, took 
the Government into his own hands, and left his uncle Gloucester 
to retire into the country, while John of Gaunt was desired to 
return to England. By this court revolution Chaucer profited. 
On the 1 2th of July in the same year he was appointed Clerk of 






toa.d. 1391.] TREATISE ON THE ASTROLABE. 1 55 

the Works at the Palace of Westminster, Tower of London, 
Castle of Berkhampstead, and at about a dozen royal manors and 
lodges, and at the mews for the king's falcons at Charing Cross. 
He might serve by deputy, and his salary was two shillings a day, 
which would be about twenty in present value. In November of 
the same year John of Gaunt returned to London. 

During the next eight years of his reign, until the coup d'etat 
of 1397, Richard II. remembered the rough lesson he had re- 
ceived. Living in some fear lest he might lose his crown, he 
was careful to avoid acts that would stir men to rebellion. 
John Gower was, during much of this time, like other patriots, 
loyally paying him the honour due to his apparent good inten- 
tions, and — considering his youth and noble birth, as son of the 
Black Prince — due also to the possible ripening of character, 
now that he had bought much hard experience with the follies 
of his earlier years. 

In 1 39 1 Chaucer, for some unknown reason, ceased to hold 
office as clerk of the king's works. His means were then very 
small; indeed it does not appear that he had other income 
than the ^ioa year (say, now ^100) for life, granted in 1374 by 
John of Gaunt, and his allowance of 40s. (say £20) half-yearly for 
robes as the king's esquire. And it was at this date, 1391, that 
he wrote for his son Lewis, ten years old, a book of instruction, 
Bread and Milk for Babes, or the Conclusions of the Astrolabie; 
simply and tenderly — true to the pure domestic feeling that 
shines through his verse — employed in a father's duty of en- 
couraging his child's taste for ennobling studies. He had 
given the boy an astrolabe, and the little treatise was to show 
him how to use it, as far as a child could. Some of its uses, he 
said, " be too hard for thy tender age of ten years to conceive. 
By this treatise, divided in five parts, will I show thee wonder 
light rules and naked words in English, for Latin ne canst thou 
yet but small, my little son. But, nevertheless, sufficeth to thee 
■these true conclusions in English, as well as sufficeth to those 
noble clerks, Greeks, these same conclusions in Greek ; and to 
the Arabians in Arabic; and to Jews in Hebrew; and to the 
Latin folk in Latin ; which Latin folk had them first out of 
divers other languages, and wrote them in their own tongue, 

that is to say in Latin And, Lewis, if it so be that 

I show thee in my little English as true conclusions touching 
this matter, and not only as true, but as many and subtle con- 
clusions, as he should in Latin in any common treatise of the 



156 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1389 

astrolabe, con me the more thanks, and pray God save the king 
that is the Lord of this language." 

43. Meanwhile John Gower (§ 32) had been living in out- 
ward peace, and still was, as far as we know, unmarried. There 
was an old friendship between him and Chaucer. When, in the 
first year of Richard's reign, Chaucer went with a mission to Lom- 
bardy, he had left the care of his private interests in the hands 
of two friends, one of whom was John Gower. Chaucer had 
dedicated to Gower his " Troilus and Cressida," and had then 
joined to his friend's name a word of honour, as " the moral 
Gower," which cleaves to it still. Presently we come to a poem 
of Gower's from which we learn that this friendship remained 
unbroken to their later days. 

In 1389 King Richard had taken the Government into his 
own hands, and, living in fear of his people, made some effort to 
rule also himself. For a few following years men who, like 
Gower, had their country's welfare at heart, credited the king 
with good intentions, and gave him loyally their friendship. In 
1390 John Gower received from the Crown the rectory of Great 
Braxted, in Essex, a mile distant from the parish of Wigborough, 
where he had property. John Gower's name is on the list of 
rectors of this parish, not as priest — for he was not an ordained 
priest — but as clerk. In 1393 John Gower, rowing to town 
from his house in Kent or Essex by the river highway, then com- 
monly used as the great London road, met the king's barge. 
At the invitation of Richard — who was at that time twenty-six 
years old, while the poet's age was nearer sixty-six — Gower left 
his boat and conversed with the king, who, in the course of 
conversation, asked him to write a new book for himself to read. 
Gower had been suffering from a long illness, and still was ill, 
but he undertook to write such a book in English for King 
Richard, to whom his allegiance and heart's obedience were 
due; and he resolved to write so that his words might be as 
wisdom to the wise and recreation to the idle. Thus Gower 
began his " Confessio Amantis" (Confession of a Lover), at a 
time when his friend Chaucer was at work upon the " Canter- 
bury Tales ;" and thus each poet in his latter years was 
following the example which had been set by Boccaccio in his 
" Decameron," except that they used verse instead of prose in 
stringing a chain of tales on a slight thread of story. But as 
to the spirit of their work our English poets differ much from 
the Italian. 



TOA.D. I393-] GOWER'S CONFESSIO AM ANT IS. 1 57 

In the Confessio A7nantis, Gower's notion of a poem that 
should be — 

"Wisdom to the wise, 
And play to them that list to play/' 

was as serious as Hampole's " Prick of Conscience." He began 
by telling its origin, and dedicating it to the king. But in a 
revision of his book, made when Richard had cast down the 
hope of those who credited him, for a few years after 1389, with 
the desire to do his duty, Gower expunged his words of alle- 
giance, said in place of them, " What shall befal here afterward 
God wot!" and transferred the dedication to Henry of Lan- 
caster. For the fashionable device of his poem Gower, infirm 
and elderly, cared little. To the best of his power he used it as 
a sort of earthwork from behind which he set himself the task 
of digging and springing a mine under each of the seven deadly 
sins. There were eight books, with a Prologue. The Prologue 
repeated briefly the cry of the "Vox Clamantis." The eight books 
were, one for each of the seven sins, with one interpolated book, 
seventh in the series, which rhymed into English a digest of the 
" Secretum Secretorum." This was a summary of philosophical 
and political doctrine wrongly supposed in the Middle Ages to 
contain the pith of Aristotle's teaching, as drawn out by himself 
for the use of Alexander. The second part of it, " De Regimine 
Principum," on the duties of kings, or " Governail of Princes/' 
as the English writers called it, enabled Gower to edify the un- 
teachable Richard with much argument upon the state and 
duties of a king. 

But how can " The Confession of a Lover" give occasion 
for seven sets of stories against the seven deadly sins ? Gower 
feigns that he went to the woods on a May Day, as Lover, and 
called upon Cupid and Venus. Cupid and Venus came, but he 
was old, and they showed him no kind cheer, although he said 
that he was dying of love. If dying, then, said Venus, let her 
Confessor come and shrive him. The Confessor was Genius, the 
Priest of Nature, her own clerk, as appointed in "The Romaunt 
of the Rose," but who had first found his way into literature 
through "The Plaint of Nature," by Alain de l'Isle (§ 16). 
To this Confessor the Lover knelt in due form, and begged of 
Dominus his holy father Genius, as he was himself disturbed at 
heart, and had his wits greatly astray, that he would put before 
him the several points of his shrift, that there might be nothing 
forgotten. He was, in fact, to put, according to the manner of 



158 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1393 

the confessional, his searching questions ; and he began in due 
form with questions as to the Lover's use of his five senses, 
especially of sight and hearing. The thread was now made 
ready for the stringing of the chain of stories. The tales lie close 
together, connected throughout, sometimes skilfully, sometimes 
with an obvious strain of ingenuity, by passages of dialogue 
between the Confessor and the Lover whom he systematically 
questions. Having discoursed on the delusions of the senses, the 
Confessor called his son's attention to the "deadly vices seven:" 
pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust; each 
classified into its chief forms, and every form illustrated with 
incident or tale. In the last book Gower elaborated the story of 
Apollonius of Tyre, which is in the " Gesta Romanorum," an 
old collection of stories, arranged according to subjects, with 
allegorical religious applications suitable for use in the enliven- 
ment of sermons ; and called " Deeds of the Romans," because 
every tale is associated with some real or fictitious Roman 
emperor. It is also in the " Pantheon" of Godfrey of Viterbo, 
whence Gower says that he took it. From Gower came the 
story of " Pericles" among the plays of Shakspeare — a play 
opened by Gower as chorus, with lines illustrating the use once 
made of stories furnished in this manner by the poets : 

" To sing a song of old was sung, 
From ashes ancient Gower is come ; 

It hath been sung at festivals. 
On Ember eves, and holy ales, 
And lords and ladies in their lives 
Have read it for restoratives. " 

Gower ended his " Confession of a Lover" by reverting to 
the love-plaint with renewed appeal to Venus, who then told 
him that his complaints were against Nature. He should re- 
member his age. Cupid came by with the mirthful band of the 
young lovers. Age followed with a smaller company of old men 
who had been servants to Love. These pleaded for the poet. 
Cupid drew the dart out of his breast. Venus put cold ointment 
over his heart, and held to him a mirror in which he saw his 
faded colour, dim sad eyes, face wrinkled with age, and hoary 
hair. Then, laughing, she asked him what love was ; and he 
replied that he knew not. So he had absolution from his Con- 
fessor, the Priest of Nature, and was dismissed from the Court 
of Venus with advice from her to go, " where moral virtue 
dwelleth." He was to take also a message from Venus to her 



toa.d. 1399.] PIERS PLOWMAN'S CREDE. 1 59 

disciple and poet Chaucer, who in the flower of his youth made 
ditties and glad songs wherewith, said Venus, 

" The land fulfilled is over all ; 
Whereof to him in special, 
Above all others I am most hold ; 
Forthi now in his daies old, 
Thou shalt him telle this message : " 

That he was to crown his work by making his Testament of Love 
as Gower had made his shrift, so that her Court might record it. 
Here it is quite evident that Gower, speaking of himself as one 
old man, turns with playful compliment to his friend Chaucer 
as another. A few years later this passage was omitted from a 
revised copy of the " Confessio Amantis ;" for it would have been 
out of place — almost a trivial impertinence — when Gower had 
learnt how Chaucer was in his old days fashioning the crown of 
his life as a poet,- with the " Canterbury Tales." In them we 
have indeed his Testament of Love to God and Man. 

44. Contemporary with the " Confessio Amantis" was a 
poem of 850 lines, in the measure and outward manner of " The 
Vision of Piers Plowman," called Piers Plowman's Crede, and 
levelled with much bitterness of feeling against all orders of 
friars. In this poem an ignorant man who had learnt his Pater- 
noster and Ave Mary wished to be taught his Creed, and, after 
seeking knowledge in vain of the friars, met with a common 
ploughman, who explained to him that the friars, although their 
orders were founded by good men, had become children of the 
devil, reminded him how they persecuted Wiclif, and himself 
gave the instruction sought. The ploughman in the poem was 
simply a poor rustic. There was no high allegory, as in the 
" Vision," and the antagonism to Church corruption was that of 
a lower and a harsher mind. The poem was written in or about 
the year 1394, and the author of it seems to have been the 
author of " The Plowman's Tale." 

45. Geoffrey Chaucer was at work upon the " Canterbury 
Tales" during the last years of his life, and left them unfinished 
when he died. He must have lost his wife within a year after 
his loss of fortune by deprival of his offices in the Customs, for 
after June, 1387, the receipt of her pension by Philippa Chaucer 
ceased. But she left him at least two sons, an elder son, 
Thomas, and the Lewis for whom Chaucer wrote his treatise on 
the astrolabe. It is probable also that when, in 1381, John of 
Gaunt paid a substantial sum for the novitiate of an Elizabeth 



l6o A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1393 

Chaucer in the Abbey of Barking, he was dealing generously 
by one of the children of his friend. Chaucer's elder son 
Thomas, who was born about the year 1367, was advanced in 
his fortunes both by King Richard and by John of Gaunt. In 
some year between 1392 and 1404 he married an heiress, who 
brought him estates in Oxfordshire and other counties. In 
Thomas's daughter Alice, Geoffrey Chaucer was grandfather to 
the grandmother of John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, whom 
Richard III. declared heir apparent if the Prince of Wales died 
without issue. John de la Pole died childless. He was killed 
at the battle of Stoke, in 1487. 

It was in the sixteenth year of Richard, 1393, that Gower, in- 
vited courteously into the king's barge, was commissioned to 
write a new poem for his Majesty. It was in the seventeenth year 
of King Richard, 1394, that Chaucer, whose means then were 
very small, received from the king a pension of ^20 (equal to 
^200) a year for life, payable half-yearly, at Michaelmas and 
Easter. In 1395 Chaucer's straitened means were indicated 
by four borrowings from the exchequer of money in advance. 
There was but one such borrowing in 1 396 ; but there were four 
again in 1397, the year in which King Richard II. cast himself 
out finally from the hearts of any who had thus far struggled to 
retain hope of his future. 

In 1396, when Richard, aged twenty-nine, was about to ally 
himself by marriage with an eight-year old French princess, 
Froissart tells that this king of England spoke to the Count of 
St. Pol, the French king's representative, of his uncles, among 
whom Gloucester was opposed to the French match. St. Pol 
advised dissimulation till the match was made, telling how, " that 
done, he would be of puissance to oppose all his rebels, for he 
might rely on aid from the French king." "Thus shall I do," 
said Richard, and thus he did. 

When the discrowning treachery of the coup d'etat was in 
preparation, Gower, aged about seventy, resigned the living that 
he held at Richard's gift, and withdrew from the outer life of the 
world. The Priory of St. Mary Overies, on the Southwark side 
of London Bridge (of which the chapel is now represented by the 
parish church of St. Saviour), was being rebuilt in the reigns of 
Richard II. and Henry IV. The masons were still at their work 
when John Gower, who was the most liberal contributor towards 
the cost of re-building, established lodgings and a chapel of his 
own in the new priory, and withdrew from the world to spend his 



toa.d. I399-] GOWBR'S TRIPARTITE CHRONICLE. l6l 

last years peacefully, a clerk among clerks, within shadow of the 
church of which he was an honoured benefactor. Gower's faith 
in Richard was gone, and the public events which immediately 
followed his retirement caused the old poet to write in Latin 
leonine hexameter his Tripartite Chronicle. This is the sequel 
to his "Vox Clamantis," since it tells the issue of the mis- 
government against which that earlier work had been a note of 
warning. The Chronicle was called " Tripartite " because, it told 
the story of Richard's ruin in three parts, of which the first, said 
Gower, related human work, the second hellish work, the third a 
work in Christ. Human work was the control of Richard by his 
uncle Gloucester when the Commission of Regency was estab- 
lished ; hellish work was the coup d'e'tatj the work in Christ 
was the consequent dethronement of King Richard. 

In July, 1397, having secured the French alliance, the king 
invited the Earl of Warwick (the Bear) to dine with him, and by 
a treacherous breach of hospitality arrested him, seized his lands, 
and made him prisoner in the Isle of Man. The Earl of 
Arundel (the Horse) was invited to a conference, assured by the 
king's oath that he should not be injured in person or property. 
He was seized at the conference, sent to prison in the Isle of 
Wight, and afterwards beheaded. By treachery as false, the 
Duke of Gloucester (the Swan) was seized, imprisoned, and, 
Gower says, smothered at Calais with a feather bed, by murderers 
whom his nephew had sent over for the purpose. Gloucester 
was murdered in September, 1397. At the same time there was 
obtained from a servile parliament a statute (of the twenty-first 
year of Richard II.) which was virtually abnegation of the power 
of the Lords and Commons, and its transfer to a junta of the 
creatures of the king. Richard was during the next year (1398) 
supreme, for there was no immediate resistance to his personal 
government. In that year Chaucer was very poor. In January 
of the same year John Gower had been married in his own 
chapel under his rooms in the priory. He doubtless felt need 
of a kindly woman's care in his old age, and married to obtain 
good nursing, for his health was weak, and two years later he 
entirely lost his sight. While the rich Gower was thus housed, 
and spending liberally on the building-works of the priory in 
which he lodged, his friend Chaucer obtained, in May, 1398, the 
king's letters of protection from arrest, on any plea except it 
• t were connected with land, for the next two years, on the ground 
of "various arduous and urgent duties in divers parts of the 

L 



1 62 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1393 

realm of England." After this Chaucer, on account either of 
sickness or occupation, did not apply for money personally ; but 
in July, 1398, within three months of his obtaining letters of 
exemption from arrest, he sent to the exchequer for a loan of 
6s. 8d. — say £3 6s. 8d. present value. 

In the following September lists were set at Coventry for 
combat between John of Gaunt's son, Henry, and the Duke of 
Norfolk. Richard, staying the combat, banished both. John of 
Gaunt survived his son's banishment but a few months, and, 
dying in 1399, was buried near the high altar in St. Paul's, by 
the side of his first wife, the Duchess Blanche. Then King 
Richard added to all other acts of rapacity, by which he was 
making his name daily more infamous, the seizure of the largt 
inheritance of John of Gaunt's son Henry. In the summer 
Richard spent in Ireland upon war against the Irish some of the 
wealth he had wrung by acts of tyranny out of the English. The 
new Duke of Lancaster was then summoned by his friends from 
France, and John of Gaunt's son, to whom Chaucer was as an 
old household friend, landed at Grimsby to claim his inheritance. 
He had taken to himself the well-known badge of his murdered 
uncle Gloucester, the Swan. The end soon followed. In Sep- 
tember, 1397, the Duke of Gloucester was murdered ; in 
September, 1398, John of Gaunt's son was banished ; in Sep- 
tember, 1399, Richard II. publicly surrendered his crown to the 
returned exile. 

The Act of the Deposition of Richard II. was read in West- 
minster Hall on the last day of September, and on the 3rd of 
October the new king granted to Chaucer forty marks a year, in 
addition to the smaller annuity that King Richard had given 
him. The old poet had then only a year to live, but his last year 
was freed from care. At Christmas he took the lease of a house 
in the garden of the chapel of St. Mary, Westminster, and there 
he died, aged seventy-two, on the 25th of October, 1400. 

John Gower, who needed no money, received from the new 
king recognition of his hearty sympathy with what he looked 
upon as Christ's work in the overthrow of tyranny. In the year 
of Chaucer's death Gower became blind ; but he lived on in the 
priory till 1408, and after his death in that year, considering his 
liberal aid to their building-works, his brethren there honoured 
his memory with a painted window and a tomb upon which his 
effigy is still to be seen lying, adorned with the Lancastrian collar 
of SS, with an appended badge of the Swan. This was the 



TOA.D. i 4 oo.] CHAUCER'S CANTERBURY TALES. 1 63 

valued gift of the new king, Henry IV. When in his blindness 
his hand touched it, the moralist might now and then recall the 
past, and blend hope for the future with abiding faith that " often 
where the people cries there is God." 

46. Such work as that upon the unfinished Canterbury Tales 
could not have been laid aside by Chaucer for work of less 
account. This must have been the main occupation of the poet's 
latter days, and the last words of the last tale in the papers 
gathered together by the hand of his son Thomas may have been 
the last words from his pen. They look up to heaven where 
" the body of man, that whilom was sick and frail, feeble and 
mortal, is immortal, and so strong and so whole that there may 
no thing impair it : there is neither hunger, nor thirst, nor cold, 
but every soul replenished with the sight of the perfect knowing 
of God. This blissful reign may men purchase by poverty 
spiritual, and the glory by lowness, the plenty of joy by hunger 
and thirst, and rest by travail, and the life by death and mortifi- 
cation of sin. To this life He us bring that bought us with His 
precious blood. Amen." Chaucer was one of the few greatest 
poets of the world who rise to a perception of its harmonies and 
have a faith in God forbidding all despair of man. No troubles 
could extort from him a fretful note. Wisely, kindly, with 
shrewd humour and scorn only of hypocrisy, he read the charac- 
ters of men, and seeing far into their hearts was, in his " Canter- 
bury Tales," a dramatist before there was a drama, a poet who 
set the life of his own England to its proper music. In this 
complete work, had it been completed, the whole character of 
England would have been expressed, as it is already expressed 
or implied in the great fragment left to us. Boccaccio, who 
died twenty-five years before Chaucer, placed the scene of his 
"Decameron" (§14) in a garden, to which seven fashion- 
able ladies had retired with three fashionable gentlemen during the 
plague that devasted Florence in 1348. They told one another 
stories, usually dissolute, often witty, sometimes exquisitely 
poetical, and always in simple charming prose. The purpose of 
these people was to forget the duties on which they had turned 
their backs, and stifle any sympathies they might have had for 
the terrible grief of their friends and neighbours who were dying 
a few miles away. For these fine ladies and gentlemen, equal 
in rank and insignificance, Chaucer gave us a group of about 
thirty English people, of ranks widely different, in hearty human 
fellowship together. Instead of setting them down to lounge in 

L 2 



1 64 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1393 

a garden, he mounted them on horseback, set them on the high 
road, and gave them somewhere to go and something to do. 
The bond of fellowship was not a common selfishness. It was 
religion ; not, indeed, in a form so solemn as to make laughter 
and jest unseemly, yet, according to the custom of his day, a 
popular form of religion — the pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas 
a Becket (ch. iii. § 11) — into which men entered with much 
heartiness. It happened to be a custom which had one of the 
best uses of religion, in serving as a bond of fellowship wherein 
conventional divisions of rank were for a time disregarded ; 
partly because of the sense, more or less joined to religious 
exercise of any sort, that men are equal before God, and also, in 
no slight degree, because men of all ranks, trotting upon the 
high road with chance companions, whom they might never see 
again, have been in all generations disposed to put off restraint 
and enjoy such intercourse as will relieve the tediousness of 
travel. Boccaccio could produce nothing of mark in descrip- 
tion of his ten fine gentlemen and ladies. The procession of 
Chaucer's Pilgrims is the very march of man on the high road 
of life. 

From different parts of London or the surrounding country 
Canterbury pilgrims met in one of the inns on the Southwark side 
of London Bridge, to set forth together upon the Kent road. 
Chaucer's Pilgrims started from the " Tabard," an inn named 
after the sleeveless coat once worn by labourers, now worn only 
in a glorified form by heralds. Chaucer feigns that he was at the 
" Tabard" ready to make his own pilgrimage, when he found a 
company of nine-and-twenty on the point of starting, and joined 
them, so making the number thirty. Harry Bailly, the host of the 
' Tabard," also joined the party, so making thirty-one. When 
Chaucer describes the pilgrims in his Prologue to the " Canter- 
bury Tales," his list contains thirty-one without reckoning the 
host. This little discrepancy is one of many reminders in the 
work itself that Chaucer died while it was incomplete. As he 
proceeded with his story-telling he probably was modifying, to 
suit the development of his plan, several of the first written 
details of his Prologue. The Pilgrims were : 1, 2, 3, a knight, 
his son, and an attendant yeoman ; 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, a prioress, 
another nun, who was her chaplain, and three priests ; 9, 10, a 
monk and a friar ; 11, a merchant ; 12, a clerk of Oxford ; 13, a 
serjeant-at-law ; 14, a franklin, that is, a landholder free of 
1 feudal service, holding immediately from the king; 15, 16, 17, 



toa.d. i4oo.] THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS. l6$ 

18, 19, a haberdasher, a carpenter, a weaver, a dyer, and a 
tapestry maker ; 20, Roger, or Hodge, of Ware, a London cook ; 
21, a sailor from the West country ; 22, a doctor of physic ; 23, 
Alisoun, a wife of Bath ; 24, 25, two brothers : a poor town parson 
and a ploughman ; 26, a reeve, or lord's servant as steward or 
overseer ; 27, a miller ; 28, a sompnour, or summoner of delin- 
quents to the ecclesiastical courts ; 29, a pardoner, who dealt in 
pardons from the pope ; 30, a manciple of a lawyer's Inn of 
Court (a manciple was a buyer of victuals for a corporation) ; 
31, Chaucer himself, who is described by 32, Harry Bailly, the 
host, as one who looked on the ground as he would find a hare, 
seemed elvish by his countenance, for he did unto no wight 
dalliance, yet was stout ; for, says the host, " he in the waist is 
shape as well as I." 

Harry Bailly, large, bright-eyed, bold of speech, shrewd, 
manly, well-informed, had a shrew of a wife. He gave his 
guests a good supper, and jested merrily when they had paid 
their reckonings. It was the best company of pilgrims that had 
been at his inn that year, he said, and he should like to secure 
them mirth upon the way. They were all ready for his counsel ; 
and it was that each of them should tell two tales on the way to 
Canterbury, and two other tales on the way home. The one 
whose tales proved to be " of best sentence and of solas" should 
have a supper in that room at the cost of all when they came 
back from Canterbury.*" He was to be their guide; and whoever 
gainsaid his judgment was to pay for all they spent upon the 
way. All agreed, and appointed the host governor, judge, and 
reporter of the tales. Then wine was fetched, they drank, and 
went to bed. The host roused them at dawn next morning, the 
28th of April (our 7th of May), when the length of day was a 
few minutes over fifteen hours. The company rode slowly to 
the watering of St. Thomas — that is to say, of the Hospital of 
St. Thomas the Martyr in Southwark, which may be called, in 
the series of Church stations, the London terminus of the line of 
pilgrimage to St. Thomas the Martyr's shrine at Canterbury. 
Here the host reminded the companions of their undertaking; 
and all, at his bidding, drew out slips by way of lot. Whoever 
had the shortest should begin. This wholesome device excluded 
all questions of precedence of rank among the fellow-pilgrims. 
The lot fell to the knight, whereat all were glad ; and with the 
courtesy of prompt assent he began. 

47. The knight's tale is the tale of " Palamon and Arcite," 



l66 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1393 

Englished by Chaucer, in spirit as well language, from the 
" Teseide" of Boccaccio. The monk is asked for the next story, 
but the miller is drunk, and forces on his companions what he 
calls a noble tale. This is a coarse tale told with vivid master- 
touches; and, as its jest is against a carpenter, Oswald the 
reeve is provoked to match it with a coarser jest against a 
miller. An honest warning of their nature is placed by Chaucer 
before these two stories, which belong 10 the broad view of life, 
but show the low animal part of it : 

" And therefore whoso list it not to hear 
Turn over the leaf and choose another tale ; 
For he sha'l find ynow both great and smale 
Of storial thing that toucheth gentilesse, 
And eke morality and holiness. ' 

In plainest words the reader is warned beforehand by the pure- 
hearted poet of the character of these two stories ; in order that 
they may be passed over by those who would avoid their theme. 
The miller's tale has in its coarseness a rough moral at the close. 
The reeve's tale paints a form of life that we can well spare from 
the picture. Yet it is taken from the " Decameron," and was 
put by Boccaccio not, as by Chaucer, in a churl's mouth, but upon 
the lips of one of his fine ladies. After this, we find through- 
out what we found in the knight's tale, Chaucer's sense of the 
pure beauty of womanhood. There is the whole range of cha- 
racter to be included in his picture, but on the fleshly side most 
natural and genial are the touches with which he gives the wife 
of Bath her place among the company. Chaucer began a cook's 
tale of a riotous apprentice, as if he meant to read a lesson to 
the Perkin revellers of the day, but he broke off, weary of low 
themes. The Tale of Gamely n, a bright piece of the class of 
poetry to which the Robin Hood ballads belong, is here placed, 
as a cook's tale, in Chaucer's series. It may have been among 
his papers, but it probably is from another hand. There is in 
this tale an Adam Spencer — that is Adam the butler or cellarer 
• — who, with certain changes, reappeared after many years in 
"As You Like It," and whose part Shakespeare himself is said 
to have acted. The " Man of Law's Tale" is of a good woman, 
the pious Constance, and seems to have been taken from the 
second book of Gower's " Confessio Amantis." The "Wife of 
Bath's Tale" of a knight, Florentius, who by obedience won a 
perfect bride, is again one of the tales of the " Confessio 
Amantis." The " Friar's Tale" contemns the cruel rapacity of 



TOA.D. i 4 oo.] CHAUCER'S CANTERBURY TALES. 1 67 

sompnours; and the " Sorapnour's Tale" scorns hypocritical 
rapacity in friars. The " Clerk's Tale" is the story of the 
patience of Griselda, the last tale in the " Decameron," and one 
which Petrarch said none had been able to read without tears. 
With the last letter he ever wrote, Petrarch sent to Boccaccio 
his own Latin prose version of it, as a religious allegory, made 
in 1373, the year before his own death, and two years before the 
death of Boccaccio ; the year also of Chaucer's visit to Italy. 
It was " De Obedientia et Fide Uxoria, Mythologia" (A Myth 
upon Wifely Obedience and Faith), and Chaucer's poem is dis- 
tinctly founded not on the tale as it stands in the "Decameron," 
but upon Petrarch's moralised version. This we find throughout, 
from the form of opening down to the religious application at 
the end, and the citation of the general Epistle of St. James, in 
the stanzas beginning — 

" For sith a woman was so patient 

Unto a mortal man, well more we ought, 
Receiven all in gree that God us sent." 

But the poetical treatment of the story is so individual that 
it all comes afresh out of the mind of Chaucer. Its pathos is 
heightened by the humanising touch with which the English 
poet reconciles the most matter-of-fact reader to its questionable 
aspects. He feels that the incidents of the myth are against 
Nature, and at every difficult turn in the story he disarms the 
realist with a light passage of fence, and wins to his own side 
the host of readers who have the common English turn for 
ridicule of an ideal that conflicts with reason. Chaucer's 
" Merchant's Tale" is that afterwards modernised by Pope in 
his " January and May." His " Squire's Tale" is of the Tartar 
Cambys Kan, or Cambuscan, of his two sons Algarsif and 
Camballo, and of his daughter Canace, who had a ring enabling 
her to hear the speech of birds, and a mirror which showed 
coming adversity, or falsehood in a lover. This is a tale of 
enchantment, left unfinished, with stately promise of a sage and 
solemn tune, and which suggested to Milton the wish that the 
grave spirit of thoughtfulness would raise Musseus or Orpheus — 

" Or call up him that left half toH 
The story of Cambuscan bold. 
Of Cambell and of Algarsife, 
And who had Canace to wife, 
That owned the virtuous ring and glass ; 
And of the wondrous horse of brass 
On which the Tartar king did ride." 



1 68 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1393 

The "Franklin's Tale," to be found also in the "Decameron" 
(fifth of the tenth day), was of a wife true of word as true of heart. 
The second " Nun's Tale" was of St. Cecilia, from the " Golden 
Legend," a treatise on Church Festivals, written at the end of 
the thirteenth century by an Archbishop of Genoa, Jacobus h 
Voragine, and translated into French by Jehan de Vignoy. The 
" Pardoner's Tale" (eighty-second in the " Cento Novelle Antiche") 
is a lesson against riotous living. Three profligates would slay 
Death, the slayer of the young. An old man said they would 
find him under an oak in the wood. They found there nearly 
eight bushels of gold florins. At this they rejoiced, and cast lots 
which of them should go to the town to fetch bread and wine 
while the others watched the treasure. The lot fell on the 
youngest. While he was gone his comrades plotted to kill him 
on his return, that the gold might be divided between two only ; 
and he himself plotted to poison two of the bottles of wine he 
brought, that all the gold might belong to himself alone. So they 
slew him, and had short mirth afterwards over the wine he had 
poisoned. 

The " Shipman's Tale " was from the " Decameron " (first of 
the eighth day), of a knavish young monk. The prioress told 
the legend of a Christian child killed by the Jews in Asia. The 
child when living loved the Virgin, who appeared to it when 
dying and put a grain under its tongue, so that the dead child- 
. martyr still sang " O alma Redemfitoris Mater." Until the grain 
was removed the song continued. Chaucer himself began " The 
Rime of Sir Thopas," a merry burlesque upon the metrical 
romances of the day, ridiculing the profusion of trivial detail 
that impeded the progress of a story of tasteless adventures. Sir 
Thopas rode into a forest, where he lay down, and as he had 
dreamed all night that he should have an elf queen for his love, 
got on his horse again to go in search of the elf queen ; met a 
giant, whom he promised to kill next day, the giant throwing 
stones at him ; and came again to town to dress himself for the 
adventure. The pertinacity with which the rhyme proceeds to 
spin and hammer out all articles of clothing and armour worn by 
Sir Thopas makes the Host exclaim at the story-teller, " Mine 
eares aken for thy drasty speech," and cry "no more." The 
device, too, is ingenious which puts the poet out of court in 
his own company, so far as regards the question who won the 
supper. His verse having been cried out upon, Chaucer answers 
the demand upon him for a tale in prose with the tale of 



toa.d. i4oo.] CHAUCER'S CANTERBURY TALES. 1 69 

Melibaeus, a moral allegory upon the duties of life, translated from 
the Latin of Albertano de Brescia, or its French version, the "Livre 
de Melibee et de Dame Prudence." Only this and the " Parson's 
Tale" are written in prose. The "Monk's Tale" is of men in 
high estate who have fallen into hopeless adversity — a series of 
short " tragedies," suggested by a popular Latin prose book of 
Boccaccio's, on the " Falls of Illustrious Men" (De Casibus Illus- 
trium Virorum). Among the Monk's examples is that of Ugolino, 
whereof Chaucer writes that they who would hear it at length 
should go to Dante, " the grete poete of Itaille," as he had said 
of any reader curious to hear more of Zenobia, " Let him unto 
my maister Petrarch go." The Host at last stopped Piers the 
Monk because his tales were dismal ; and Sir John, the Nun's 
Priest, asked for something merry, told a tale of the Cock and 
the Fox, taken from the fifth chapter of the " Roman de Renart." 
Thus the pilgrims made for themselves entertainment by the 
way till they reached Boughton-under-Blean, seven miles from 
Canterbury, where they were overtaken by a Canon's Yeoman, 
who was followed by his master. These had ridden after the 
pilgrims for three miles. They seem to have followed them from 
Faversham, where the Canon— a ragged, joyless alchemist, who 
lived in a thieves' lane of the suburb — was on the watch for 
travellers whom be might join and dupe with his pretensions to 
a power of transmuting metals. This Canon, said his man, after 
other flourishing as herald of his master, could pave all their road 
to Canterbury with silver and gold. " I wonder, then," said 
Harry Bailly, " that your lord is so sluttish, if he can buy better 
clothes. His overslop is not worth a mite; it is all dirty and torn." 
Chaucer proceeds then skilfully to represent the gradual but 
quick slide of the yeoman's faith from his master, who, when he 
caught up the company, found his man owning that they lived 
by borrowing gold of men who think that of a pound they can 
make two : 

" Yet it is false ; and ay we have good hope 
It is for to doon, and after it we grope." 

The Canon cried at his man for a slanderer. The Host bade 
the man tell on, and not mind his master, who then turned and 
fled for shame, leaving the company to be entertained with the 
"Canon's Yeoman's Tale," preluded with experience of alchemy. 
The Manciple related after this the tale from Ovid's " Meta- 
morphoses " of the turning of the crow from white to black for 
having told Apollo of the falsehood of his Coronis. There is 



170 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1400 

then an indication of the time of day, four o'clock in the after- 
noon, before the " Parson's Tale," which evidently was meant to 
stand last, for it is a long and earnest sermon in prose on a 
text applying the parable of a pilgrimage to man's heavenward 
journey. The text is from Jeremiah vi. 16 : " Stand ye in the 
ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good 
way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls." 



CHAPTER V. 

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

I. The fifteenth century, which added to our literature not one 
masterpiece, fed with its very mists the great streams of the 
future. Scattered personal interest sped over the scene as a 
wild mass of clouds, and rolled at times into a tempest to which 
mists of darkness seemed to be reserved for ever. But in the 
clods of the earth — among its unconsidered people — there lay 
forces to which even mist and storm gave energy ; and still 
over all there shone the light of Him whose strength is in the 
clouds. The vigour of a nation lies, at all times, in the character 
and action of the common body of its people. The highest 
genius, which implies good sense, true insight, and quick sym- 
pathy, must draw its sustenance from the surrounding world of 
man and Nature. When it mistakes, if it ever can mistake, the 
conventional life of a court for the soul of a nation, seeking to 
strike root down into that only and draw support from that, it 
must be as good seed fallen among stones. When it mistakes, 
if it ever can mistake, the mere dust of the high road, the day's 
fashions blown about by every wind, for source of life, it dies 
under the feet of the next comer. The good soil is everywhere 
in the minds of men. Culture maybe confined to a few patches, 
but everywhere in the common ground lies that of which fruit 
shall come. 

2. When Chaucer died, in the year 1400, the first printers 
were unborn. John Gutenberg may, indeed, have been an infant 
in the first year of the fifteenth century. John Faust was not born 
until three years after Chaucer's death ; and his son-in-law, Peter 
Schceffer, was some twenty years younger than Faust. 

In Spain the Moors held Granada, and the Christians were 



toa.d. i 4 i 4 .] OPENING OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 171 

divided under the three kingdoms of Leon and Castile, Navarre, 
and Aragon. 

In Germany, the nobles, in the year of Chaucer's death, 
deposed Emperor Wenzel, and, choosing for themselves a 
ruler as conveniently incapable but less inconveniently drunken 
and self-willed, made the Count Palatine of the Rhine Emperor 
Rupert. To Wenzel they left, for the nineteen remaining years 
of his life, the sovereignty of Bohemia. A sister to this Wenzel 
was our Richard II.'s " Good Queen Anne," who died six years 
before the beginning of the fifteenth century ; and it was to this 
Wenzel's wife that John Huss, ordained priest in the year 1400, 
was made confessor. 

The marriage between our King Richard and Anne of 
Bohemia had brought Bohemians to England. One of them, 
who had been studying at Oxford, took home and communicated 
to his friend Huss some of the books of Wiclif. The social cor- 
ruptness of the clergy in Bohemia had prepared the suffering 
people for an effort to cast out the money-changers from the 
temple. Huss looked upon his meeting with the works of Wiclif 
as the happiest event of his life ; and, through him, Wiclif raised 
revolt of the Bohemians against Italian trading on the national 
religion. Huss restored also to the University of Prague its 
nationality. The Archbishop of Prague, called Alphabetarius 
because his scholarship stopped short at A B C, burned the 
books of Wiclif, which he could not read, and interdicted the 
preaching of Huss. But Huss's gospellers sustained him 
against excommunication by the pope, and their chief battle 
was not on grounds of controversial theology. Its energies were 
quickened by the striving of the English people towards 
national independence in Church matters, and for a religion 
that no man in Church authority might follow as a knavish 
trade. The followers of Huss continued, indeed, in a modified 
and not unorthodox form, Wiclif's attack upon adoration of the 
host; but otherwise their assault was upon simony in the 
Church and upon adding belief in the pope to a belief in the three 
persons of the Trinity. The pope's claim to unlimited obedi- 
ence, his indulgences, his abuse of excommunication, and the 
false faith in him, were four of " the six errors " posted by Huss 
on the gate of the Chapel of Bethlehem. Simony, and the 
belief that priests made the body of Christ in the mass, were 
the other two. The argument upon this last head (which did 
not include denial of transubstantiation itself) was so far an 



1/2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1400 

open one that when Huss went, in 1414, to the Council of Con- 
stance, he took with him a declaration from the Inquisitor- 
General of Heresy in Bohemia that, as far as the Inquisitor 
knew, Huss had shown no disposition to impugn any article of 
the Christian faith. Condemned as " a disciple of Wiclif, of 
damnable memory," John Huss, aged forty, whose worst heresy 
was the belief that liberty of conscience is a right of man, 
was burnt at Constance, on the 6th of July, in the year 141 5, 
three or four months before the battle of Agincourt. From 
among the fagots rose a steady hymn of trust in God, till the 
smoke and the flames choked the firm voice and concealed the 
singer from the people while his soul was passing to its rest. 
Huss was afterwards reported to have said, playing upon his 
own name, which, in Bohemian, means goose : " To-day you 
burn a goose ; in a hundred years a swan shall arise whom you 
cannot burn." A hundred and two years after the burning of 
Huss, Luther affixed to the church-door at Wittenburg his 
ninety-five theses against indulgences. 

3. The heat of struggle against heresy had become fiercer, 
while effort was made to end that schism in the papacy which had 
encouraged opposition to its rule (ch. iv. § 33). The Council of 
Constance that burnt Huss was also to restore unity by subject- 
ing the claims of rival popes to a decision of the Church. In 
1406 the death of the Italian, Innocent VII., gave hope to the 
cardinals at Rome. They elected a quiet old man of eighty 
pope for Italy, as Gregory XII., with a provision that he was to 
hold office only till he could arrange with the French pope, 
Benedict XI 1 1., for a simultaneous abdication. Gregory was at 
first true to the understanding. Some months after his election 
he refused to give benefices, saying that he was not made pope 
for that, but only to end the schism. His friends and kinsmen, 
who flocked round him clamouring for loaves and fishes, caused 
him to halt on the way. He became rich in excuses for inaction; 
and, when nothing else availed, could stop and pray, in high 
pontifical state, for the peace of the Church, and so dispose of 
the time he did not wish to spend in action for securing it. 
Benedict, on the other side, though equally determined to do 
nothing, professed great readiness to meet Gregory and fulfil 
the desires of good churchmen. Europe was little edified to 
see the dance accordingly set up by the two aged popes, who 
poussetted to each other about France and Italy, but took 
care never to come near enough to join hands. One professed 



toa.d. 1414.] QUESTIONS OF CHURCH REFORM. 173 

fear of hostile ships, and would not approach the coast ; the 
other professed fear of ambuscades, and would not venture far 
inland. So that, as Aretin wrote, one was a water animal to 
whom dry land was death ; the other a land animal who 
looked with profound horror at water. By this trifling, and by 
yet more open swerving from the policy dictated by a true sense ' 
of religion, each lost friends. The Italian pope had Italy and 
the cardinals against him ; the French pope was opposed by 
the French king and the University of Paris. Forsaken by 
the Church of France, Benedict went to his native Aragon, 
and then joined Gregory in the convocation of a General 
Council ; this was to meet at Pisa, in the year 1409, for the 
establishment of unity and good religious order in the Church. 
It was opened by Jean Charlier, better known as Gerson, 
Chancellor of the Church and University of Paris, with his 
essay on the Unity of the Church. The council took into its 
own hands a power supreme over the popes', thus carrying 
out the principle advocated by the University of Paris. Gerson 
and the party represented by him held the whole Church to be 
bound by what they called essentials of theology, but were so 
tolerant of minor differences that they were not without hope 
of reuniting the Eastern with the Western Church. The two 
popes refused to recognise a council that usurped papal 
authority ; therefore they were deposed, and in their place 
was set up a third pope, an Alexander V. This added to the 
confusion. The new pope owed his rise to a cardinal ex- 
pirate, Balthazar Cossa, the most infamous man of his order, 
whose influence came of vast wealth ill-gotten, whose ambition 
was unscrupulous, and whom it suited at that time to place 
a creature of his own upon the vacant throne of Christendom. 
A year afterwards, when Alexander V. died, it was widely 
believed that the Cardinal Balthazar Cossa had sent him to 
heaven as soon as he was himself disposed to fill his place in 
this world. The belief shows what was thought of the man 
who, in 1410, as John XXI I L, inherited the pledge to labour 
for a reformation of the Church. It was in his time that the 
reformatory council, which he was at last obliged to summon, 
met at Constance. It began work in November, 1414, declaring 
itself to be a continuation of the Council of Pisa. Within four 
months it had received accusations of deep crime against Pope 
John. The Council maintained Gerson's principle that the 
pope is subject to a Church assembly. It tried and deposed 



174 A FIRSl SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a,d. 1399 

Pope John, humoured Gregory into abdication, left Benedict, 
deserted by his followers, pope only in his own esteem, and 
made Cardinal Otto of Colonna, Pope Martin V. The streets 
of Constance bore daily a shameful witness to the corruption 
widely spread among the clergy who attended at this Council, 
and who witnessed the execution of their sentence for the burn- 
ing of John Huss. 

Meanwhile a large part of Europe was fairly upon the way 
from Huss to Luther. The relation of earnest educated church- 
men to the pope, as pope, in the early years of the fifteenth 
century, remained what it had been in the latter years of the 
fourteenth (ch. iv. § 33). We find it expressed by Chancellor 
Gerson in his treatise on the Methods of Uniting and Reforming 
the Church. " A pope," he said, " is a man, descended from 
men, earth from earth, a sinner and subject to sin. A few days 
ago the son of a poor peasant, he is exalted to the papal chair. 
Does such a one become a sinless man, a saint, without the 
least repentance for his sins, without confessing them, without 
contrition of heart ? Who has made him a saint ? Not the 
Holy Ghost ; for it is not dignity of station that brings the 
influences of the Holy Ghost, but the grace of God and love ; 
not the authority of the office, for it may be enjoyed by bad 
men as well as good." This was the free speech of one who 
avoided the free speculations of the English, and saw no security 
outside the system of theology accounted orthodox in his own 
time and country. " Where," he asked, " will you find charity 
in a pope ? At the Roman court the daily talk is of castles, 
of territorial domains, of the different kind of weapons, of gold ; 
but seldom or never of chastity, alms, righteousness, faith, or 
holy manners : so that the court, once a spiritual one, has 
become a secular, devilish, tyrannical court, and worse in 
manners and civil transactions than any other." This had been 
the language of Gower's Vox Clamantis, and the language used 
by many educated earnest men whom the Church never accused 
of heresy, but who belonged to the most faithful of her sons. 

4. From King Henry IV. (1399 — 141 3) the English Church 
reformers, like all other reformers, looked for support ; but he 
had not long worn his crown before he leagued with the clergy 
against them. As it had been settled by statute of the fifth year 
of Richard II., so it was confirmed by statute of the second year 
of Henry IV., that part of the sheriff's oath when he took office 
was to be that he should seek to redress all errors and heresies, 



toa.d. 1413.] KNIGHTON. JOHN OF BROMYARD. 175 

commonly called Lollards. This indicates the early sense of 
the word which, though otherwise derived from an Englishman, 
Walter Lollardus, burnt for heresy at Cologne in 1322, was then 
held to be derived from the Latin lolia or lollia (" tares") ; and 
that Walter probably was called Lollardus for his sowing of 
tares among the good wheat of the Church. In the second year 
of Henry IV. heretics were also left to be dealt with by the 
clergy at their own discretion, provided always that the pro- 
ceedings against them were publicly and judicially ended within 
three months. The end might be a sentence of imprisonment 
or fine to any extent, or a delivering over to the secular power 
to be burnt to death before the people. No time was lost by 
Archbishop Arundel in exercising this new privilege. In 
February, 1401, William Sawtree (Salter), priest of St. Osyth's 
in London, was burnt alive in Smithfield. In 1410 the Commons 
of England prayed the king for repeal or mitigation of the statute 
against the Lollards. The king said that he wished it had been 
more severe, and immediately signed a warrant for the burning 
of a blacksmith named John Badby. 

Henry Knighton, who wrote during this reign a Latin 
chronicle of events in England from the time of King Edgar 
to the death of Richard II., is full of bitterness against the 
Lollards. He was a regular canon of the abbey of Leicester ; 
and of Wiclif's translation of the Bible into English his 
chronicle said: "This Master John Wiclif translated into the 
Anglic — not angelic — tongue the Gospel that Christ gave to 
the clergy and the doctors of the Church, that they might 
minister it gently to laymen and weaker persons, according to 
the exigence of their time, their personal wants, and the hunger 
of their minds, whence it is made vulgar by him, and more 
open to the reading of laymen and women than it usually is 
to the knowledge of lettered and intelligent clergy ; and thus 
the pearl of the Gospel is cast forth and trodden under feet 
of swine." 

There was only one other writer who produced a book of 
any note during the reign of Henry IV., and he was a Dominican 
—John of Bromyard— bitter as Knighton in assault upon 
the Lollards. John of Bromyard, in Herefordshire, taught 
theology at Cambridge, and his great work, among others upon 
theological, civil, and moral law, was a Summa Predicantium, 
an alphabetical compilation of material for use in preaching, 
arranged under such heads as Abstinence, Absolution, Avarice, 



176 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1399 

and ending in Xhristus ; a work upon so large a scale that 
when first printed at Niirnberg, in 1485, it filled a thousand large 
folio pages of double-column black letter. It is an earnest, 
erudite, and interesting mass of mediaeval practical theology. 

5. Of our three poets of chief mark during the former half of 
the fifteenth century, two, John Lydgate and Thomas Occleve, 
were men about thirty years old at the time of Chaucer's 
death. They were more than forty when Henry IV. died ; but 
neither of them seems to have attempted to produce any im- 
portant work during his reign. The third poet, a younger man, 
was James I. of Scotland, whom Henry IV. made his 
prisoner in 1405. 

The father of James I. was John, who, in 1390, succeeded his 
father, Robert II., as Robert III. The Scottish nobles had 
been bred by the long contest with England to use of arms, and 
were not nice as to the amount of liberty they took. Robert III. 
was weak, and the Estates of Scotland in Parliament assembled 
made him answerable for all that the people suffered by mis- 
government. In 1398 they transferred his power to his son, 
whom they made acting-lieutenant for his father, with the title 
of Duke of Rothsay. Robert III. had also a brother, who was 
made at the same time Duke of Albany. In 1402 the Duke 
of Albany contrived to get his nephew the acting-lieutenant into 
a prison, from which he was soon afterwards brought out for 
burial. The king had another son, the boy James ; but Albany 
became sole Governor of Scotland in a time of trouble. The 
Percys were preparing insurrection against Henry IV. ; they 
were in secret alliance with Owen Glendower, who had so 
headed a Welsh struggle for independence as to be for a time 
King of Wales. Percy, in defiance of a royal order, released 
Douglas and other Scots taken at Homildon Hill. Douglas 
marched into England, joined Percy, and shared defeat with 
him at Worcester. Albany had raised an army, and masked 
his designs ; but if he had meant to join Percy he was too late. 
He then favoured the fiction, or maintained the fact, that in 
Scotland King Richard II. was still living. Either Henry IV. 
had produced some other body as that of the dead Richard 
in St. Paul's ; or Albany was showing somebody else as the 
live Richard in Scotland, for his own future benefit as ruler 
there. Probably it was Albany who, in 1405, contrived that 
his nephew James, then a boy of eleven, should, during a time 
of truce, be intercepted by an armed ship of the English when 



toa.d. 1422.] JAMES I. OF SCOTLAND. 177 

upon his voyage to France, whither he was being sent for 
education. In the following year King Robert died, and the 
boy of twelve became King James I. ; but the Duke of Albany, 
aged sixty-seven, with a son, Murdoch, to leave in his place, was 
actually reigning sovereign of Scotland. Thus the boy-king, 
James I., received his education as a prisoner at the English 
court, and was a young man of about nineteen, with some 
genius as a poet and much energy of character, when Henry IV. 
died and bequeathed the care of him to his son Henry V. 
Henry V. was also counselled by his father to divert the atten- 
tion of the English from domestic griefs by foreign war. 

Before the death of Henry IV. in England, the northern 
districts of the Scottish Lowlands were, in 141 1, threatened with 
a descent of Highland marauders in unexampled force, under 
Donald, the Lord of the Isles. There was a hasty gathering of 
defenders under Alexander Stewart, Earl of Mar, who checked 
the advance of the Highlanders at the Battle of Harlaw. Poems 
were written on this battle ; Scottish schoolboys took sides, and 
played at it. Harlaw remained the' name of a tune in the 
beginning of the seventeenth century. 

6. During the reign of Henry V. (1413 — 1422), James I. of 
Scotland remained prisoner at the English court ; well educated, 
trained in English laws and customs, and to be released when 
further bound by marriage with a lady of the royal family of 
England. Nature assisted Henry's policy, for a true affection 
sprang up between King James and the Lady Jane Eeaufort, 
daughter of the Earl of Somerset, niece to King Henry IV., and 
first cousin to Henry V. The love was celebrated in a poem 
known as The King's Quair, that is, " King's Little Book," from 
the old French quayer or cayer, modern French cahier. This 
is a graceful piece of court poetry, inspired by love and a study 
of Chaucer, and written in Chaucer's own seven-lined stanza, 
which long remained a favourite with his successors. It has 
been called rhyme royal, because this particular disciple used it. 
The " King's Ouair" is in six cantos. It begins with (1) the poet 
in his bed at midnight reading Boethius, thinking of the wheel 
of fortune, and likening his own life to a ship among black 
rocks with empty sail ; proceeds (2) to tell of his capture in 
boyhood, his listening from his prison window to the love-songs 
of the birds, his wonder what love is, till looking down he saw 
walking under his tower, newly come to make her morning 
orisons, the lady whose thrall he became. When she was gone 

M 



178 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1413 

he lamented, till at evening he lay with his head against a stone, 
half sleeping, half in swoon with sorrow. Then (3) a dazzling 
light seemed to come in at the window whereat he leant, and a 
voice said, "I bring thee comfort and heal; be not afraid." The 
light went out, and he rose through sphere and sphere to Venus, 
with her allegorical court, and made his plaint to her. She sent 
him to Minerva. He went then (4) to Minerva, who bade him 
base his love on virtue, be true, and meek, and steadfast in his 
thought, doing fit service to his lady in word and work, and so 
abide his time. The poet declared in three stanzas that his 
love was pure as his desire was great. 

" ' Desire/ quod she, ' I nyl it not deny, 

So thou it ground and set in Christin wise.' " 

Then at the bidding of Minerva the poet went (5) to Fortune, 
whose dwelling is, of course, allegorically described. Fortune 
placed him on her wheel, bade him take heed, and took him by 
the ear " so earnestly that therewithal I woke." The next and 
last canto (6) tells how the poet rose from his uneasy sleep and 
went to the window, where a white turtle-dove, the bird of Venus, 
alighted on his hand, and turning to him showed him in her bill 
a fair branch of red gilly-flowers with their green stalks, which 
had written in gold on every leaf a message of glad comfort to 
the lover. King James I. ended his poem with a strain of true 
love, thanked the prison wall from which he had looked forth and 
leaned, and rejoiced in the unfading flower of his love. An epi- 
logue, or " excusation of the author," represents James, king 
though he be, acknowledging his "masters" in three poets, 
whose royalty was more than the inheritance of worldly rank, 
Gower and Chaucer, and next to these John Lydgate, who, when 
the young king wrote his poem, was first in repute among men 
of the generation after Chaucer. 

7. John Lydgate was born not later than 1370, in Suffolk, at 
the village of Lydgate, six or seven miles from Newmarket. In 
the Benedictine Monastery of Bury St. Edmunds he was ordained 
subdeacon in 1389, deacon in 1393, and priest in 1397. After 
studying at Oxford, Paris, and Padua, he opened a school of 
rhetoric at his monastery of Bury St. Edmunds, where Dan 
(that is Dominus) John Lydgate, the Monk of Bury, became a 
famous teacher of literature and the art of versifying. He was 
well read in ancient lore, mathematician also and astronomer as 
well as orator and poet ; a bright, pleasant, and earnest man, 



toa.d. i 4 22.] LYDGATE. OCCLEVE. 179 

who wrote clear fluent verse in any style then reputable, but 
who was most apt at the telling of such moral stories as his 
public liked. Sometimes he was as prolix, and he always was 
as musical, as the old romancers who had been satirised by 
Chaucer in Sir Thopas ; but he preferred to take his heroes and 
heroines out of the Martyrology, and he could write pleasantly to 
order for the library of any monastery the legend of its patron 
saint. Since he wrote so much (there are not less than 250 
works bearing his name), and almost always as a story-teller, he 
found many readers, and his rhyming supplied some of the ' 
favourite tales of his time. He turned into smooth English 
verse the tales of Troy and Thebes. He elevated into an 
English poem that best of the Latin works of Boccaccio which 
tells and moralises tales of the mutations of affairs of men from 
Adam downward. These were his three chief works ; but they 
were written in the reign of Henry VI. Lydgate wrote for 
Henry V. the " Life of our Lady ;" he sang the tale of St. Alban, 
the English protomartyr, of his own St. Edmund, and of many 
a saint more. He could catch the strain of popular song, and 
satirize the licking up of money which leaves the poor man hope- 
less of justice in his London Lickpenny, whereof the measure is 
enlivened with the street-cries of his time. He could write 
morality in the old court allegorical style ; he could kneel at the 
foot of the Cross and offer to his God the sacrifice of a true out- 
burst of such song as there was in him. John Lydgate was not 
a poet of great genius, but he was a man with music in his life. 
He was full of a harmony of something more than words, not 
more diffuse than his age liked him to be, and, therefore, with 
good reason, popular and honoured among English readers in 
the fifteenth century. 

8. Thomas Occleve, the other chief poet of the generation 
after Chaucer, was of the same age as Lydgate, and, like Lydgate, 
about thirty years old when Chaucer died. He was a Londoner, 
and knew Chaucer ; evidently he refers to a personal relation 
between them when he speaks of himself as Chaucer's disciple. 
In his earlier years he lived in the Strand, at Chester's Inn, one 
of the buildings pulled down for the site of Somerset House. 
He says that his life was ill regulated in his youth, but says this 
in a poem designed for moral counsel to young men — La Male 
Regie de T. Hoccleve — of which the purpose doubtless led to a 
half-artistic exaggeration of self-censure. We know Occleve 
tolerably well through his chief poem, for the long original 

M 2 



l8o A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1413 

introduction to his version of the De Regimine Principiim, or 
" Governail of Princes" (ch. iv. § 43), consists wholly of moral re- 
flections on the manners of his time, interspersed with references 
to his own position in a government office as clerk of the Privy- 
Seal. He was married, had a household to provide for, and could 
not get his salary paid, or an annuity for life of twenty marks which 
had been nominally granted him. Therefore he took a melan- 
choly morning walk and met an old man, who asked what was 
his trouble. Was it love, was it care of abundance, was it care of 
* poverty, was it heresy? — and here six stanzas are given to a recol- 
lection of the burning of John Badby, at which Henry V., then 
prince, showed his humanity. When Badby was brought to the 
stake, and a barrel was prepared in which to burn him, the prince 
spoke to him kindly and urged recantation. Badby, remaining 
firm, was put into the barrel, and the burning fuel was heaped 
round it. The prince, moved by his cries of agony, caused the 
fuel to be cleared from about him, and again, when he was half 
dead, spoke to him, offering to procure pardon and even a 
pension. Badby still was firm; the prince, with some anger, 
ordered the fuel to be heaped round him again, and he was 
burned to ashes as a hopeless heretic. When the old man had 
preached upon the sin of heresy, Occleve answered that this was 
not his trouble. The old man was pleased, and urged next that 
his counsel was not to be despised for his poor habit ; this text 
giving occasion for much moral satire on extravagance of costume 
in Henry V.'s time. Then the moralist turned from his poverty to 
his age, and found occasion to touch on the riotous excesses of the 
young. Finally he got from the poet a full account of the cause 
of his trouble. A lively dialogue followed on that, giving occa- 
sion, as that was taken throughout, for earnest words upon all evils 
of the time, from the self-seeking churchmen to the length of 
side sleeves. The old man's advice was that Occleve should 
write to the prince something in English, but " write to him no 
thing that sowneth to vice," and show himself to be a man who 
deserved payment of arrears of salary. In obedience to this 
counsel, he translated for Henry V. the book "De Regimine 
Principum," digested into practical counsel, not without reminder 
of the unpaid annuity, and towards the end with deprecation of 
the wars between the Kings of France and England, and an in- 
vocation of peace for the land. " Let Christian kings," he says, 
" war only on the enemies of Christ." 

Were they the men accused of heresy? Occleve— earnest 



toa.d. i 4 22.] THE LOLLARDS. l8l 

and liberal in many things, and in this lighter poem, written in 
English and in Chaucer's stanza, seeking to find out the wrong 
and get it undone, with as much earnestness as Gower in his 
" Vox Clamantis," while he pointed to the corruption of the 
clergy — was, like Gower, an orthodox maintainer of Church 
doctrine. We find, therefore, that he assented to the new en- 
deavour to save as it was thought many from the everlasting fire 
by giving some to be burnt publicly in this world. 

9. In the second year of Henry V., in 1414, a new law 
passed against the Lollards, which ordained that they should 
forfeit all the lands they had in fee-simple, and all their goods 
and chattels, to the king. The same Act decreed that whatso- 
ever they were that should read the Scriptures in their mother 
tongue, they should forfeit " land, catel, lif, and godes from their 
heyres for ever, and so be condempned for heretykes to God, 
enemies to the crowne, and most errant traitors to the lande." 

On Christmas morning, in 141 7, Sir John Oldcastle, Lord 
Cobham, a brave knight of unblemished life, who held the 
tenets of Wiclif, and had opened his doors at Cowling Castle 
to the persecuted teachers of the Lollards, was hung up by the 
middle in an iron chain upon a gallows in St. Giles's Fields, and 
burnt alive while thus suspended. The last words heard from 
him were praise of God, into whose hands he resigned his soul. 

Chichele was then primate, violent as Arundel in vindictive 
dread of Lollard attacks on the Church temporalities. It was 
he who led his clergy when they urged the ready King Henry V., 
who was twenty-five years old and had a military genius, to 
follow his father's counsel, and divert attention of the people 
from domestic needs by foreign war. The war was based upon 
unjust claims of dominion over France ; claims which the 
English primate and his party declared to be just and lawful. 

Henry V., although essentially a soldier and intemperate in 
war, was temperate in life, well taught, and had respect for 
scholars. His ambassador in Spain in 1422 was William 
Lindwood, an Oxford divinity professor, who wrote the Con- 
stitutions of the Archbishops of Canterbury, from Langton to 
Chichele. Lindwood was made Bishop of St. Davids in 1434, 
and died in 1446. He had been preceded in his bishopric 
by an astronomer, named Rocleve, who had been among the 
friends of Henry V., and to whom the king gave that see. But 
most closely attached to Henry V. was the most famous English 
theologian of his day, Thomas Netter 3 of Saffron Walden, in 



1 32 A F/KST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1413 

Essex, who was born in 1380, and educated at Oxford, where he 
was Doctor of Divinity, and publicly disputed against Wiclif's 
doctrines. He became a Carmelite in London, went to the 
Council of Pisa, in 1414 became Provincial of the Carmelites in 
England, and as such was a distinguished member of the 
Council of Constance (§ 3). Thomas Netter, of Walden, was 
regarded by the orthodox as prince of controversialists in the 
fifteenth century. The chief of his numerous works was a Doc- 
trinale, which is a long and systematic theological assertion of 
Church doctrine against Wiclif heresies. He also put together 
Fasciculi Zizaniorum — Bundles of Master John Wiclif's tares 
with wheat — which contain the statute for the burning of heretics ; 
the bull of John XXIII. against Wiclif's heresies ; condemned 
opinions of Wiclif ; sentence passed on him and on John Huss ; 
accusations against Jerome of Prague ; divers condemned errors 
of Lollards and others ; the latest topic being the examination 
of William White, September 13th, 1428, at which Thomas of 
Walden was himself present, two years before his death. This 
theologian was Inquisitor-General in England for the punishing 
of heretics. He had business in Lithuania after the close of the 
Council of Constance, in 141 8, and upon his return was made 
confessor to King Henry V. 

10. In August, 141 5, Henry had crossed to France. On the 
25th of the following October he won the battle of Agincourt, 
and closed the victory with a barbarous massacre of prisoners. 
Two chroniclers of English history were present at the fight. 
One, John de Wavrin, fought on the French side, but two years 
later joined the French allies of England. He wrote afterwards 
a chronicle of English history from the earliest years, which he 
brought down to the year 1471. He is also probably the anony- 
mous continuer (from 1443) of the chronicle of Monstrelet, who 
died in 1453. The other soldier of Agincourt who has left us a 
chronicle was an Englishman, John Harding. He was born 
in 1378 ; at the age of twelve was admitted into the house of Sir 
Henry Percy, known as Hotspur, and served as a volunteer 
under Percy in the battle of Homildon. After Percy's death 
John Harding followed the banner of Sir Robert Umfraville, who 
died in 1436, and became constable of one of his castles. John 
Harding, in and after the reign of Henry V., was much employed 
in procuring documents — some of them forgeries — in support of 
the claim on the kings of Scotland for homage to the kings of 
England. His English rhyming Chronicle was not written 



to a.d. 1422.] CHRONICLERS. 183 

until after the reign of Henry V. But Henry V. was King of 
England when a rhyming chronicle was written in English of 
the north, the Oryginale Crony kil of Scotland, by Andrew 
of Wyntoun, a regular canon of St. Andrew's, and prior of 
one of the five subordinated monasteries of St. Andrew's, that of 
St. Serf, in the island of Lochleven, once a religious house of the 
Culdees. Andrew of Wyntoun crowded into his nine books of 
ingenious eight-syllabled doggrel a great number of facts and 
traditions. 

11. We had English verse also from William of 
ITassington, in Northamptonshire, a proctor in the Eccle- 
siastical Court of York, who translated into English rhyme a 
Latin metrical treatise on the Trinity and Unity, called The 
Mirror of Life. The translation was made about the year 141 8. 
The original, in several thousand verses, was by John of Waldly, 
in Yorkshire, an Augustine Friar, provincial of his order in 
England, and active in controversy against Wiclif. 

12. The chief Latin chronicler of the reign of Henry V. was 
Thomas Walsingham, precentor and chief copyist, or scrip- 
torarius, in St. Albans Abbey, where in his time, by his advice, 
a new Scriptorium was built. He used records produced in the 
form of chronicle by preceding monks of St. Albans— William 
Rishanger, John of Trokelowe, Henry of Blaneford, 
William Wyntershylle, — in the formation of an English 
history, Historia Anglicana, which extends from 1272 to the 
end of the reign of Henry V., in 1422. He also compiled, about 
the year 1419, his Ypodgima Neustrice, or "Demonstration of 
Events in Normandy," dedicated to Henry V. in compliment 
upon his recent conquests of Normandy ; but the affairs of 
Normandy form only a small portion of the work. 

13. We may now pass out of the reign of Henry V., who 
died at the end of August, 1422. When the penitential psalms 
were being read to him on his death-bed, the words "Thou 
shalt build the walls of Jerusalem" put into his head more 
fighting, and he said, " If I had finished the war in France, and 
established peace, I would have gone to Palestine to redeem the 
holy city from the Saracens." 

He left an infant son, Henry VI. (1422 — 1461), King of Eng- 
land, and he named his brother Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 
regent of England. Parliament gave chief power to the Duke 
of Bedford, who was made Regent of France, and the Duke of 
Gloucester was made President of the Council, as " Protector 



I&4 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1422 

of the Realm and Church of England," when Bedford was away 
in France. This Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, was the 
patron of John Lydgate, who died about 1460. 

For him Lydgate wrote, in the reign of Henry VI., his Falls 
of Princes, a long poem in Chaucer's seven-lined stanza, founded 
upon Boccaccio's Latin prose work in nine books, " De Casibus 
Illustrium Virorum;" but Lydgate said that he followed Boccaccio 
through the version of a Frenchman, Laurent, that is Laurent 
de Premierfait, who translated also the "Decameron" for Jeanne, 
Queen of Navarre. Lydgate interspersed his work with occa- 
sional prologues and balades of his own, while he retold the 
stories, not as a mere rhyming translator, but as a man who had 
an honest gift of song and felt their poetry. There passes 
through the reader's mind a funeral pomp of men who have 
been carried high on Fortune's wheel, and then been bruised to 
death by its descending stroke. The poem warns the mighty to 
be humble, and the lowly to be well content. 

The Storie of Thebes is told by Lydgate as another " Canter- 
bury Tale." After a sickness he went in a black cope, " on 
palfrey slender, long, and lean," with rusty bridle, and his man 
before him carrying an empty pack, to the shrine at Canterbury, 
and by accident put up there at the inn where Chaucer's pil- 
grims were, assembled. There he saw the host of the " Tabard," 
who thought him lean for a monk, prescribed nut-brown ale 
after supper, with anise, cummin, or coriajider seed at bedtime. 
But the best medicine was cheerful company. So Dan John 
supped with the pilgrims, went home with them next day, and 
helped to amuse them with the story of the " Thebaid " of 
Statius, as it had been manipulated by the romancers of the 
Middle Ages. 

Lydgate's Troy Book is a metrical version from a French 
translation of the " Historia Trojana" of Guido della Colonna, a 
Sicilian poet and lawyer of Messina, who came to England in 
1287 with Edward I., when he returned from his war in Asia. 
Colonna's "Trojan History" was a version from the "Fall of 
Troy" ascribed to Dares (ch. iii. § 21). 

14. The author of the " King's Ouair," James I. of Scotland, 
went home to his Scotch throne not very long after the death of 
Henry V. His love was first crowned by marriage to Jane 
Beaufort with royal state ; he was then allowed to proceed to 
his kingdom, and was crowned at Scone in May of the year 
1424. He sought to maintain peace and order in his kingdom, 



toa.d. 1461.] LYDGATE. JAMES I. CIVIL WAR. l8$ 

endeavoured to bring law and justice within reach of the poor, 
regulated weights and measures, established a survey of property 
with a view to justice in taxation, and made careful inquiry into 
titles. He tried to suppress with a strong hand the violence 
of faction. But the enlarged liberties of the people pressed on 
the feudal rights of the nobles. Many a rough-handed chief 
looked also with concern at the inquiry into titles. Sir Robert 
Graham, who had denounced the king as a tyrant for his en- 
croachment on the nobles, at last broke in upon him with three 
hundred Highlanders, at Christmas time in 1436, caught him 
unarmed, and killed him. He defended himself bravely, and 
his wife Jane, who sought to shelter him, was wounded in the 
struggle. He had written of her truly in the " King's Quair :" 

" And thus this floure . . . 
So hertly has unto my help attendit, 
That from the deth hir man sche has defendit." 

There remained only a six year old son to be the king's 
successor. 

Some writers ascribe to James I. of Scotland, and some to 
James IV., two humorous old Scottish poems describing the 
rough holiday life o the people. They are called Peeblis to the 
Play and Christis Kirk of the Green. If they were really by 
James I., he must have had a range of power that would place 
him first among the poets of his time. 

15. The death of Charles VI. of France made the infant 
Henry VI. of England, by the Treaty of Troyes, sovereign of 
France ; but this claim was resisted. Then followed contention, 
wasting life and honour ; the patriotic inspiration, the success, 
and the disgrace to England of the burning of Jeanne d'Arc, 
after her abandonment and sale by men of her own country. 
Slowly the French ground was reconquered by the French, and 
England fell under the plague of civil war. In this contest 
between the rival lines of York and Lancaster first blood was 
drawn in the battle of St. Albans, on the 22nd of May, 1455; 
but after this there was, during four or five years, rest from the 
actual clash of arms, while strife continued for supremacy under 
the feeble rule of a king whose mind, weak through disease, 
swayed in its clearer hours towards a kindly piety. 

16. During this interval Reginald Pecoek, author of the 
most important English prose work written in the reign of 
Henry VI., was called to account for the free spirit shown not 



150 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. i 4 m 

in attack upon the higher clergy, but in defence of them. 
Reginald Pecock, probably a Welshman, was born towards the 
end of the fourteenth century, studied at Oriel College, Oxford, 
and was admitted to priest's orders in 142 1. In 1431 John 
Lydgate's patron, the Protector, Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, 
made Pecock Master of Whittington College, and Rector of St, 
Michael in Riola. For the next thirteen years he lived in 
London, taking active interest in the religious controversies that 
were still astir, and seeking by many tracts, written in English, 
to convince the Lollards. About 1440 he produced a Donet, or 
introduction to the chief truths of Christianity, in a dialogue 
between father and son. The second part was against the 
Lollards. A Follower of Donet appeared some years later. 
In 1444, Humphrey of Gloucester, a lover of books and patron 
of learning, made Pecock Bishop of St. Asaph. At the same 
time he became Doctor of Divinity. Bishop Pecock undertook 
to defend his order against popular aspersions, and in 1447 
preached at Paul's Cross a sermon arguing that, although he 
often preached in his own diocese, bishops were free from the 
burden of preaching, because they had duties of a higher 
character ; and that when they were non-resident they had good 
reason for being so. This sermon was the beginning of a course 
of offence against the Church, consisting mainly in a defence 
based upon arguments addressed to the reason. About the 
year 1449 Pecock was busy upon his chief work, The Repressor 
of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy; and in the same year he 
was raised from the Bishopric of St. Asaph to that of Chichester. 
His ''Repressor," although wholly meant as a defence of the 
higher clergy against those who were called the Bible men, 
increased the hostility of his own party against him. He under- 
took to justify eleven, but did in fact restrict himself to six, of 
the practices for which the clergy incurred blame among the 
people : these were, the use of images ; the going on pilgrimage; 
the holding of landed possessions by the clergy ; the various 
ranks of the hierarchy ; the framing of Church laws by papal 
and episcopal authority ; and the institution of the religious 
orders. For discussion of the other five points he referred to 
other books of his, written or about to be written. Upon the 
topics it discussed the book was a repertory of fifteenth century 
argument. The offence was that the whole subject was argued 
out in homely English for discussion by the English people ; for 
while Pecock exalted the pope's supremacy, he conceded to his 



TOA.D. 1461.] PECOCICS " REPRESSOR." 1 87 

opponents that in Scripture was the only rule of faith, and urged 
that doctrine should be proved therefrom by reason. This, 
however, he did while opposing the demand of the Lollards — 
Puritans of the fifteenth century— for authority of Scripture in 
less important matters of usage, lay or clerical. There could be 
no real conflict between reason and Scripture, Pecock taught, 
and the clergy, he said, shall be condemned at the last day " if 
by clear wit they draw not men into consent of true faith other- 
wise than by fire, sword, and hangment ; although I will not 
deny these second means to be lawful, provided the former be 
first used." A bishop who thought for himself after this fashion ; 
denying to the Lollards that deductions from their reading of 
the Bible were infallible, denying also to his brethren of the 
hierarchy the right to claim an uninquiring faith in dogmas of 
the Church ; opposed himself to the passions of the combatants 
on either side, and had no partisans. In 1457 a council was 
held at Westminster, in which all temporal lords refused to 
speak till Pecock had been expelled from it. The divines at this 
council appointed four-and-twenty doctors to examine Pecock's 
books. The books were reported against, Pecock was declared 
a sickly sheep, and called upon to abjure or be burnt. He had 
admitted the right of the Church thus to compel opinion, and he 
submitted. The executioner burnt, instead of the bishop, his 
works in three folios and eleven quartos, including a copy of that 
" Repressor " of his, a piece of natural fifteenth century English, 
which yet survives as one of the best and most considerable 
specimens of early prose among the treasures of our literature. 
After some months Bishop Pecock was deprived of his see, and 
secluded in the abbey of Thorney in Cambridgeshire, where he 
was confined to a private room within sight of an altar, was for- 
bidden ever again to put pen to paper, and was to have access 
to no books but a breviary, a mass-book, a psalter, a legend, 
and a Bible. The doors of Thorney Abbey closed on him. 

17. There is little more to record of our literature in the 
reign of Henry VI. Dame Juliana Berners, lady prioress 
of the nunnery of Sopwell, near St. Albans, who was living in 
1460, wrote in English verse a Book of Hunting, and in English 
prose the Art of Hawking and the Laws of Arms. 

18. John Capgrave, born in 1393, at Lynn in Norfolk, 
died in 1464 Provincial of the Austin Friars. He excelled all 
men of the reign of Henry VI. in the industry of a great eru- 
dition without genius. He was a hearty orthodox churchman, 



1 88 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 142a 

who detested Wiclif and his followers, but as an Englishman 
sympathised with resistance to aggressions of the papal see 
upon his king's prerogative or the just rights of his countrymen. 
His chief works are a Book of the Noble Henries, dedicated to 
King Henry VI., and a Chronicle of England, dedicated to King 
Edward IV. 

19. Throughout the reign of Henry VI., and on into the 
reign of Henry VII., extends, from 1422 to 1505, the large body 
of family and friendly correspondence known as the Paston 
Letters. Most of them are addressed to John Paston, Esq., of 
Norfolk, who died in 1466 ; to Sir John Paston, his son, who 
died in 1479 ; and to John Paston of Gelston, who died in 1503. 
They abound in interesting illustrations of our civil and social 
history during the Wars of the Roses. 

20. A most valuable record of the Transition English of 
Norfolk in the year 1440 is the Promptorium Parvulornm, an 
English-Latin Dictionary, compiled by one of the Dominicans, 
or Black Friars, of Bishop's Lynn. He was known as Geoffrey 
the Grammarian, and is believed to have been also the author 
of a Latin-English Dictionary, which he called the Medulla 
Gramjnatices. The Latin interpretations in the Promptorium 
enable us to define the meaning of many now obsolete words in 
books written before the Commonwealth. 

21. John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, whom Henry VI. 
made Lord Deputy of Ireland, and who afterwards was Lord 
High Constable and Lord High Treasurer, had scholarly tastes, 
and was translating Cicero on F7'iendship at the time when the 
first printers with movable types were establishing their art 
in Mayence. During the short interval of restored rule to 
Henry VI., breaking the reign of Edward IV., John Tiptoft was 
accused of cruelty in his Irish administration, and he was exe- 
cuted on Tower Hill in October, 1470. 

Benedict Burgh, Archdeacon of Colchester, was then at 
work upon his translation of Cato's "Morals "into English stanzas, 
for the use of his pupil Lord Bourchier, son of the Earl of 
Essex. Benedict Burgh is said also to have finished a metrical 
version of the De Regimine Principnm, which Lydgate had 
left incomplete. Burgh himself died in 1488. 

22. Thomas Chestre, who wrote for the minstrels in the 
reign of Henry VI., Englished the Lay of Sir Lannfal; but 
the most famous minstrel of this time was a Scottish rustic, 
blind from birth, known as Henry the Minstrel, or Blind 



toa.d. I473-] SIR JOHN FORTESCUE. 1 89 

Harry, who obtained food and clothing by recitation of stories 
before men of the highest rank. He was one of an order of 
men who sang or chanted tales to the harp, in verses often of 
their own composing, enlivened with mimicry and action. 
Blind Harry, who understood Latin and French, produced a 
long poem on his nation's hero, Wallace, in or about the year 
1461. He was the first who followed Chaucer in use of the 
heroic couplet ; and he calls his poem a chronicle derived chiefly 
from the Latin of John Blair, who had been Wallace's school- 
fellow. 

23. Of our literature during the reign of Edward IV. (1461 — 
1483) there is only one thing more to be said that is not con- 
nected with the introduction of the art of printing with movable 
types into this country. Even when distracted by contending 
factions, England was advancing towards freedom. The laws of 
the country were not based like those of France upon the prin- 
ciple that the will of the monarch is law, but on the will of the 
people through their representatives. An English lawyer, Sir 
John Fortescue, born in Devonshire, and Chief Justice of the 
King's Bench from 1442 to 1460, fought at Towton, and fled 
with King Henry VI. to Scotland and Wales. The exiled king 
made him his nominal Lord Chancellor. The actual king con- 
fiscated his possessions as those of a traitor. As an exile in 
Lorraine with the queen and prince, he wrote, about the year 
1463, for the use of the young prince, a Latin book in praise of ■ 
the laws of England {De Landibus Legimi Anglia>) in dialogue 
between himself and the prince. It is a simple sketch of the first 
principles of law. He wrote afterwards in like spirit an English 
book on the Difference between Absolute and ' Li?nited Monarchy ', 
his chief object being to show the superiority of a constitutional 
over a despotic government. After Henry VI. and the prince 
were dead, Sir John Fortescue acknowledged Edward IV. 's 
title to the crown, and thus he obtained in 1473 tne reversal of 
his attainder. He is said to have lived to the age of ninety. 
The strength of constitutional feeling in this chief English 
lawyer of the fifteenth century may be inferred from his manner 
of dating the absolute regal dominion from Nimrod, who "first 
acquired to himself a kingdom, though he is not called a King 
in the Scripture, but a Mighty Hunter before the Lord. For," 
: says Fortescue, " as a Hunter behaves towards Beasts, which 
' are naturally wild and free ; so did he oblige Mankind to be in 
servitude and to obey him." He went back even to the mythical 



190 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1419 

time for the free spirit of the English body politic. " The king- 
dom of England," he says, " had its original from Brut and the 
Trojans who attended him from Italy and Greece, and became 
a mixed kind of government, compounded of the regal and 
political." Going as far back as he could, he was unable to 
find or conceive an English people passively obedient to any 
one irresponsible master. The nation was advancing slowly in 
his days ; there was social confusion, and intellectual life seemed 
to be numbed, while events of great moment were happen- 
ing abroad. But if there Was no guiding light of genius, there 
was the sense of God and duty in the people which enabled 
them to find their own way till the next guides came. 

The rise in Florence of the Medici family ; the Capture of 
Constantinople by the Turks ; and the Invention ox Printing, 
were, during the reigns of Henry VI. and Edward IV., the 
events abroad which had most influence upon the course of 
thought in England. 

24. It had been to Florence that the pope elected by the 
Council of Constance (§ 3), Martin V., finding himself one 
of four, and unable to get immediate possession of his rights 
at Rome, betook himself in the year 14 19. This was when 
Henry V. was King of England; and about the time when 
Occleve was writing his chief poems, and James I. of Scotland 
was writing the " King's Ouair." For a year and a half a papal 
court was added to the pomps of the free city. The deposed 
pope, John XXIII., presently came to Florence, made his sub- 
mission, and died there, leaving the founder of the great Medici 
family, Giovanni de' Medici, one of his four executors. At this 
time the wealth of trading Florence was augmented by the pur- 
chase of Leghorn and its port from Genoa. The free common- 
wealth was unrivalled in commercial prosperity. Its citizens 
were active in all quarters of the world. There was a treaty 
even with the Soldan of Babylon for currency within his realm 
of the coin of Florence. The strength thus gathered was soon 
to be absorbed and exhausted in the domination of the Medici; 
but the founder of that family, the rich banker Giovanni, made 
Gonfaloniere in 1421, owed his political rise to his goodwill 
towards the people. The war with Filippo Visconti, Duke of 
Milan, begun by Florence in 1423, was to check aggression upon 
the free cities of Tuscany. But the war began ill, and Florence 
might have fallen in the fight for liberty if Venice had not at last 
consented to alliance with her. Victory cost Florence three and 



to a.d. 1429.] RISE OF THE MEDICI, I9I 

a half millions of florins ; and the popular Giovanni de' Medici, 
who had been at the head of a peace party, obtained political 
supremacy by the invention and establishment of an equitable 
income-tax for payment of the public debts. The tax was half 
per cent, on incomes, as a forced loan to the Government at five 
per cent. ; or a third part of the tax might be paid, with abandon- 
ment of right to interest and repayment. Money was worth 
much more than five per cent, to the traders of Florence ; but 
the deductions allowed before charging for this income-tax 
secured to every one untaxed his house, his horse, and two 
hundred florins a year for each mouth in his household. Thus 
there was a protection against general discontent, and licence for 
irregular taxation. The half per cent, or decima, was soon 
taken as the mere unit of calculation, and forced loans of this or 
that number of decimas, for this or that new exigence of the State, 
might afterwards be raised at the discretion of the ruler. Such 
loans were raised now and then as often as twelve times a year, to 
feed the magnificence of one man at the expense of commerce 
which had given freedom and strength to the city, and which 
had sent up that strong shoot of artistic life whereof the later 
Medici consumed the fruit. 

In 1429 Giovanni died, "enormously rich in treasure, but 
richer still in good repute," lord only of his counting-house. He 
had steadily rejected the advice of his son Cosmo that he should 
take advantage of his position in the city by placing himself at 
the head of the popular party against the weaker faction of the 
aristocracy, and so rise to political power. 

When Cosmo became chief of his house he became chief 
also of the popular party, which he made a faction. It was 
faction against faction, chief against chief, and some began to 
ask themselves to which of the chiefs Florence would have to 
yield her independence. Cosmo's antagonists achieved his 
banishment, and thereby added to his strength. Venice wel- 
comed him, Florence missed him. Friends and poor citizens 
suffered for want of access to the purse by which he made him- 
self beloved. A signory favourable to the Medici was voted 
into office ; the aristocratic faction- failed in an attempt at armed 
resistance ; and Cosmo was recalled, to enter Florence in great 
triumph as the father of his country. His first care was for the 
exile, fine, imprisonment, or death of the stronger men of the 
opposite side. Having weeded out enemies, or suspected ene- 
mies, he and his comrades strengthened new men into serviceable 



192 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1429 

friends, divided the goods of the outlawed, made new and con- 
venient laws, suppressed elections of unfriendly magistrates, and 
took means, by bribing and by tampering with the purses from 
which names of magistrates were drawn, to confine to men of 
their own faction all offices in which power of life and death 
was vested. Power of life and death was given to the eight ; 
chance of return was almost wholly cut off from the exiles. Thus 
the faction led by Cosmo was supreme. It has been said that 
to a remonstrance on the ruin caused to the city by so many 
deaths and fines and banishments of worthy citizens, Cosmo 
replied that a city ruined was better than a city lost, and that 
it cost only a few yards of red cloth to make more citizens 
worshipful. Twenty families, says one old historian, were 
banished by the Medici for every one that suffered with them. 
The exiled leader of the aristocratic faction invited the arms of 
the tyrant of Milan to an attack on Florence ; and the city again 
fought manfully against foreign despotism while her liberties 
were sickening at home. 

Then came the time when the fall of Constantinople was 
impending. Greek Christians, who sought aid from the nations 
of the West, made politic effort to heal the division upon 
points of ceremonial between the Eastern and the Western 
Churches. The Council of Basle, transferred to Ferrara, and 
again to Florence, brought together in Florence, in the year 
1439, the Pope Eugenius IV. and the Patriarch Joseph of Con- 
stantinople, with many. Greek bishops and scholars, and also 
the unfortunate Greek Emperor, John Palaeologus. Talk of 
Plato thus first became familiar to the chiefs of Florentine 
society. The Eastern Church assented in five articles to 
Western opinion, and united itself to the Church of Rome. But 
as this act of union did not secure the desired end of saving 
Constantinople from the Turk, after the fall of the Eastern 
capital the two Churches fell back into their old state of schism. 
More came of the intellectual appetite of the rich merchants 
and bankers of Florence for commerce with men who had some- 
thing new to traffic in — Greek manuscripts worth reading, and 
the skill to read them. 

25. The Byzantine Empire had in 1425, by a treaty of the 
Emperor John Pakeologus II., been reduced to Constantinople 
and its environs, with some outlying places. These were held 
subject to a yearly tribute, which transferred the larger part of 
their revenues to the Turk. The treaty was observed by 



TOA.D. T453-] FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE. T93 

Sultan Amurath II. But his son Mohammed II., in the third 
year of his reign, began, at the age of about three-and-twenty, 
his career of conquest by overthrowing all that remained of 
the Roman Empire in the East. After fifty-eight days' siege, 
he took Constantinople by storm, on the 29th of May, in the 
year 1453. Five years later he made himself master of the 
Morea. Occupation of Greece by the Turks drove the Greek 
patriots and scholars into exile. They sought a livelihood in 
foreign capitals by teaching their old language, and diffusing 
knowledge of the treasures of its literature. Thus Greek became 
a part of European scholarship, and Plato lived again, to join 
the ranks of the reformers. 

It was of a Spartan in Paris, who supported himself also by 
skill with his pen as a copyist, that John Reuchlin had learnt, 
before he sought more at Florence from Argyropoulos its first 
famous teacher there, Greek enough to surprise the patriot 
with speech in his own tongue from a German, and cause 
him to say, "Alas, Greece is already banished beyond the Alps." 
Argyropoulos, fugitive to Florence after the capture of Constan- 
tinople, had been welcomed by Cosmo de' Medici, appointed 
tutor to his sons Lorenzo and Pietro, and established as a pro- 
fessor of Greek, with pupils, among whom was Politian. Among 
other Greeks who came to Florence was the venerable George 
Gemisthus Pletho, whose long life had been spent in enthusi- 
astic study of Plato, and who lectured upon him to the Italians, 
maintaining his philosophy as partisan of Plato against Aris- 
totle. Cosmo de' Medici, his constant hearer, received his 
opinions. While he was steadily pursuing his design to become 
sovereign in Florence, the head of the great banking-house 
which spread its branches over Europe set a fashion for the 
collecting of Greek manuscripts, proceeded towards the estab- 
lishment of a Platonic academy in Florence, and educated 
young Marsilio Ficino specially in Platonism, that he might 
become its head. 

John Argyropoulos worked at Aristotle ; but the new teachers 
were generally Platonists, reading their Plato with the glosses of 
the mystical school of Neoplatonists, whose philosophy had been 
in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries at war with Christianity ; 
but in this fifteenth century became indirectly an aid in the refor- 
mation of the Christian Church. To the corrupt society of Italy 
Platonism gave some grace of heathendom and many affecta- 
tions. To men of the Teutonic or English race, and others who 

N 



194 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1455 

went to Florence to learn Greek, the new study gave something 
more. Earnest minds that were battling with the strong animal 
nature of the Church passed, through the new study, to works- 
of a heathen philosopher who saw a divine soul in the world 
towards which by heavenward aspiration souls of men could 
rise. " But if the company will be persuaded by me," wrote 
Plato, in the tenth book of the Republic, " considering the soul 
to be immortal and able to bear all evil and good, we shall 
always persevere in the road which leads upwards, and shall by 
all means follow justice with prudence ; that so we may be friends 
to ourselves and to the gods, both while we remain here, and 
when we afterwards receive its rewards, like victors assembled 
together ; and so both here and in that journey of a thousand 
years we shall be happy." The Neoplatonists had grafted ex- 
treme doctrines of purification and subjection of man's animal 
nature upon the teaching in Plato's " Phsedo," that a soul given, 
to fleshly pleasures takes taint of the flesh. They were con- 
nected by their faith with the divine essence, and upon many of 
the best minds of Europe the new study of Greek through 
such reading of Plato came as a new impulse to conflict with 
the sensuality which had become the scandal of the Church of 
Rome. Plato was thus associated among such men with the 
cause of progress ; while Aristotle, of whose teaching the know- 
ledge had been long since diffused by the Arabians through 
translation, supplied forms for conventional thought, and, eager 
pioneer as he had been, was made the idol of the school- 
men who stood on the ancient ways. The fall of Constantinople 
made Plato a power in Europe. So it was that those of the 
clergy who shrank from the quickened tendency among good 
scholars to attack their flesh-pots, gave currency to the proverb,. 
" Beware of the Greeks, lest you be made a heretic." 

26. It was at this time that the future influence of every 
wise thought was enlarged by the Invention of Printing. In the 
year of the battle of St. Albans, 1455, the Bible called the 
Mazarin Bible, because it was first found in the library of 
Cardinal Mazarin, was printed at Mayence by John Gutenberg. 
In the year of the condemnation of Reginald Pecock for de- 
claring that all truth would bear the test of reason and inquiry, 
John Fust, or Faust, and Peter Schceffer printed a magnificent 
edition of the Psalter. 

Stamping with ink from blocks on which letters had been 
carved in relief had already been tried when, in 1438, John 



toa.d. 1469.] INVENTION OF PRINTING. CAXTON. 195 

Gutenberg, of Mayence, first thought of the use of movable 
types to save the great labour of cutting a fresh block for every 
page. He had gone from Mayence to Strasburg as a block 
printer, become impoverished by a lawsuit, returned to Mayence, 
and worked at his press in partnership with a wealthy gold- 
smith, named John Faust, or Fust. After many experiments, 
so much success was obtained that, as before said, the printing 
of the Mazarin Bible was completed with movable type in 1455. 
The partnership was dissolved, and Gutenberg, unable to repay 
advances of money, made over his types to Faust, who at first 
printed copies of the Bible to imitate those sold as MSS., and 
gave for sixty crowns what copyists required five hundred for 
producing. Then he took into partnership his son-in-law, 
Peter SchcerTer ; and in the colophon to the Psalter produced by 
them in 1457, Faust and Schceffer boasted openly the power of 
their new art. In 1462 Mayence, which had been for some 
years a free imperial city, was taken and sacked by its arch- 
bishop, Adolphus. This event, by scattering the pupils and 
workmen of Faust and Schoeffer, dispersed through Europe 
the knowledge of their art. It was carried from Mayence to 
Haarlem and Strasburg ; from Haarlem to Rome, in 1466, by 
Sweynheym and Pannartz, the first users of Roman type. It 
reached Paris in 1469; Cologne in 1470; and England, through 
William Caxton, about 1475. There was no printer in Scotland 
until after the close of the fifteenth century, y 

27. William Caxton, born about 1422, in the Weald of 
Kent, was apprenticed to a wealthy London mercer. After his 
master's death, in 1441, he lived chiefly in Brabant, Flanders, 
Holland, and Zealand, for thirty years and more. In 1464 he 
was employed by Edward IV. as one of two commissioners for 
the settlement of a treaty of commerce with Philip the Good, 
Duke of Burgundy. That Philip was succeeded, in 1467, by 
his eldest son Charles, called the Bold, who in the following 
year, 1468, married Edward IV.'s sister Margaret. Caxton was 
then in Margaret's service, and received from her a yearly fee. 
On the 1st of March, 1469, he began a translation from Raoul 
le Fevre, of the Recuyell of the History es of Troye, a work sus- 
pended by him for two years, and then finished at Margaret's 
command. In October, 1470, when Warwick, the Kingmaker, 
was moving Henry VI. up from the Tower to the Palace of 
Westminster, Edward IV., paying his fur gown for his passage, 
came as a fugitive to Bruges, with seven c r eight hundred hungry 

N 2 



196 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1469 

followers. He was at Bruges five months, and then returned to 
become king again. Among the companions of Edward in this 
brief exile to the city in which Caxton served the king's sister, was 
his brother-in-law, Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, trans- 
lator, from the French, of a book of Dictes and Sayings of the 
Philosophers. He submitted his translation to Caxton's criti- 
cism. Having achieved his own version of the Recuyell of the 
Historyes of Troye — a work afterwards occupying 778 folio pages 
of print — Caxton says that he " practised and learnt at great 
charge and expense " the art of printing, to enable him to strike 
off in one day many copies. He seems to have learnt the art at 
Cologne, of Conrad Winters, who had set up his press there in 
1470. Caxton's translation of the "Histories of Troy" was, 
he says, finished at Cologne, September 19, 147 1 ; and then he 
began to print. 

The first book printed by him was his translation, also from 
the French, of a moral treatise, The Game and Playe of the 
Chesse. Of this there are two editions, the first said to have 
been finished on the last day of March, 1474. It is assumed to 
be the first book printed in this country. Perhaps it was ; but 
there is no evidence that Caxton did not print it at Cologne. 
It is to the printed copy of the translation of " Les Dictes 
Moraux des Philosophes," as The Dictes and Sayings of Phi- 
losophers, by Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, that Caxton first 
added, " imprynted by me, William Caxton, at Westmynstre ;" 
and the date of it is 1477. A book of 1480 specifies the Abbey 
as the place where Caxton had his press. Resort to the Abbey 
scriptorium for copies of books had led to a settlement of 
copyists within the Abbey precincts. Among the " Paston 
Letters" is a book bill, dated 1468, from a copyist named W. 
Ebesham, who said that he was living at some expense in 
the Sanctuary, Westminster. The new-born giant was in its 
mother's lap when Caxton, who had learnt the new art as a 
business speculation, worked his press at Westminster Abbey 
among the professional transcribers whom he found there busy 
with their pens. 

28. In those days Lorenzo de' Medici ruled Florence. 
Michael Angelo and Ariosto were both born in one year ; and 
the year, 1474, was that in which Caxton completed the printing 
of his " Game and Play of Chess." Italian fine gentlemen had 
begun to affect far-fetched conceits and ingenuities of speech. 
Lorenzo himself, who set forth Platonism in his Altercazione, 



to a.d. 1480.] ITALIAN INFLUENCE: PULCI. THE PASTORAL, igy 

was writing love sonnets and canzone in a style that would tell 
how the rays of love from the eyes of his lady penetrated 
through his eyes the shadow of his heart, like a ray of sun 
entering the dark beehive by its fissure ; and how then, as the 
hive wakes, the bees fly, full of new cares, hither and thither in 
the forest, sip at flowers, fly out, return laden with odorous 
spoil, sting those who are seen idle, so the spirits stir in his 
heart, fly out to seek the light, &c. &c. But in these days 
Florence had other poets. Then it was that Luigi Pulci, born 
in 1432, cleverest of three verse-writing brothers, wrote in 
the fashionable strain of the flowing of the river Lora in the 
Apennines into the Severus, in his poem of "The Dryad of 
Love." The nymph Lora was loved by the satyr Severus. 
Diana changed him to a stag, then hunted him, and changed 
him into a river ; but the loving nymph, changed also into a 
stream, ran to her union with him. Luigi Pulci wrote also in a 
far different vein. Spanish romance was influenced by Vasco de 
Lobeira, a Portuguese of Chaucer's time, who had been knighted 
on the battle-field by the King John to whom John of Gaunt 
married his daughter Philippa. Lobeira, who may have met 
Chaucer on the occasion of that marriage (ch. iv. § 39), died in 
1403, and had written towards the close of the fourteenth century 
his "Amadis of Gaul," a long prose romance of original invention, 
which, about 1503, was turned into Spanish, and established in 
Spain a new form of knightly prose romance. " Amadis " itself 
had and deserved more popularity than most of its successors. 
But an earlier impulse from Spain quickened development in 
Italy of chivalrous romance, and caused Luigi Pulci to produce, 
in octave rhyme, a prelude of Italian Charlemagne poetry in the 
irreligious and half-mocking " Morgante Maggiore," of which 
the first canto has been translated into English by Lord Byron. 
Then it was also that in Florence the pastoral strain, of which 
Boccaccio, in his " Admetus," sounded the first note, was taken 
up by Agnolo of Monte Pulciano. Agnolo, called Politianus — 
Poliziano— was a marvellous young man of twenty when Caxton 
finished the printing of his " Game and Play of Chess." He was 
born in 1454, and had been educated at the expense of Cosmo de' 
Medici. He studied Greek under Andronicus of Thessalonica, 
Plato under Marsilius Ficinus, Aristotle under Argyropoulos ; 
he became professor of Latin and Greek at Florence, and was 
sought as a teacher even by the pupils of Chalcondylas, for he 
was poet as well as scholar, and could put true life into his 



I98 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1462 

teaching. He was but forty when he died, and among his 
poems he has left us the pastoral tale of Orpheus, his " Orfeo," in 
terza rima, the first pastoral in modern literature with a story in 
it. Niccolo da Correggio called his " Cefalo," in octave rhyme, 
recited at Ferrara in i486, also a story — " Favola" — and in the 
following years others appeared as rustic comedies, eclogues, or 
pastoral eclogues. When long, they were divided into acts. 
And here we are at the source of the taste for pastoral poetry 
which we shall find after some years coming by way of France 
to England. 

m 29. These were the days also of Christopher Columbus, born 
in Italy in 1445. He went to sea about the time when, in 1462, 
the printers of Mayence were first scattered; and was voyaging 
northward beyond Iceland, and southward to the coast of 
Guinea, while the printer's press was being first set up in sundry 
capitals of Europe. 

The short reign of Edward V., in 1483, from April 9 to June 
25, and the reign of Richard III. (1483 — 1485), yielded no work 
of any mark to English literature. But in 1483 Luther and 
Raffaelle were born. 

During the early part of the reign of Henry VII. (1485 — 1509) 
the New World was discovered. Sebastian Cabot, born at 
"Bristol, the son of a Venetian pilot, was but twenty years old 
when, on a voyage with his father and two brothers in the ser- 
vice of Henry VII., for the discovery and occupation of new 
lands, he first saw the mainland of America, in 1497. Columbus, 
in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, had found for 
Spain in 1492 the West India Islands. On his third voyage in 
search of new lands and their wealth, in 1498, he saw the main- 
land of America, which had been seen by the Cabots in 1497, 
and which was named after Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine, 
who did not visit it till 1499. " Spain, that used to be called 
poor, is now the most wealthy of kingdoms," Columbus wrote ; 
but in his old age he had for one ornament of his home the 
chains in which he had been sent home from Hispaniola by 
men weary of one who vexed them with restraints of honesty. 
" For seven years," he wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella, " was I 
at your royal court, where every one to whom the enterprise was 
mentioned treated it as ridiculous ; but now there is not a man, 
down to the very tailors, wlpio does not beg to be allowed to 
become a discoverer. There is reason to believe that they 
make the voyage only for plunder, and that they are permitted 



toa.d. 1500.] COLUMBUS. GROCYN AND LINACRE. 199 

to do so, to the great disparagement of my honour, and the 
detriment of the undertaking itself.* It is right to give God his 
due, and to receive that which belongs to one's self. ... I 
was twenty-eight years old when I came into your highnesses' 
service, and now I have not a hair upon me that is not grey; my 
body is infirm, and all that was left to me, as well as to my 
brothers, has been taken away and sold, even to the frock that 
I wore, to my great dishonour." So Columbus wrote from the 
Indies, in July, 1503, when absent on his fourth and last voyage 
to the New World, the voyage following that from which he 
had returned in chains. With a pure heart and noble mind 
he had served the greed of men ; and to his death, in 1 506, he 
still found Mammon an ungrateful master. 

30. The influence of the capture of Constantinople, in 1453, 
upon the development of scholarship in Europe was evident in 
England during the last years of the fifteenth century. The 
study of Greek was introduced among us first at Oxford, by 
William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre. 

William Grocyn, eldest of a group of English classical 
scholars, was born at Bristol in 1442, educated at Winchester 
School, and thence passed to New College. The relation be- 
tween Winchester and New College remains as of old, for it 
was in connection with New College that the school had been 
founded, in 1387, by Bishop William Long — William of Wyke- 
ham. William Grocyn became, in 1479, rector of Newton Long- 
ville, in Buckinghamshire, and afterwards prebendary of Lincoln. 
He went to Italy, learnt Greek from Demetrius Chalcondylas 
and Politian (§ 28), and in 1491 settled at Exeter College, 
Oxford, as the first teacher of Greek. In 1490 he had exchanged 
his living for the Mastership of All Hallow's College at Maid- 
stone, where he died in 1522. Grocyn differed from the common 
fashion as a Greek scholar in giving most of his time to the 
study not of Plato but of Aristotle, whom he began to translate. 
He left his papers and part of his property to Linacre, his 
executor, and William Lily. 

Thomas Linacre, born at Canterbury, and about eighteen 
years younger than Grocyn, was educated at Canterbury and at 
Oxford, became fellow of All Souls in 1484, and early in the 
reign of Henry VII. was sent on a mission to the Court of 
Rome. He stayed by the way at Florence, and, like Grocyn, 
studied Greek under Demetrius Chalcondylas. After his return 
lie became M.D. of Oxford, read lectures on physic, and taught 



20O A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 14S5 

Greek and Latin. He was physician and tutor to Henry VI I. 's 
son, Prince Arthur. 

In the year 1500, Grocyn was fifty-eight years old, Linacre 
about forty. John Fisher, who became in 1504 Bishop of 
Rochester, was forty-one years old in the year 1500, John 
Colet was thirty-four, William Lily was over thirty, and Thomas 
More was a young man of twenty. These men were to be 
chief promoters of English scholarship at the beginning of the 
sixteenth century. Scholarship abroad had its best representa- 
tive in Erasmus, who had come to England in 1497, when he 
was thirty years old. During 1496 he had been supporting 
himself in Paris by private teaching. His fame was in the 
future ; and the fame of Oxford, as one of the few places 
in which Greek could then be learnt, had drawn him to the 
place. There he not only learnt Greek, but he also found 
Greek scholars who welcomed him to an enduring friendship. 

31. In the year 1500 Michael Angelo was twenty-six years 
old, and Ariosto twenty-six ; Raffaelle was seventeen, and 
Luther seventeen. 

Lorenzo de' Medici had died in 1492. During the latter 
years of his rule, Matteo Maria Boiardo, Count of Scandiano 
and Governor of Reggio, wrote that poem of "Orlando Innamo- 
rato" (Orlando Enamoured) which is of most interest for its 
relation to the later work of Ariosto. Boiardo died, sixty years 
old, in 1494, leaving his poem unfinished in his own opinion, 
and by several cantos more than finished in the opinion of 
others. This poem dealt more seriously, if less cleverly, than 
Pulci's " Morgante" with the Charlemagne romance. Boiardo 
set up Charlemagne's nephew Roland, or Orlando, as true 
knight enamoured of a fascinating Angelica, who had been 
brought from the far East to sow dissension among the Christians 
with whom infidel hosts were contending. Boiardo was suc- 
ceeded in his command of the fortress of Reggio by Ariosto the 
father, and in his conduct of the story of Orlando by Ariosto 
the son, who took up the tale where Boiardo ought to have 
dropped it, not where he actually did leave off. 

32. During those earlier years of the reign of Henry VII., 
when in Florence Boiardo was giving a new point of departure 
to the metrical romance of chivalry, the poetical literature of 
this country was most vigorous in the north. Good poets were 
then living, who gave the best evidence of their power in the 
first years of the sixteenth century. John Skelton was about 



toa.d. 1500.] BOIARDO. ROBERT HENRYSON. 201 

forty, William Dunbar about forty, and Gavin Douglas about 
twenty-six years old, in the year 1500. Skelton, in England, and 
Dunbar, in Scotland, had begun to write before the close of 
the fifteenth century ; but our only poet of mark who then 
closed his career was Robert Henryson, schoolmaster of 
Dunfermline. He lived to be old, and was among those named 
as dead in Dunbar's " Lament for the Makers," printed in 1508. 
The number of Scottish singers named in that piece by Dunbar 
bears witness to the diffused activity of thought in Scotland at 
the time when Robert Henryson " compiled into eloquent and 
ornamental metre " The Morall Fables of Esope the Phrygia,7i. 
There are thirteen fables here versified, including one that has 
once or twice since taken a place of note in literature, the fable 
of the " Town and Country Mouse," or, as Henryson had it, the 
"Taill of the uponlandis Mous and the burges Mous." Another 
fable of " The Dog, the Wolf, and the Sheep" is treated as an 
exposure of the abuses in procedure of the ecclesiastical courts. 
Henryson wrote a prologue to the collection, and another to the 
fable of "The Lion and the Mouse," which represents himself 
wandering into a wood on a June morning, sleeping under a haw- 
thorn, and visited in dream by " Maister Esope, poet laureate," 
who says that he is of gentle blood, and that his " natal 
land is Rome withouttin nay." Nay, the schoolmaster was 
asleep when he made ^Esop a Roman poet ; and asleep after 
the fashion of many English and other poets since the days of 
the "Romaunt of the Rose." He used also Chaucer's seven-lined 
stanza here and in his Testame7it of Cresseidj for this measure 
had become current among our poets as the English represen 
tative of octave rhyme. Henryson's " Testament of Cresseid " 
is a moral sequel to Chaucer's " Troilus and Cressida." Aban- 
doned by Diomede, and become a leper among lepers, she saw 
Troilus pass on his way back from a brilliant attack upon the 
Greeks. As she looked at him, although he did not recognise 
her through her leprosy, yet her presence filled his mind with 
thought of the fair Cresseid, and in memory of her he threw a 
rich purse to the leper. Cresseid learnt, after he had passed, 
that this kind-hearted knight was Troilus ; and then, lamenting 
her inconstancy, she uttered her last Testament and died. 
Henryson is the author also of our first pastoral poem, Robene 
and Makyne, a work that has much natural and simple beauty, 
and is not, like most of his writings, too diffuse. The Blady 
Serk is a good example of the religious earnestness that under- 



.202 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1485 

lies his work, and of the continuance of the old taste for allegory. 
A prince saved a princess from a dungeon into which she had 
been cast by a giant, and shut the giant up in his own prison- 
house. He restored the princess to her father, and then died of 
a wound received in the conflict, bequeathing to the lady the 
shirt stained with the blood shed for her, which she was to look 
at when approached by a new lover. The lady, it is explained, 
is the Soul of Man, God's daughter, and His handiwork ; the 
giant, Lucifer ; the champion, Christ. And, therefore — 

" For His lufe that bocht us deir, 
Think on the bludy serk." 

The next men of whom we have to speak represent part of 
the larger life and energy of England under the Tudors. 

33. Owen Tudor, a private Welsh gentleman in the service 
of Henry V.'s widow, Catherine of Valois, became her second 
husband. Tudor in Welsh (Tueddwr) means one who inclines, 
or has a bias. Owen was imprisoned in Newgate and Walling- 
ford Castle for his inclination towards a royal widow ; but 
Catherine abided by her second husband, and gave him three 
sons — Edmund, whom Henry VI. made Earl of Richmond ; 
Jasper, Earl of Pembroke ; and one who became a monk. 
Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, married (when she was but 
ten years old) Margaret, daughter and heiress of John, Duke of 
Somerset, whose father, John, Earl of Somerset, had been one 
of the children of John of Gaunt and Chaucer's sister-in-law, 
Catherine Swinford (ch. iv. § 22). Edmund Tudor died at the 
age of twenty-five, leaving his wife Margaret, Dowager Countess 
of Richmond, a young widow with one son, Henry. This was the 
Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who became chief of the Lan- 
castrian party, and king after the battle of Bosworth Field, in 
August, 1485, as Henry VII., then twenty-eight years old. In the 
following year King Henry married, as policy dictated, Elizabeth 
of York, eldest daughter of Edward IV. ; but was a hard hus- 
band to her, incapable of love to any of the house of York. In 
the year 1 500, when his own age was forty-three, Henry VII. 
and his wife had four children living, of six who had been born. 
Arthur, Prince of Wales, his eldest son, was then fourteen years, 
old ; Margaret, his eldest daughter, was eleven ; Henry, his 
second son, nine ; Mary, his second daughter, two years old. 

The Stuart family retained the throne of Scotland. In that 
part of our country, during the whole fifteenth century, kings 



toa.d.i5oo.'J TUDORS AND STUARTS. 203 

were rebuked freely by the people. But while they suffered 
insult, and even death, at the hands of turbulent men whom 
they were unable to control, there was unswerving fidelity to 
the principle of monarchy, and even to the luckless house of 
Stuart. Its rule began in 1370, when Robert, the High Steward, 
so named from his court office, succeeded his cousin David as 
Robert II. His eldest son succeeded him in 1390. During 
the troubled reign of that Stuart the second, his son James 
became prisoner at the English court ; but though a prisoner 
abroad, he was proclaimed king as James I. of Scotland, Stuart 
the third, in 1406. He earned fame as a poet, and sought, as a 
prince, to subject his rough lords to more law than they liked, 
and he was murdered (§ 6, 14). He was loved by the people, 
who avenged his death upon his murderers. His eldest son was 
but six years old at the time of the murder ; but none disputed 
the throne with him, though rival chiefs were ready enough to 
seize him, and through him play king. That child, as James II., 
Stuart the fourth, lived to be thirty, when he was accidentally 
killed by a wedge blown out of the ring of a gun at the siege of 
Roxburgh. The son he left for successor was again a child 
but eight years old, yet his right of succession was respected, 
and in 1460 he became King James III., Stuart the fifth. He 
was abundantly afflicted by high-handed lords ; his subjects did 
not relish his inclination towards artists and musicians, and 
thought him a coward. Finally, it was believed that he was 
ready to oppose his troublers by the inbringing of Englishmen, 
and the perpetual subjection of the realm. He was accused by 
the Estates ; risen against by barons, with his own son at their 
head. His friends were routed in a skirmish at the Sauchie 
Burn, and he was treacherously stabbed during his flight by an 
unknown assassin. The son, who, being only sixteen years old, 
joined the confederates against his father, became in the same 
year, 1488, King James IV., Stuart the sixth. He had been 
king, then, for about twelve years in 1500. 

34. John Skelton is the English poet of chief mark whose 
name is associated with the reign of Henry VII. He was born 
either in Cumberland or Norfolk, and not before the year 1460 ; 
educated at Cambridge, where he appears to have taken his 
degree of M.A. in 1484, and to have written a poem On the Death 
of King Edward IV. Like one of the old metrical tragedies of 
men fallen from high estate, it tells — the dead king speaking — how 
the days of power, of wealth wrung from the commonalty, of 



204 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1485 

costly works under a rule pleasing to some, to others displeasing, 
are at an end : 

" Mercy I ask of my misdoing ; 

What availeth it, friends, to be my foe, 
Sith I cannot resist nor amend your complaining-? 
Quid, ecce, nunc in pulvere dormio." 

The last line, suggesting royal pomp asleep in dust, is the 
refrain to every stanza. In 1489 Skelton wrote, in Chaucer's 
stanza, an Elegy upon the Death of the Earl of Northumberland, 
who was killed by an insurgent populace in Yorkshire. In the fol- 
lowing year, 1490, Caxton spoke of John Skelton, in the preface to 
his version from the French of a prose romance founded upon the 
"./Eneid," as "Mayster John Skelton, late created poete laureate* 
in the University of Oxford. Caxton prayed that Skelton, who- 
had translated Cicero's Letters and Diodorus Siculus and divers 
other works from Latin into English, would correct any mistakes 
he found. Of Skelton's translations, and of Skelton himself — 
then about thirty years old — Caxton wrote in the same preface 
to " The Boke of Eneydos, compyled by Vyrgyle, '* that he had 
translated from the Latin, " not in rude and olde langage, but in- 
polysshed and ornate termes craftely, as he that hath redde 
Vyrgyle, Ovyde, Tullye, and all the other noble poets and 
oratours, to me unknowen. And also he hath redde the nine 
muses, and understande theyr musicalle scyences, and to whom 
of theym eche scyence is appropred. I suppose he hath dronken- 
of Elycon's well." 

The degree of poet laureate was then a recognised degree in 
grammar and rhetoric with versification. A wreath of laurel 
was presented to each new"poeta laureatus ;" and if this gra- 
duated grammarian obtained also a licence to teach boys, he 
was publicly presented in the Convocation House with a rod and 
ferule. If he served a king, he might call himself the king's 
humble poet laureate ; as John Kay, of whom no verse remains, 
was, as far as we know, first to do, in calling himself poet 
laureate to Edward IV. Before obtaining this degree the can- 
didate would be required to write a hundred Latin verses on the 
glory of the University, or some other accepted subject. 

John Skelton, poet laureate of Oxford in 1493, and also of 
Louvain, was admitted to the same title at Cambridge eleven 
years later. He had written a poem, now lost, on the creation 
of Prince Arthur, Henry VII.'s eldest son, as Prince of Wales, 
in 1489 ; and he wrote Latin verses, also lost, on the creation of 
the infant Prince Henry (afterwards King Henry VIII.) as Duke 



toa.d. i5oa] JOHN SKELTON. WILLIAM DUNBAR. 205 

of York, in 1494. Skelton was in favour with Henry VII., and 
also with that king's mother, Margaret Countess of Richmond, 
and of Derby by her second marriage. The Lady Margaret is 
remembered as a patroness of learning. In 1498 Skelton took 
holy orders, and at this time he was tutor to Prince Henry ; 
Bernard Andre, another poet laureate, being tutor to Prince 
Arthur. As John Skelton himself afterwards wrote : 

" The honor of Englond I lernyd to spelle 
In dygnite roialle that doth excelle : 

******* 
It plesyth that noble prince royalle 
Me as hys master for to calle 
In his lernyng primordialle." 

He produced for his pupil a treatise, now lost, called the 
Speculum Principis, the Mirror of a Prince. At the end of 
the century, when Prince Henry was nine years old, Erasmus, 
in dedicating to the boy a Latin ode in " Praise of Britain, King 
Henry VII., and the royal children," congratulated him on 
being Housed with Skelton, a special light and ornament of 
British literature (" unum Britannicarum literarum lumen et 
decus "), who could not only kindle his desire for study, but 
secure its consummation. In the ode itself Erasmus again 
spoke of Skelton as Prince Henry's guide to the sacred sources 
of learning. 

35. John Fisher, a native of Yorkshire, a learned and 
religious man, born at Beverley in 1459, was, at the end of 
the fifteenth century, confessor to Margaret Countess of Rich- 
mond, and earnestly abetted her good disposition towards those 
engaged in the pursuit of knowledge. 

36. In Scotland William Dunbar received in the year 1500 
a pension of £10 Scots from James IV. Dunbar was born in 
Lothian about the year 1460. He studied at St. Andrew's, where 
he was one of the " determinantes," or Bachelors of Arts, at St. 
Salvator's College, in 1477, and took his degree in arts in 1479. 
He was a small man, jested at in playful controversy as a dwarf. 
For a time he was a Franciscan or Grey Friar, and preached in 
Engla.id and in Picardy. In 1491 he was one of an embassy to 
France, a lettered priest acting as secretary under the Earl of 
Bothwell. After this he was abroad for some years in the King 
of Scotland's service, and he probably had written, with other 
verse, his poem of the Golden Terge (first printed in 1508), when 
in 1500 he received his small pension of ,£10 Scots. 



206 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. i 4 8 5 

Thus Dunbar and Skelton were two men of ripened power, 
ready to take rank as our chief poets of the North and South at 
the beginning of the sixteenth century. 

37. To the close of the fifteenth century belong also the 
earliest remaining traces of old English Ballad Literature, 
Wynken de Worde, born in Lorraine, came to England with 
Caxton ; and after Caxton's death, in or about the year 1491, 
succeeded him in his printing-office, and styled himself printer 
to Margaret Countess of Richmond. He settled afterwards in 
Fleet Street, and lived until 1534. One of Wynken de Worde's 
earliest publications was a collection of Robin Hood Ballads 
into a continuous set called A Lytel Geste of Roby7i Hode. In 
" The Vision of Piers Plowman," Robin Hood is named as one 
who was already, in the second half of the fourteenth century, a 
hero of popular song, Sloth there says : 

" I kan noght parfitly my Paternoster, 
As the priest it syngeth ; 
But I kan rymes of Robyn Hood, 
And Randolph, Erl of Chestre." 

We learn also from the " Paston Letters " that in Edward IV.'s 
time Robin Hood was a hero of one of the popular mummeries. 
So he remained. A sermon of Latimer's shows with much 
emphasis the popularity of country sports on a Robin Hood's 
Day in the time of Edward VI. There are manuscripts also of 
the ballads of Robin Hood and the Potter and Robin Hood and 
the Mo?ik, not older than the last years of the fifteenth century. 

The tradition is that Robin Hood was a name corrupted 
from that of Robert Fitzooth, reputed Earl of Huntingdon, who 
was born about the year 11 60, in the reign of Henry II. After 
Robin had, in the wildness of youth, consumed his inheritance, 
he was outlawed for debt, lived in the woods on the king's game, 
and by his open defiance became an impersonation of the 
popular feeling against forest laws, which, under the Norman 
kings, were cruelly iniquitous. Among the woods of England 
Robin Hood is said to have chiefly frequented Sherwood in 
Nottinghamshire, Barnsdale in Yorkshire, and Plompton Park 
in Cumberland. His most trusty friends were, it is said, John 
Nailor, known as Little John ; William Scadlock, called also 
Scathelock and Scarlet ; George a Green Pinder (that is, pound- 
keeper), of Wakefield ; and Much, a miller's son. But he gathered 
also, tradition says, a stout company of a hundred archers, equal 
to any four hundred who could be brought against them. The 



TOA.D. 1500.] ROBIN HOOD BALLADS. 207 

ballads and tales that made Robin Hood representative of 
English popular feeling not only gave him courage and good- 
humour, and connected his name with the maintenance of 
archery for national defence, but also gave him Friar Tuck for 
chaplain, and blended in him religious feeling with resistance to 
oppression : 

"A good maner then had Robyn 
In londe where that he were, 
Every daye ere he wolde dine 
Three masses wolde he hear." 

His religion took especially the form, once dear to the people, of 
that worship of the Virgin which softened the harsh temper of 
mediaeval doctrine : 

" Robyn loved our dere lady ; 
For doute of dedely synne, 
Wolde he never do company harme 
That ony woman was ynne." 

Maid Marian being added to his company, fidelity to her would 
express English domestic feeling ; while the same battle against 
corrupt luxury in the Church which had been represented for 
the educated courtier by Walter Map's Golias poetry (ch. iii. 
§ 13), was rudely expressed to the people in Robin Hood's in- 
junction to his men : 

" These byshoppes and these archebyshoppes, 
Ye shall them bete and bynde." 

Robin Hood pitied the poor, and gave them part in the wealth 
stripped from those who lived in sensual excess. The chief 
representative of rich ecclesiastics in the Robin Hood ballads 
was the Abbot of St. Mary's at York ; and the oppressions of 
secular authority were especially defied in the person of the 
Sheriff of Nottingham. Robin Hood is said to have escaped all 
perils of his way of life, and to have been more than eighty years 
old when he went to his aunt, the prioress of Kirklees Nunnery, 
in Yorkshire, to be bled. She treacherously let him bleed to 
death. As he was thus dying, Robin bethought him of his bugle- 
horn, and " blew out weak blasts three." Little John came to 
his rescue, and asked leave to burn the nunnery, but Robin 
said : 

" I never hurt fair maid in all my time, 
.Nor at my end shall it be." 

He asked only to shoot an arrow from the window, that he- 
might be buried where the arrow fell ; and so, says tradition, he 



,cS A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 14S5 

was buried on a height that overlooks the valley of the Calder, 
at the distance of a mighty bow-shot from Kirklees. 

To the end of the fifteenth century belongs the charming 
dialogue-ballad of The Nut Brown Maid. She was a baron's 
daughter, and her love had been won by a suitor who came as 
" a squyer of lowe degree." Her faith was tried by her lover's 
feigning himself one who must die or fly as an outlaw to live by 
his bow like Robin Hood. As he urged the difficulties and 
dangers that must part them, in stanzas ending with the refrain, 
* For I must to the greenwood go, alone, a banished man," the 
Nut Brown Maid met every argument with faithful resolve to 
bear all and follow him, the stanzas in which she answered 
closing steadily with the refrain, " For in my mind, of all man- 
kind, I love but you alone." When she had borne the trial of 
her faith, she learnt that " the squire of low degree " was neither 
squire nor banished man, but an earl's son, come to marry her 
and take her to Westmoreland, which was his heritage. The 
ballad ended with a moral like that attached by Petrarch and 
Chaucer to Boccaccio's tale of the "Patient Griselda"(ch.iv.§46): 

" For sith men wolde that wymen sholde be meke to them eche on, 
Much more ought they to God obey, and serve but hym alone." 

The ballads of The Battle of Otterburn and Chevy Chase do 
not remain to us in their first form. There is no copy of them 
written so early as the fifteenth century, to which doubtless they 
belong. The battle of Otterburn was fought on the 19th of 
August, 1388, between Scots under James Earl of Douglas, 
and English under the two sons of the Duke of Northumber- 
land. It began with a sudden entering of England by the Earl 
of Douglas with 3,800 men, who advanced to Brancepeth, 
ravaging the country they passed through. In the warfare 
against English settlements in France, such a raid was called by 
the French allies of Scotland a chevauche'e, and, by a common 
process, that name was corrupted into Chevy Chase. It lives 
yet among schoolboys as a "chivy." Now, since there are in 
Northumberland Cheviot Hills as well as an Otterburn, Chevy 
Chase was interpreted into the Hunting of the Cheviot. The 
old ballad of the " Battle oi Otterburn," or "Chevy Chase"— the 
battle of the chevauchee which was its crowning incident — was 
therefore recast as The Hunting of the Cheviot, always with 
some confused sense of identity between one incident and the 
other. The battle of Otterburn is an incident minutelv described 



toa.d. 1500.] BALLADS. CHEVY CHASE. 20O, 

by Froissart ; but there is no record whatever of any similar 
battle that arose out of a Hunting on the Cheviots. The author 
of the ballad of the " Hunting" was, in fact, quite right when he 
said : 

" This was the Hontynge of the Cheviot ; 
That tear began this spurn : 
Old men that knowen the grownde well yenough 
Call it the Battell of Otterburn." 

The ballad literature to which these poems belong came into 
strong life in Europe during the thirteenth, and especially the 
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the thirteenth century 
Spain uttered through national ballads the soul of freedom in 
her struggle against the Moors. Our English ballads are akin 
to those which also among the Scandinavians became a 
familiar social amusement of the people. They were recited by 
one of a company with animation and with varying expression, 
while the rest kept time, often with joined hands forming a 
circle, advancing, retiring, balancing, sometimes remaining still, 
and, by various movements and gestures, followed changes of 
emotion in the story. Not only in Spain did the people keep 
time by dance movement to the measure of the ballad, for even 
to this day one may see, in the Faroe Islands, how winter 
evenings of the North were cheered with ballad recitations, 
during which, according to the old northern fashion, gestures 
and movements of the listeners expressed emotions of the story 
as the people danced to their old ballads and songs. From this 
manner of enjoying them the ballads took their name. Ballare 
is a Middle Latin word, meaning to incline to this side and that, 
with which the Italians associate their name for dancing, and we 
the word " ball " for the name of a dancing party. The balade 
of Southern Europe (ch. iv. § 25), a wholly different production, 
which is not in the least remarkable for life and energy, took 
its name from the same word for another reason. It inclines to 
this side and that, in see-saw with a single pair of rhymes. 
There is some reason to think that educated gentlewomen were 
often the unknown writers of the ballads of England and the 
North of Europe. 



210 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. JA.D. 1500 

CHAPTER VI. 

FROM THE YEAR 1500 TO THE YEAR 1 558. 

I. Of the reign of Henry VII. (1485— 1509), the last nine years 
have now to be accounted for. They were a time of rest from 
the feud between the English crown and Scottish people. Perkin 
Warbeck was, in 1495, a visitor at the court of James IV. of 
Scotland, and he was there married to a lady of the royal 
family. James made some attempts to maintain his guest's 
quarrel with England, but they came to little ; and Henry VII. 
worked for a reversal of the policy that made an enemy of 
Scotland. Scotland, during the English civil wars free from 
attack, had increased in prosperity and power. Henry VI I.'s 
England needed peace at home ; and in 1502, Margaret Tudor, 
Henry's daughter, aged thirteen, was affianced to King James IV. 
of Scotland, then aged thirty. The princess entered Edinburgh 
a year later, marriage took place on the 8th of August, 1503, 
and was celebrated by William Dunbar (ch. v. § 36), in his 
poem of The Thistle and the Rose, not without the home- 
speaking which usually passed between a Scottish subject and 
his sovereign. For Dame Nature says to "the thistle keepit 
with a bush of spears :" 

" And sen thou art a king, be thou discreet : 

Herb without virtue hald not of sic price 
As herb of virtue and of odour sweet; 

And let no nettle vile and full of vice 

Her fellow to the guidly flour de lis, 
Nor let no wild weed full of churlishness 
Compare her to the lilie's nobleness." 

James IV. of Scotland, to whom such counsel was given, was a 
handsome man with uncut hair and beard, liberal, active in war 
or chase, familiar with his people, brave to rashness, well read, 
and of good address. He could speak Latin, French, German, 
Flemish, Italian, Spanish, Gaelic, and broad Scotch. He was 
attentive to priests, and gave by his life good reason for Dunbar's 
sspecial warning in " The Thistle and the Rose " of the Thistle's 
solemn trust to 

" Hold no other flow'r in sic deuty 
As the fresh rose, of colour red and white ; 
For gif thou does, hurt is thine honesty." 

Through this weak side of his nature he is said to have been 



-TO a.d. 1503.] DUNBAR i THE THISTLE AND THE ROSE. 211 

cajoled in his youth by those who led him to unite with them 
against his father. 

Dunbar's poem of "The Thrissil and the Rois," upon the 
marriage of James IV. of Scotland to Margaret Tudor, is a 
court poem in Chaucer's stanza, planned to a form that had 
already become traditional in Chaucer s time (ch. iv. § 13, 16, 20). 
When he was in bed on a May morning, Aurora looked in at 
his window, with a pale green face, and on her hand a lark, 
whose song bade lovers wake from slumber. Fresh May stood 
then before his bed, and bade the sluggard rise and write some- 
thing in her honour. Why should he rise, he asked, for few 
birds sang, and May brought only cold and wind that caused 
him to forbear walking among her boughs ? She smiled, and yet 
bade him rise to keep his promise that he would describe " the 
rose of most pleasaunce." So she departed into a fair garden ; 
and it seemed to him that he went hastily after her, among the 
flowers, under the bright sunrise, where the birds sang for com- 
fort of the light. They sang Hail to the May, Hail to the 
Morning, Hail to Princess Nature before whom birds, beasts, 
flowers, and herbs were about to appear, " as they had wont in 
May from year to year," and pay due reverence. First of the 
beasts came the Lion, whom Dunbar's description pleasantly 
associated with the lion on the arms of Scotland. Nature, 
while crowning him, gave him a lesson in just rule. A like 
lesson she gave to the Eagle, when she crowned him King of 
Birds ; and, as we have seen, to the Thistle, who personified 
King James of Scotland, when she " saw him keepit with a bush 
of spears," crowned him with ruby, and bade him defend all 
others in the field. Then came the poet's welcome of the Tudor 
Margaret, when Nature glorified her as the Rose, the freshest 
Queen of Flowers ; and the poem closed with a song of hail and 
welcome to her from the merle, the lark, the nightingale, and 
from the common voice of the small birds, who, by their shrill 
chorus, woke the poet from his dream. 

2. In this poem, as in "The Golden Terge," Dunbar was a 
follower of Chaucer, constructing his own work on a time- 
honoured model. The " Thistle and the Rose " was written in 
1503 ; The Golden Terge was first printed by Chepman and 
Myllar, in 1508, when the printing-press was new to Scotland, 
Printing did not begin in, Edinburgh till about thirty years after 
Caxton brought it to London. The art is said to have been 
taken to Scotland by the priests who fled thither from pcrsecu- 

O 2 



212 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1500 

tion in the Low Countries. But the first patent for establishing 
a press in Scotland was granted, in 1507, by James IV., to 
Walter Chepman, a merchant, and Andrew Myllar, a working 
printer. Poems of Dunbar were among the first works of their 
printing. " The Golden Terge" is in stanzas of nine ten-syllabled 
lines, forming a peculiar measure allied to that of the balade, 
each stanza having a musical cadence of two rhymes thus inter- 
laced — aabaabbab. This poem also begins with the con- 
ventional May morning. The poet rose with the sun, saw the 
dew on the flowers, heard the songs of the birds, while a brook 
rushed, over pebbles and little waterfalls, among the bushes. 
The sound of the stream and song of the birds caused him to 
sleep on the flowers. In dream he then saw the river, over 
which there came swiftly towards him a sail, white as blossom, 
on a mast of gold, bright as the sun. A hundred ladies in 
green kirtles landed from the ship. Among them were Nature 
and Queen Venus, Aurora, Flora, and many more. May walked 
up and down in the garden between her sisters April and June, 
and Nature gave her a rich, painted gown. The ladies saluted 
Flora, and sang of love. Cupid and Mars, Saturn, Mercury, and 
other gods were there, also playing and singing, all arrayed in 
green. The poet crept through the leaves to draw nearer, was 
spied by love's queen, and arrested. Then the ladies let fall 
their green mantles, and were armed against him with bows, but 
looked too pleasant to be terrible. Dame Beauty came against 
him, followed by the damsels Fair Having, Fine Portraiture, 
Pleasaunce, and Lusty Cheer. Then came Reason in plate and 
mail, as Mars armipotent, with the Golden Targe, or shield, to 
be his defender. Youth, Innocence, and other maids did no 
harm to the shield of Reason. Sweet Womanhood, with all 
her good company, Nurture and Loveliness, Patience, Good 
Fame and Steadfastness, Benign Look, Mild Cheer, Soberness, 
and others, found their darts powerless against the Golden 
Targe. High Degree failed also ; Estate and Dignity, Riches, 
and others, loosed against him in vain a cloud of arrows. Venus 
then brought in allegorical recruits, and rearranged her forces. 
But Reason, with the Shield of Gold, sustained the shock, till 
Presence threw a powder in his eyes that blinded him. Then 
Reason was jested at, and banished into the greenwood. The 
poet was wounded nearly to the death, and in a moment was 
Dame Beauty's prisoner. Fair Calling smiled upon him ; 
Cherishing fed him with fair words ; Danger came to him 



to a.d. 1508.] GOLDEN TERGE. LAMENT FOR THE MAKARS. 2 1 3 

and delivered him to Heaviness. But then the wind began to 
blow, and all, flying to the ship, departed. As they went they 
fired guns, by which the poet was awakened to the renewed 
sense of the fresh May morning. This kind of invention is as 
old as " The Romaunt of the Rose" (ch. iii. § 36), but Dunbar 
took it from Chaucer. Though Chaucer had been dead a hundred 
years, no poet had yet succeeded to his throne. The land was 
still " full filled with his songs." Gower and Lydgate were still 
named after him in courtly verse as the two other chief poets of 
the past ; but of Chaucer men thought as Dunbar wrote in one 
of the closing stanzas of his " Golden Terge :" 

" O reverend Chaucer I rose ot rhetoris all; 
As in our tongue ane flower imperial, 

That raise in Britain ever who reads richt, 
Thou bears of makars the triumph riall ; 
Thy fresh enamellit tennes celical 

This matter could illuminat have full bricht : 

Was thou nocht of our English all the licht, 
Surmounting every tongue terrestrial 

Als far as Mayes morrow does midnicht." 

3. "The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy" and Dunbar's 
" Lament for the Makars " were also first printed in 1508. The 
genius of Dunbar is, of course, most evident where he is least an 
imitator. In " The Thistle and the Rose" and "Golden Terge" 
he is gracefully conventional ; in all his other poetry he is him- 
self; he utters thoughts of his own life, and illustrates the life 
of his own time. 

Dunbar's Lament for the Makars, or Poets {iroiy\r4]s — maker), 
was written in 1507, when he lay dangerously ill. It is in 
musical four-lined stanzas, each ending with the refrain, " Timor 
mortis conturbat me " (The fear of death disquiets me). Warm 
with religious feeling and a sense of human fellowship, speaking 
high thought in homely phrase, with a true poet's blending of 
pathos and good-humour, it bows to the supremacy of death 
while Dunbar joins lament with kindly memories of poets who 
have died before him. 

" And he has now ta'en last of aw 
Gude gentle Stobo, and Quintine Schaw, 
Of whom all wichtis has pitie : 
Timor mortis conturbat me. 

" Gude Maister Walter Kennedy 
In point of deid lies verily; 
Great ruth it were that so suld be : 
Timor mortis conturbat me. 



214 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1500 

" Sen he has all my brether ta'en 
He will not let me live alane ; 
On forse I maun his next prey be : 
Timor mortis conturbat me. 

" Sen for the death remeid is none, 
Best is that we for death dispone, 
After our death that live may we : 
Timor mortis conturbat me? 

The " Good Master Walter Kennedy," to whom Dunbar has- 
here given a kindly stanza, was his playfellow, for the amusement 
of lookers-on, at the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy. This 
metrical scolding-match belongs to a form of literature descended 
from the "tenson" or "jeu parti" of early Provencal poetry. 
The tenson was a song in dialogue of contention which found its 
way into European literature from wit-combats of the Arabs on 
nice points of love and philosophy. But the fifteenth century 
advanced by many ways to a rough heartiness in dealing with 
realities of life. Thus, in a flyting, which takes its name from 
our old name for contention, " flit," the two poets, who, if they 
had lived some centuries earlier, would, through a tenson, have 
been attacking and defending castles in the air, were down upon 
earth belabouring each other with the pen as heartily as if they 
had come into the tilt-yard, and the pens were lances with 
which they were engaged, each in the playful endeavour to 
knock down his friend. 

Walter Kennedy, who joined in flyting with Dunbar, was the 
sixth son of Gilbert, first Baron Kennedy. He acquired, in 
1504, the lairdship of Glentig ; and it seems to have been 
between this date and 1508 that Dunbar wrote the greater 
part of his share in the rough whimsical scolding-match. 

With the vigorous homeliness a certain coarseness was then 
often associated — coarseness which was not immorality, but con- 
sisted in plain utterance of truths belonging to the grosser side of 
life. This was common in Dunbar's humorous poetry. It was 
used with noble purpose in his Dance of the Seven Deadly Szns, 
written in 1507, a piece in which new life was given to the old 
forms of allegorical poetry by the genius of a master. On the 
festival night before Lent, Dunbar saw heaven and hell, in a 
trance ; and it seemed to him that Mahoun called for a dance 
among the fiends. As the Seven Deadly Sins joined in the 
dancing, the allegorical description of each one became vivid 
with intensity of life, and was realised to the imaginations of 
the people by a profound earnestness expressed with playful 



to a. d. 1 509. ] D UNBA R . GA VI N DO UGLA S. 2 1 5 

humour. This poem was followed by one purely humorous, 
which described another of the sports called for by Mahoun, 
The J oast between the Tailor and the Soutar (shoemaker). And 
this, again, was followed by an ironical Amends to .the Tailors 
and Soutars, with the refrain, " Tailors and soutars, blest be ye I" 
which was but a new form of flyting. You tailors and soutars 
can shape anew a misfashioned man, cover with crafts a broken 
back, mend ill-made feet — 

" In erd ye kyth sic miracles here 
In heaven ye sail be sancts full clear, 
Though ye be knaves in this countrie : 
Tailors and soutars, blest be ye ! " 

Humour abounded, but it was the humour of a man essentially 
earnest. No poet from Chaucer till his own time equalled 
Dunbar in the range of genius. He could pass from broad jest 
to a pathos truer for its homeliness ; he had a play of fancy 
reaching to the nobler heights of thought, a delicacy joined with 
a terse vigour of expression in short poems that put the grace of 
God into their worldly wisdom. 

4. Gavin Douglas was another Scottish poet who wrote 
during the last nine years of the reign of Henry VII. ; and, 
like Dunbar, lived on into the days when Henry VIII. was 
King of England. Gavin Douglas was born about the year 
1474, son of that Archibald Earl of Angus who was known as 
Bell-the-Cat. He took holy orders, and became, in the year 
1509, the last year of the reign of Henry VII., rector of Hawick. 
Before that time he had written the longest of his original poems, 
probably in 1501, when he was about twenty-seven years old. 
It was called The Palace of Honour, and was, in the measure of 
" The Golden Terge," a court poem dedicated to James IV., an 
allegory imitated in the usual way from poems that remained 
in fashion. On a May morning the poet entered a garden, 
swooned, and dreamt of a procession of Minerva and her court, 
Diana and her followers, Venus and all her train, with the court 
of the Muses, to the Palace of Honour. The palace was built 
on a high slippery rock with many paths, and but one leading 
to the summit. After much detail, classical and allegorical, 
after seeing the Muses cull flowers of rhetoric, Gavin Douglas 
awoke, wrote a lay in praise of Honour, and dedicated his 
poem to the king. Steady maintenance of right and duty, 
which runs through the literature of our country, is here no 
doubt. We find it also in Gavin Douglas's better poem of 



2l6 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. |>.d. 150c 

King Hart, an allegory of life, the heart personified as M an ; 
but the gathering energies of the nation have not yet raised 
up the thinkers who shall cast into new forms the thoughts 
of a new day. 

5. In England John Skelton (ch. v. § 34) may have pro- 
duced during the latter years of the reign of Henry VII. his 
Bowge of Court. It was an allegorical court poem against court 
follies and vices. Bowge is the French bouche (the mouth); and 
bowge of court was the old technical name for the right to feed 
at a king's table. Skelton here told, in Chaucer's stanza, how in 
autumn he thought of the craft of old poets who 

" Under as coverte termes as could be 
Can touche a trouth, and cloke it subtylly 
With fresshe utteraunce full sentencyously." 

Weary with much thinking, he slept at the port of Harwich in 
mine host's house called "Power's Keyej" and it seemed to him 
that he saw sail into harbour a goodly ship, which cast anchor, 
and was boarded by traders who found royal merchandise in 
her. The poet also went on board, where he found no acquaint- 
ance, and there was much noise, until one commanded all to 
hold their peace, and said that the ship was the " Bowge of 
Court," owned by the Dame Saunce-pere (Peerless) ; that her 
merchandise was called Favour, and who would have it must 
pay dear. Then there was a press to see the fair lady, who sat 
enthroned. Danger was her chief gentlewoman, and taunted the 
poet for being over-bold in pressing forward. Danger asked 
him his name, and he said it was Dread. Why did he come ? 
Forsooth, to buy some of her ware. Danger then looked on 
him disdainfully ; but another gentlewoman, named Desire, came 
to him and said, " Brother, be bold. Press forward, and speak 
without any dread. Who spares to speak will spare to speed." 
He was without friends, he said, and poor. Desire gave him a 
jewel called "bonne aventure." With that he could thrive ; but, 
above all things, he must be careful to make a friend of Fortune, 
by whom the ship was steered. Merchants then thronged, 
suing to Fortune for her friendship. What would they have? 
" And we asked favdur, and favour she us gave." Thus ended 
the prologue. Then Dread told how the sail was up, and 
Fortune ruled the helm. Favour they had ; but under honey 
oft lies bitter gall. There were seven subtle persons in the 
ship : 



TO A.D. 1509. ] SKEL TON. ALEX A NDER BA R CLA Y. 2 1 7 

" The first was Favell, full of flatery, 

With fables false that well coude fayne a tale ; 

The seconde was Suspecte, which that dayly 

Mysdempte eche man, with face deedly and pale ; 

And Harry Hafter, that well coude picke a male ; 
With other foure of theyr affynite, 

Dysdayne, Ryotte, Dyssymuler, Subtylte." 

Harry Hafter in that stanza derives his name from the old 
English hceftan (to lay fast hold of anything). These seven sins 
of the court had for their friend Fortune, who often danced with 
them ; but they had no love for the new-comer, Dread. Favell 
cloaked his ill-will with sugared speech. Dread thanked him, 
and was then addressed in turn by the other vices, each in his 
own fashion ; and at last Dread, the poet, was about to jump 
out of the ship to avoid being slain, when he awoke, " caught 
penne and ynke, and wrote this lytyll boke." 

But Skelton's fame does not rest upon good thought put into 
this conventional disguise. He felt with the people ; and in the 
reign of Henry VIII. we shall find him speaking with them, and 
for them, by putting bold words of his own upon the life of his 
own day into a form of verse borrowed from nobody. This 
form of verse, which has been called Skeltonical, appeared in the 
delicately playful Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe, the lament of a 
simple-hearted maid, Jane Scrope, one of the young ladies who 
were being educated by the Black Nuns at Carow, near Norwich, 
for Philip, her pet sparrow, killed by a cat. The lament ended 
with a Latin epitaph to the bird, and it was followed by dainty 
commendations of its mistress. This poem, suggested no doubt 
by the sparrow of Catullus, was written by Skelton before the end 
of 1508, for it is included among follies at the end of Barclay's 
" Ship of Fools." 

6. Alexander Barclay, whose place and date of birth are 
unknown, was of Oriel College, Oxford. After leaving college 
he travelled abroad, and then became one of the priests of the 
college of St. Mary Ottery, in Devonshire. He was afterwards 
a Benedictine monk of Ely, then among the Franciscans of 
Canterbury. In 1 546 he obtained the livings of Baddow Magna, 
in Essex, and of Wokey, in Somersetshire ; and he had also 
the living of All Saints, in Lombard Street, when he died, an 
old man, at Croydon, in 1552. He translated from some of the 
best authors of the Continent ; and the most famous of his 
translations was that of Sebastian Brandt's " Narrenschiff," done 
into Chaucer's stanza, with an occasional variation, and pub- 



2l8 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 150© 

lished in 1 508, with some additional home-thrusts of his own, as 
Barclay's Ship of Fools. Sebastian Brandt, born at Strasburg, 
in 1458, and educated at Basle, became syndic of his native 
town, and was in 1508 a living writer. He died in 1520. His 
" Narrenschiff," supposed to have been first published in 1494, 
though the Latin version of it, " Navis Stultifera," appeared in 
1488, led the march of sixteenth century satire in Germany. 
Brandt called his book "The Ship of Fools" because no cart or 
coach was big enough to hold them all. The ship once ready, 
there was a great thronging for berths in her ; but nobody was 
admitted who had sense enough to call himself a fool. Whoever 
set up for a wit was welcome. One hundred and thirteen several 
forms of folly were at last entered, with Brandt himself for their 
leader, as the Bookish Fool, who had many books, and was con- 
tinually buying others, which he neither read nor understood. 
Various forms of human folly, among misers and spendthrifts, 
labourers, gamblers, beggars, huntsmen, cooks, &c, were passed 
in good-humoured satirical review, with incidental bits of counsel 
upon the training of children and other subjects. The book was 
rhymed with homely vigour, and many a proverbial phrase in the 
Alsatian dialect; it had, therefore, wide currency as a picture of 
manners, and a wholesome satire on the follies of the day. It 
went through many editions, was translated into French in 1497 ; 
and, while still in the first flush of its fame, was also in 1508 
translated into English as the " Ship of Fools " by Alexander 
Barclay, then signing himself priest and chaplain in the College 
of St. Mary Ottery. Alexander Barclay's other writings were 
produced after the death of Henry VII. 

7. Another English poet of the reign of Henry VII. was 
Stephen Hawes, a Suffolk man. Like Barclay, he was 
educated at Oxford, and then travelled. He was well read in 
the poets of England, France, and Italy, could repeat much of 
the verse of Lydgate, whom he called especially his master, and, 
perhaps for his good knowledge of French, was made by 
Henry VII. groom of the privy chamber. Like Alexander 
Barclay, Stephen Hawes was a poet without independent 
genius, a clever man who took delight in literature, and was 
active with his pen. In 1500 his Temple of Glass, an imitation of 
Chaucer's "House of Fame," was printed by Wynken de Worde. 
His chief work, first printed by Wynken de Worde in 15 17, was 
finished in 1506, and dedicated to King Henry VII. as " The 
Pastime of Pleasure; or, the History of Graund Amour e and La 



toa.d. 1509.] STEPHEN HAWES. 219 

Bel Puce 11 : containing the Knowledge of the Seven Sciences 
and the Course of Man's Life in this World. Invented by 
Stephen Hawes, groom of King Henry VII. his chamber." It 
is an allegory of the old form, chiefly in Chaucer's stanza. 
Graund Amoure passed through the fair meadow of youth, 
and then came to the choice between two highways of life, the 
way of Contemplation — that was life in a religious order — and the 
way of Active Life. He took the way of Active Life, met Fame 
with her two greyhounds, Grace and Governaunce, who told him 
of La Bel Pucell. In her Hawes represented the true aim of 
life, only attainable through many labours. Then he first 
visited the Tower of Doctrine, and was introduced to her seven 
daughters. These were the seven sciences, arranged of old into 
three, Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, forming what was called the 
"Trivium;" and four, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, Astronomy, 
which formed the " Ouadrivium." When, in his introduction 
to these seven daughters of Doctrine, Graund Amoure had 
advanced to Music, he found her playing on an organ in her 
tower, and it was then that he first saw his ideal, La Bel PucelL 
He told his love to her, and danced with her to sweet harmony. 
This means that the youth who has advanced far enough in the 
pursuit of knowledge to have ears for the grand harmonies of 
life is for a time brought face to face with the bright ideal to be 
sought through years of forward battle. La Bel Pucell went to 
her distant home ; and Graund Amoure, after receiving counsel 
from Geometry and Astronomy, proceeded to the Castle of 
Chivalry, prayed in the Temple of Mars, within which was 
Fortune at her wheel, and on his way to the Temple of Venus 
met Godfrey Gobilive, who spoke ill of women. This part 
is in couplets. They went to the Temple of Venus ; but 
Godfrey was overtaken by a lady named Correction, with a 
knotted whip, who said that he was False Report, escaped in 
disguise from his prison in the Tower of Chastity. To that 
tower the lady Correction introduced Graund Amoure. As 
the adventurer proceeded on his way he fought a giant with 
three heads, named Falsehood, Imagination, Perjury, and cut 
his heads off with the sword Claraprudence. Then he proceeded 
through other adventures, which carried on the allegory of stead- 
fast endeavour till Graund Amoure saw the stately palace of La 
Bel Pucell upon an island beyond a stormy ocean. After the 
water had been crossed, there was still to be quelled a monster 
against which Graund Amoure could only defend himself by 



220 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1500 

anointing his sword with the ointment of Pallas. The last 
victory achieved, Graund Amoure was received into the palace 
by Peace, Mercy, Justice, Reason, Grace, and Memory; and he 
was married next morning to La Bel Pucell by Lex Ecclesiae 
(Law of the Church). After his happy years with her, Old Age 
came one day into Graund Amoure's chamber, and struck him 
on the breast ; Policy and Avarice came next. Graund Amoure 
became eager to heap up riches. Death warned him that these 
must be left. After the warning, Contrition and Conscience 
came to him before he died. Mercy and Charity then buried 
him. Fame wrote his epitaph. Time and Eternity pronounced 
the final exhortation of the poem. 

Among the other books by Stephen Hawes was a Con- 
version of Swearers, printed in 1509. He wrote also inverse, 
A Joyful Meditation of All England, on the Coronation of King 
Henry VIII. 

8. The chroniclers of English history who wrote in the 
latter part of the reign of Henry VII. were Robert Fabyan, a 
Londoner; Polydore Vergil, an Italian; and Bernard Andrd, a 
Frenchman. 

Bobert Fabyan, son of John Fabyan, of a respectable 
Essex family, was born in London, and apprenticed to a draper ; 
he became a member of the Draper's Company, Alderman of 
the Ward of Farringdon Without, and, in 1493, served in the 
office of sheriff. In September, 1496, in the mayoralty of Sir 
Henry Colet, Robert Fabyan was chosen, with the Recorder 
and certain commoners, to ride to the king " for redress of the 
new impositions raised and levied upon English cloths in the 
archduke's land," namely, the newly- appointed Philip's charge 
of a florin for every piece of English cloth imported into the 
Low Countries ; a charge withdrawn in July, 1497. Soon after- 
wards Fabyan was an assessor upon London wards of the 
fifteenth granted to Henry VII. for his Scottish war. In 1502, 
Fabyan resigned his alderman's gown to avoid the expense of 
taking the mayoralty, for, although opulent, he had a large 
family. His wife, with four sons and two daughters, from a 
family of ten boys and six girls, survived him. He died in 
1512. 

Robert Fabyan was a good French and Latin scholar; and, 
in using monkish chronicles as material for his own compilation 
of history, was a devout adopter of the censures of all kings 
who were enemies to religious places. Of Becket he spoke as a 



toa.d. 1509.] CHRONICLES: ROBERT FABYAN. 221 

"glorious martyr" and a "blessed saint;" of Henry II. as a 
"hammer of Holy Church ;" but he was not credulous of 
miracles and marvels. His Concordance of Histories, after- 
wards called " New Chronicles of England and France, in Two 
Parts," opened with a prologue in Chaucer's stanza, which repre- 
sented its author as one who prepared material for the skilled 
artist or historian who should come after him to perfect what 
he had rudely shaped. The prologue ended with an invocation 
to the Virgin for help, and the seven parts of the chronicle, 
which brought the history from Brut to the year 1504, ended 
with seven metrical epilogues, entitled the " Seven Joys of the 
Blessed Virgin." The chronicle itself was in prose, with trans- 
lation into English verse of any Latin verses that were cited. A 
notable example of this was Fabyan's English version of the 
Latin verses said to have been made by Edward II. in his 
imprisonment. 

Polydore Vergil, born at Urbino, had won fame in Italy 
before he came to England for Peter's Pence, and was here 
made Archdeacon of Wells. He returned to Italy, and died 
there in 1555. Among his works, all written in Latin, is an 
English Chronicle, in twenty-seven books, begun by him in the 
latter years of Henry VII., and finished in the earlier years of 
the reign of Henry VIII. 

Bernard Andre, born at Toulouse, was an Austin Friar, who 
was present at Henry VII.'s entry into London after Bosworth 
Field. Soon afterwards Andre, who was blind, styled himself 
Henry VII.'s poet laureate. In 1496 he was made tutor to 
Arthur, Prince of Wales. John Skelton, also poet laureate, was, 
as we have seen, tutor to Prince Henry. Andre had retired 
from court, and was receiving some small Church preferments, 
when, in 1500, he began to work at his Latin "Life of Henry 
VII.," finished in 1502, with a preface in which he undertook 
to write every year for the king. He seems to have written, in 
pursuance of this promise, yearly accounts of the chief events 
of his time; but for the reign of Henry VII. only two of these 
are extant. Andre lived on into the reign of Henry VIII., 
and there remain accounts by him of two years of that reign, 
15 1 5 and 1 521, the last date at which he is known to have 
been living. This blind French poet and historiographer, 
naturalised in England, although no genius, had much repute 
in his own day. 

9. The representatives of the new energy of English scholar- 



222 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1500 

ship, Grocyn, Linacre, Lily, Colet (ch. v. § 30), lived through 
the reign of Henry VII. into that of Henry VIII. 

John Fisher (ch. v. § 35), by his influence with Margaret 
Countess of Richmond, obtained the establishment of Lady 
Margaret Divinity Professorships in both universities. He 
became Doctor of Divinity in 1501. In 1502 he was the Lady 
Margaret's First Divinity Professor at Cambridge. In 1504 he 
was made Bishoj) of Rochester. Through his influence Christ's 
College, Cambridge, was founded by the Lady Margaret, and 
completed under his care in 1505. He procured in the same 
way the foundation of St. John's College, finished in 15 15. 
Between 1505 and 1508, Bishop Fisher was the head of Queen's 
College. He invited Erasmus to Cambridge, offered him an 
appointment as Lady Margaret's Divinity Professor, and sup- 
ported him in the endeavour to teach at Cambridge the Greek 
he had learnt at Oxford. Erasmus persevered only for a few 
months in the endeavour to form a Greek class. Failing with 
Chrysolora's Grammar, he tried Theodore Gaza's, and then left 
the labour to be continued by Dr. Richard Croke. Even at 
Oxford the new study of Greek was fighting its way slowly 
against strong opposition of two parties : idlers who called them- 
selves Trojans, and who under leaders whom they called Priam 
and Hector battled with the Greeks ; and the timidly religious men 
who cried, " Beware of the Greeks, lest you be made a heretic." 
There was called forth, indeed, a royal declaration that no 
student of Greek should be molested ; and there was open rebuke 
of some court preachers who made bold, in the king's presence, 
to denounce Greek in their sermons. 

10. We pass now to the reign of Henry VIII. (1509 — 1547). 
When Henry came to the throne, in 1509, a handsome youth of 
eighteen, well educated and self-willed, Martin Luther was a 
young man of six-and-twenty, and it was the year of Calvin's 
birth. 

John Colet, born in 1466, was the son of Sir Henry Colet, 
a wealthy city knight, who was twice Lord Mayor of London. 
Dame Christian, his mother, had eleven sons and eleven 
daughters, of whom John was the sole survivor. She lived 
with him during the last nine years of his life, after her husband's 
death in 15 10 ; and, says Erasmus, " being come to her ninetieth 
vear, looked so smooth, and was so cheerful, tnat you would 
think she had never shed a tear ; and, if I mistake not, she 
survived her son, Dean Colet. Now that which supplied a 



toa.d. 1509.] SCHOLARS: FISHER, CO LET, W. LILY. 223 

woman with so much fortitude was not learning, but piety to 
God." John Colet had seven years' training at Magdalene 
College, Oxford ; then studied in Paris, and then went to Italy 
and learnt Greek. While absent from England he was receiving 
Church preferment, for his family had interest. After his return he 
went to Oxford, and there gave free lectures on St. Paul's Epistles. 
In 1504 he became Doctor of Divinity, and in 1505 Dean of St. 
Paul's. Inquiry into Scripture was then made by him part of 
the Cathedral service ; he preached generally in exposition of 
St. Paul's Epistles, his favourite study. He was handsome, 
earnest, eloquent, outspoken against corrupt lives of the clergy, 
-against the confessional, image worship, belief in purgatory, 
and thoughtless repetitions of fixed quantities of prayer. The 
Bishop of London would have brought him into trouble as a 
heretic if he had not been protected by Archbishop Warham. 
Among Colet's works were a treatise on the Sacraments of the 
Church, and two treatises on the Hierarchies of Dionysius, of 
which the latter have been published from the M S. in the library 
•of St. Paul's School. Other works of his — comments on St. 
Paul — remain in manuscript at Oxford. He died in September, 
15 19. Dean Colet spent his ecclesiastical income on his house- 
hold and in hospitality ; his large private fortune he spent in 
the foundation of St. Paul's School. The foundation of this 
school was begun by him in 15 10, the year in which his father's 
death gave him, at the age of forty-four, a large inheritance. He 
appointed his friend William Lily, an excellent Greek scholar, 
to be the first head master. 

11. William Lily, born at Odiham, Hants, in 1568, was 
about two years younger than Colet, and had also been educated 
at Magdalene College, Oxford. After taking his first degree, 
Lily went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It was on his way 
back that he studied Greek at Rhodes, and afterwards at Rome. 
He had been head master of St. Paul's School for twelve years, 
when he died of the plague. His most famous book was the 
Latin Gra?nmar, produced for the use of the new school, 
and familiar to boys of many English schools for many 
generations. It was first published in 15 13. The preface to 
the book was written by Thomas Wolsey, not yet cardinal, but 
in the year of its publication Dean of York. The English 
" Rudiments " were written by Dean Colet, who wanted confi- 
dence in his own Latinity. The English Syntax and the rules 
in Latin verse for genders, beginning " Propria quae maribus," 



224 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. i 5 co 

and for past tenses and supines, beginning "As in praesenti," 
were by William Lily. The Latin Syntax was chiefly the work 
of Erasmus ; and the great currency of the book was the work 
of Henry VIII., who established its orthodoxy by declaring it 
penal publicly to teach any other. 

12. Thomas Linacre (ch. v. § 30), who survived his friends 
Grocyn and Lily little more than a year, died in 1524, and was 
buried in St. Paul's. He also produced an Elementary Latin 
Grammar, which was written in English for the use of the 
Princess Mary, and was preparatory to his more important 
work in Latin, " De Emendata Structura Latini Sermonis Libri 
VI." As a physician he founded not only three lectureships 
on physic, two at Oxford and one at Cambridge, but he was 
chief founder also of the Royal College of Physicians, which 
held its first meetings at Linacre's house, and for which he 
obtained a charter in 1 5 1 8. Linacre took orders, and obtained 
prebends in Wells, York, and Westminster, also the rectories of 
Mersham, Hawkhurst, Holsworthy, and Wigan. 

13. Sir Thomas More was another of the Oxford scholars 
active during the earlier part of the reign of Henry VIII. Born 
in 1478,' he was thirty-six years younger than Grocyn, about 
eighteen younger than Linacre, and twelve younger than Lily 
and Colet. Thomas More was the son of Sir John More, knight, 
a justice of the King's Bench, who was three times married, 
though he used to say that marriage was like dipping the 
hand into a bag where there are twenty snakes and an eel — it 
was twenty to one that you did not get the eel. Thomas M ore's 
birthplace and early home being Milk Street, in the City of 
London, he was sent to St. Anthony's, in Threadneedle Street, 
then chief in repute among the London schools. More next 
entered the household of Cardinal John Morton, Archbishop of 
Canterbury and Lord Chancellor. 

Morton had been one of the foremost of Oxford scholars 
when William Grocyn was a child. He was Doctor of Laws 
and Vice-Chancellor of the University in 1446. He practised 
law, and obtained many Church benefices ; was Master of the 
Rolls in 1472, Bishop of Ely in 1479— the sam e Bishop of Ely 
of whom the Protector Richard, about to seize the crown, said ; 

" My lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn, 
I saw good strawberries in your garden there ; 
I do beseech you send for some of them ; " 

an hour before he sent him to the Tower. When afterwards 



a.-d. 1500.] CARDINAL MORTON. THOMAS MORE. 225 

released, and transferred to the custody of the Duke of Buck- 
ingham, Morton helped to organise the insurrection which cost 
Buckingham his head ; and, being himself safe in Flanders, was 
thenceforth busy as a negotiator on the side that triumphed 
at Bosworth Field. Thus Morton became the trusted friend of 
Henry VII., who at the beginning of his reign made him, in 
1468, Lord Chancellor of England, and nine months afterwards 
Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1489 Morton obtained a bull 
from Pope Innocent VIII. authorising him, as visitor, to 
exercise authority within the monasteries ; in which, the bull 
said, there were many who, giving themselves over to a reprobate 
mind, and having laid aside the fear of God, were leading a 
wanton and dissolute life, to the destruction of their own souls 
and the dishonour of religion. While upholding the sovereignty 
of the archbishop in spiritual things, Morton, as Henry VII.'s 
chief adviser, maintained in temporal affairs the absolute 
sovereignty of the king. He greatly enriched himself, but was 
liberal with his wealth. He helped the king, more narrowly 
avaricious, to draw money, by benevolences or otherwise, from 
his subjects ; and he shared the king's unpopularity. Morton was 
a vigorous old man of between seventy and eighty, whose life 
was blended with the history of half a century, when young 
Thomas More was placed in his household, and found him a 
generous patron and appreciative friend. A son of one of lower 
rank was often received of old into a great man's house. He wore 
there his lord's livery, but had it of more costly materials than 
were used for the footmen, and was the immediate attendant of 
his patron, who was expected to give him a start in life when 
he came of age. When at Christmas time; a Latin play was 
acted, young Thomas More could step in at will among the 
players, and extemporise a comic part. " Whoever liveth to 
try it," Morton would say, " shall see this child here waiting at 
table prove a notable and rare man." Dean Colet used to say, 
" There is but one wit in England, and that is young Thomas 
More." About the year 1497 the archbishop sent the youth to 
Oxford, where he was entered to Canterbury College, now 
included in Christ Church. There he learned Greek of Linacre 
and Grocyn. In 1499 he removed thence to London, and pro- 
ceeded to study law at Lincoln's Inn. In 1500 Archbishop 
Morton died. 

While studying law, More, who was earnestly religious, tried 
on himself for a time the experiment of monastic discipline, 

P 



226 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1500 

wore a hair shirt, took a log for a pillow, whipped himself on 
Fridays. At the age of twenty-one he entered Parliament, and 
soon after he had been called to the bar he was made an Under- 
Sheriff of London. In 1503 he opposed in the House of Com- 
mons Henry VII.'s proposal for a subsidy on account of the 
marriage portion of his daughter Margaret ; and he opposed 
with so much energy that the House refused to grant it. One 
went and told the king that a beardless boy had disappointed 
all his expectations. During the last years, therefore, of 
Henry VII., More was under the displeasure of the king, and 
had thoughts of leaving the country. But in the first years of the 
reign of Henry VIII. he was rising to large practice in the law 
courts, where it is said he refused to plead in cases which he 
thought unjust, and took no fees from widows, orphans, or the 
poor. He would have preferred marrying the second daughter 
of John Colt, of New Hall, in Essex, but chose her elder sister, 
that he might not subject her to the discredit of being passed 
over. In 15 13, Thomas More, than Under- Sheriff of London, 
is said to have written his History of the Life a?id Death of 
King Edward V., and of the Usurpation of Richard TIL, first 
printed in 1557, from a MS. in his writing. The book seems to 
contain the knowledge and opinions of More's patron, Morton, 
who, as an active politician in the times described, was in peril 
of his own life from Richard III. When, in describing the 
death of Edward IV., and reporting his last words to the by- 
standers, it is said, " He laid him down on his right side with 
his face toward them," Morton, an eye-witness, rather than 
More, who was then a five-year-old child, seems to be speaking. 
Sir George Buck, in a eulogy of Richard III. published in 1646, 
says that Morton " wrote a book in Latin against King Richard, 
which came afterwards into the hands of Mr. More, some time 
his servant ;" and adds a note that "the book was lately in the 
hands of Mr. Roper, of Eltham, as Sir Thomas Hoby, who saw 
it told me." There is some reason, then, to think that More's 
MS. may have been a translation of his patron's Latin history, 
and therefore a contemporary record, though ascribed to More 
by the son-in-law who first printed it, twenty-two years after 
More's death. The work which comes down to us in Latin and 
in English, if wholly More's, is mainly based on information 
given to him by his patron Morton. 

14. In the year 15 13, when More's "History of Edward V. 
and Richard III." is said to have been written, Henry VI I L 



to a.d. 1512.] THE RISE OF WOLSEY. 227 

was launching against France a war of which the details were 
managed by Thomas Wolsey. Wolsey, the son of a well-to-do 
butcher of Ipswich, was five years younger than Dean Colet, 
seven years older than More, and twenty years older than King 
Henry VIII. From Ipswich Grammar School he went to 
Magdalene College, Oxford, and there took his B.A. degree so 
early that he was called the Boy Bachelor. He became Fellow 
of Magdalene, then master of Magdalene School, where three 
sons of the Marquis of Dorset were among his pupils. When 
the sons went home for their Christmas holidays the master 
was invited with them, and he was so much liked that, in 1500, 
the marquis gave him the rectory of Lymington, in Somerset- 
shire. Wolsey then obtained the post of chaplain to Henry 
Dean, Morton's successor in the Archbishopric of Canterbury, 
the prelate who in November, 1501, married the Princess 
Katherine of Aragon to young Arthur, Prince of Wales, iour 
months before the boy's death. Henry VIII. married her in 
1509, about six weeks after his accession. Dr. Dean was arch- 
bishop only for two years, and died in February, 1503, not long 
after Wolsey had become his chaplain. Wolsey next became one 
of the chaplains to an old knight, Sir John Nephant, governor 
of Calais, and managed all his affairs for him so well that when 
Sir John was, at his own request, called home, he specially 
commended Wolsey to the notice of the king, and procured for 
him the post of a court chaplain. Then Wolsey made friends 
at court, obtained employment on a foreign service, and per- 
formed his duty with a rare despatch. The king rewarded him, 
in 1508, with the deanery of Lincoln. After the accession of 
Henry VIII., Wolsey obtained the living of Torrington, in 
Devon, was made also Registrar of the Garter, Canon of 
Windsor, Dean of York. Dr. Fox, Bishop of Winchester, was 
Secretary of State and Lord Privy Seal. To him Wolsey in 
part owed his advancement. Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, 
was Lord Treasurer, and had more of the new king's confidence 
than the Bishop of Winchester thought good for his own inte- 
rests. Therefore Dr. Fox sought to advance Wolsey, as a 
creature of his own, in the king's personal favour ; and, to place 
him in closer relations with the king, obtained for him the post 
of Royal Almoner. From that point Wolsey's rise was rapid. 
He made his society delightful, knew how to win the king to his 
own counsels, and never flinched from work. In 15 12 Henry 
made an inglorious attempt against France. Ten thousand 

P 2 



228 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. f A .D. 1512 

Englishmen intended for attack upon Guienne went to Spain, 
under the Marquis of Dorset, became insubordinate, and re- 
turned to England in defiance of the king's commands. Wolsey, 
the royal almoner, took charge of the victualling of the forces, 
and laboured indefatigably at the preparation for an attack 
upon France in 15 13, the next year, which should not fail. 
Henry was leagued against France with Pope Leo X. and the 
Emperor Maximilian. He crossed to France in the summer of 
15 13, and the campaign satisfied him, since he won the Battle 
of the Spurs, took Terouenne and also Tournay, of which place 
he gave to Wolsey the rich bishopric. Before Henry returned 
to England, in November of that year, James IV. of Scotland 
had been slain at Flodden. Wolsey had been in France with 
the king, counselling and aiding with his great administrative 
power. Soon after their return the king made his friend Bishop 
of Lincoln. Before the end of the year 15 14 the see of York fell 
vacant, and Wolsey was made Archbishop of York. Lavish 
gifts of the king followed rapidly. Wolsey obtained administra- 
tion of the see of Bath and Wells, the temporalities of the Abbey 
of St. Albans ; soon afterwards in succession there were added 
to his archbishopric the bishoprics of Durham and Winchester. 
He had the revenues of a sovereign, lived pompously, and 
favoured learning. From 15 15 to 1523 no parliament was sum- 
moned; Henry and Wolsey held absolute rule. In November, 
15 1 5, Wolsey formally received, in Westminster Abbey, from 
Leo X., the rank of cardinal, which had been granted in 
September. Dean Colet preached the installation sermon. 
Towards the close of December, in the same year, Warham, 
Archbishop of Canterbury, after a vain struggle against usurpa- 
tions of his power by the strong rival archbishop, yielded to 
him the office of Lord Chancellor. It was in these days that 
Thomas More, not knighted yet, wrote his " Utopia." 

15. In May, 15 15, More had been joined in a commission 
with Cuthbert Tunstal and others, to confer with the am- 
bassadors of Charles V., then only Archduke of Austria, upon 
a renewal of alliance. Tunstal, a rising churchman, then held 
several preferments, and was chancellor to Warham, Archbishop 
of Canterbury. He was made in that year, 15 15, Archdeacon 
of Chester, and in May, 15 16, Master of the Rolls. In the 
same year, 15 16, he was again sent with More on an embassy 
to Brussels, and lived there under the same roof with Erasmus, 
who was indebted much to the generous friendship of Archbishop 



toa.d. 1516.3. MORES UTOPIA. 22Q. 

Warham, and something to the help of English friends, among 
whom was More, for the leisure which enabled him to produce, 
in 1 5 16, his New Testament. On the first embassy More was 
absent more than six months, and during that time he estab- 
lished friendship with Peter Giles (Latinised, ^Egidius), a 
scholarly and courteous young man, who was secretary to the 
municipality of Antwerp. 

M ore's Utopia is in two parts, of which the second, describing 
the place (Ovtottos — or Nusquama, as he called it sometimes in 
his letters — " Nowhere"), was probably written in the latter part 
of 15 15 ; the first part, introductory, early in 15 16. The book 
was first printed at Louvain, late in 1 516, under the editorship of 
Erasmus, Peter Giles, and other of More's friends in Flanders. 
It was then revised by More, and printed by Frobenius, at 
Basle, in November, 1518. It was reprinted at Paris and Vienna, 
but was not printed in England during More's lifetime. Its 
first publication in this country was in the English translation 
made in Edward VI.'s reign ( 1551) by Ralph Robinson. The 
name of the book has given an adjective to our language — we 
call an impracticable scheme Utopian. Yet, under the veil of a 
playful fiction, the talk is intensely earnest, and abounds in 
practical suggestion. It is the work of a scholarly and witty 
Englishman, who attacks in his own way the chief political and 
social evils of his time. Having commended the book in a 
witty letter to his friend Giles, More tells in the first part how 
he was sent into Flanders with Cuthbert Tunstal, " whom the 
king's majesty of late, to the great rejoicing of all men, did 
prefer to the office of Master of the Rolls ;" how the commis- 
sioners of Charles met them at Bruges, and presently returned 
to Brussels for instructions ; and how More then went to 
Antwerp, where he found a pleasure in the society of Peter 
Giles, which soothed his desire to see again his wife and 
children, from whom he had been four. months away. One 
day, when he came from the service in Antwerp Cathedral, 
More fables that he saw his friend Giles talking to " a certain 
stranger, a man well stricken in age, with a black sunburnt 
face, a long beard, and a cloak cast homely about his shoulders," 
whom More judged to be a mariner. Peter Giles introduced 
him to his friend as Raphael Hythloday (the name, from the 
Greek v6\os and Mios, means " knowing in trifles"), a man learned 
in Latin and profound in Greek, a Portuguese wholly given to 
philosophy, who left his patrimony to his brethen, and, desiring to 



230 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1515 

know far countries, went with Amerigo Vespucci in the three last 
of the voyages of which an account had been printed in 1507. 
From the last voyage he did not return with Vespucci, but got 
leave to be one of the twenty -four men left in Gulike. Then he 
travelled on until having reached Calicut he found there one of 
the ships of his own country to take him home. So it was that 
in the course of travel Raphael Hythloday had visited the island 
of Utopia, unknown to other men ; had dwelt there for five 
years, and had become familiar with its customs. M ore's book, 
which expresses much of the new energy of independent thought, 
was thus associated with the fresh discovery of the New World. 
The Cabots had reached the continent in 1497, on the coast of 
Labrador. Columbus reached it in 1498, near the Island of 
Trinidad, off the northern coast of South America. The 
Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci, made his first expedition in 1499, 
under command of Ojeda ; his second in 1500. His third and 
fourth voyages were made in 1501 and 1503 in Portuguese ships 
in the service of King Emanuel of Portugal. In 1505 he re- 
turned into the service of Spain, but made no more voyages ; 
he prepared charts, and prescribed routes for voyages of other 
men to the New World. The fame of Amerigo's description of 
his voyages caused a German geographer to call the newly- 
founded continent, after his name, America. He died three or 
four years before Thomas More wrote his " Utopia." 

After the greeting in the street, Raphael Hythloday and 
Peter Giles went with More to his house ; " and there," says 
More, " in my garden, upon a bench covered with green torves, 
we sat down talking together." The talk was of the customs 
among men, and of the government of princes. Why would 
not Hythloday give his experience as counsellor of some great 
prince, since " from the prince, as from a perpetual well-spring, 
cometh among the people the flood of all that is good or evil ? " 
Thomas More had withheld himself from such service ; and he 
put two reasons for doing so into the mouth of Hythloday. First, 
that " most princes have more delight in war (the knowledge of 
which I neither have nor desire) than in the good feats of peace ; 
and employ much more study how by right or wrong to enlarge 
their dominions than how well and peaceably to rule and govern 
that they have already." Secondly, because "every king's coun- 
sellor is so wise in his own eyes that he will not allow another 
man's counsel, if it be not shameful, flattering assent." More had 
in mind the supreme counsels of Wolsey, abetting Henry VIII.'s 



toa.d. 1516.] MORE'S UTOPIA. 23 T 

war policy, and doing little to secure peace and well-being 
for the English people. Had Hythloday ever been in England, 
he was asked. Yes, for a few months, not long after the insur- 
rection of the Western Englishmen (in 1496), "which by their 
own miserable and pitiful slaughter was suppressed and ended." 
He was then much beholden to Cardinal Morton ; and here 
More put into Raphael's mouth eulogy of Morton, with an 
account of discourse at his table which set forth some of those 
social miseries, the amending of which would better become a 
prince than foreign war. Some one at Morton's table praised 
the strict execution of justice which showed felons hanging 
usually by twenty at a time upon one gallows. Hythloday said 
he argued that death was too great a penalty for theft. Those 
cannot be kept from stealing who have no other way whereby 
to live. "Therefore in this point not you only, but also the 
most part of the world, be like evil schoolmasters, which be 
readier to beat than to teach their scholars." There were 
the broken soldiers who came from the wars maimed and 
lame. There were the crowds of idle retainers nourished 
in the households of great men, these were thrust out of doors, 
capable of nothing, when their masters died, or they fell 
sick. In France there was what More thought the worse 
plague of a standing army, then a new invention, for which 
war must be found " to the end they may ever have prac- 
tised soldiers and cunning man-slayers." A thousand times 
more regard ought to be had, said Hythloday, to needs of peace 
than to the needs of war. Then there was the destruction of 
tillage and increase of pastures for the sheep of the rich abbots. 
" They inclose all into pastures ; they throw down houses, they 
pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing but only the 
church to be made a sheep-house." Thus husbandmen were 
thrust out of their own ; thus victual had grown dear. Many 
were forced into idleness, yet the sheep suffered from murrain, 
and the price of wool had risen. " Let not so many be brought 
up in idleness ; let husbandry and tillage be restored ; let cloth- 
working be renewed, that there may be honest labours for this 
idle sort to pass their time in profitably, which hitherto either 
poverty hath caused to be thieves, or else now be either vaga- 
bonds or idle serving men, and shortly will be thieves. For by 
suffering your youth wantonly and viciously to be brought up, 
and to be infected even from their tender age by little and little 
with vice, then a' God's name to be punished when they commit 



232 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1500 

the same faults after being come to man's estate, which from 
their youth they were ever like to do, — in this point, I pray you, 
what other thing do you than make thieves and then punish 
them ?" Such passages indicate the spirit and the purpose of 
the book concerning which Erasmus wrote to a friend, in 15 17, 
that he should send for More's " Utopia" if he had not read itj. 
and " wished to see the true source of all political evils." And 
to More Erasmus wrote of his book, " A burgomaster of Antwerp 
is so pleased with it he knows it all by heart." When Raphael 
Hythloday's talk in the garden had excited curiosity by its, 
frequent reference to the way things were done in Utopia, he 
was persuaded to give an account of that wonderful island. 
His description forms the second part of the little book. It is 
designedly fantastic in suggestion of details, the work of a 
scholar who had read Plato's " Republic " and had his fancy 
quickened after reading Plutarch's account of Spartan life under 
Lycurgus. But never was there in any old English version of 
" The Governail of Princes " (ch. iv. § 43) a more direct uphold- 
ing of the duty of a king in his relation to the country governed 
than in Thomas More's " Utopia." Beneath the veil of an ideal 
communism, into which there has been worked some witty extra- 
vagance, there lies a noble English argument. Sometimes More 
puts the case as of France when he means England. Sometimes 
there is ironical praise of the good faith of Christian kings, 
saving the book from censure as a political attack upon the 
policy of Henry VIII. Thus protected, More could declare 
boldly that it were best for the king " to content himself with 
his own kingdom, to make much of it, to enrich it, and to make 
it as flourishing as he could, to endeavour himself to love his 
subjects, and again to be beloved by them, willingly to live with 
them, peaceably to govern them, and with other kingdoms not 
to meddle, seeing that which he hath already is even enough 
for him, yea, and more than he can well turn him to." But 
Hythloday added, " ' This mine advice, Master More, how think 
you it would be heard and taken V ' So, God help me, not very 
thankfully, quod I.'" The prince's office, in More's " Utopia," 
" continueth all his lifetime, unless he be deposed or. put down 
for suspicion of tyranny." In the chapter on the Religions in 
Utopia, More wrote of King Utopus, who conquered the country 
because it was distracted with quarrels about religion, that 
" first of all he made a decree that it should be lawful for every 
man to favour and follow what religion he would, and that he 



toa.d. 1520.] DIFFUSION OF THE BIBLE: XIMENEZ. 233 

might do the best he could to bring other to his opinion, so 
that he did it peaceably, gently, quietly, and soberly, without 
hasty and contentious rebuking and inveighing against each 
other. If he could not by fair and gentle speech induce them 
unto his opinion, yet he should use no kind of violence, and 
refrain from displeasant and seditious words. To him that 
would vehemently and fervently in this cause strive and contend 
was decreed banishment and bondage. This law did King 
Utopus make, not only for the maintenance of peace, which he 
saw through continual contention and mortal hatred utterly 
extinguished, but also because he thought this decree would 
work for the furtherance of religion." 

16. More wrote when the days were at hand that would 
have yielded many bondsmen had Utopus given laws to Europe. 
The invention of printing had caused a wide diffusion of the 
bible in the received Latin version, known as the Vulgate. 
Eighty editions of it were printed between the years 1462 and 
1500. The new impulse given to scholarship was felt by the 
great scholars of the Church. In 1502, Ximenez, then Primate 
of Spain and founder of the University of Alcala, projected an 
edition of the Scriptures known from Complutum, the Latin 
name of Alcala, its place of publication, as the Complutensian 
Polyglot. He proposed to correct the received version of the 
books of the Old Testament by the Hebrew text, and those of 
the New Testament by the Greek text. " Every theologian," 
he said, " should also be able to drink of that water which 
springeth up to eternal life at the fountain-head itself. This is 
the reason why we have ordered the Bible to be printed in the 
original language with different translations. ... To accom- 
plish this task we have been obliged to have recourse to the know- 
ledge of the most able philologists, and to make researches in 
every direction for the best and most ancient Hebrew and Greek 
manuscripts. Our object is to revive the hitherto dormant study 
of the Sacred Scriptures." This work was prepared at the uni- 
versity of Alcala by some of the best scholars of Spain, who worked 
under his direction, and were maintained by his liberality. 
Leo X. became pope in March, 1 5 1 3, and the printing of the first 
part of the Polyglot (dedicated to him), the New, Testament, was 
completed in folio in January, 15 14. There were letters and pre- 
faces of St. Jerome and others ; there was a short Greek grammar 
on a single leaf, and there was a short lexicon : but although 
money had lavishly been spent in procuring manuscripts for the 



234 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1500 

determination of the text, there was no description of them, 
there were no specific references to their authority, no various 
readings. In the whole of the New Testament folio there were 
only four critical remarks upon the text. The second of the 
six folio volumes was ready in May, 15 14, and served as an 
Introduction to the Old Testament, containing a Hebrew- 
Chaldee lexicon, a Hebrew grammar, and other aids. The 
other four volumes gave the books of the Old Testament in five 
forms, the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the Hebrew, the Chaldee 
text, or Targum of Onkelos, and a Latin version of the Targum. 
The publication was completed in July, 15 17, only four months 
before the death of its promoter. The pope's permission for 
the publication of the work did not appear till March, 1520, and 
another year elapsed before any one of the six hundred copies 
printed was allowed to pass the Spanish frontier. 

The year of the publication of Utopia, 15 16, was also the 
year in which Erasmus turned study of Greek to account by 
publishing his New Testament with the Greek text revised 
from collation of MSS., a Latin version, which corrected mis- 
translations in the Vulgate, and appended notes to explain 
changes of reading. In the Introduction to this work Erasmus 
said that the Scriptures addressed all, adapted themselves even 
to the understanding of children, and that it were well if they 
could be read by all people in all languages ; that none could 
reasonably be cut off from a blessing as much meant for all as 
baptism and the other sacraments. The common mechanic is 
a true theologian when his hopes look heavenward, he blesses 
those who curse him, loves the good, is patient with the evil, 
comforts the mourner, and sees death only as the passage to 
immortal life. If princes practised this religion, if priests 
taught it instead of their stock erudition out of Aristotle and 
Averroes, there would be fewer wars among the nations of 
Christendom, less private wrath and litigation, less worship of 
wealth. " Christ," added Erasmus, " says, He who loves me, 
keeps my commandments. If we be true Christians, and really 
believe that Christ can give us more than the philosophers and 
kings can give, we cannot become too familiar with the New 
Testament." This new edition of it was received with interest 
by many who soon afterwards were in strong opposition to the 
claims of the reformers. It was revised, and several times re- 
printed, while Erasmus followed up his work by the issue of 
Latin Paraphrases of the books of the New Testament, which 



TOA.D. ism.] ERASMUS. LUTHER. 235 

expanded here and there for the sake of interpretation, and put 
into a fresh and flowing Latin style, the sense of the text, so as 
to bring it home at once to the less learned, and even to the 
learned give sometimes a livelier perception of its meaning. 
The first Paraphrase was of the Epistle to the Romans, and 
was first published in 1518. In 15 19 followed the Epistle to 
the Corinthians. The demand for more caused Erasmus to 
paraphrase other epistles. At the beginning of 1522 appeared 
his Paraphrase of Matthew's Gospel, dedicated to Charles V. 
That of John's Gospel followed, with a dedication to Ferdinand I. 
In 1523 the Paraphrase of Luke's Gospel was published. It 
ivas dedicated to Henry VIII. ; and the Paraphrase of Mark's 
Gospel, published in 1524, was inscribed to Francis I. In these 
dedications of the Gospel of Peace to the chief authors of dis- 
cord there was something akin to the spirit of M ore's Utopia. 

17. It was but a year after the publication of Utopia and of 
Erasmus's New Testament when, on the 31st of October, 15 17, 
Martin Luther began his career as a reformer by affixing his 
Ninety-five Theses against Indulgences to the church door at 
Wittenberg. He was then a pious, preaching monk, a Doctor 
and Professor of Divinity in the University of Wittenberg, aged 
thirty-four, desiring to be faithful alike to his Church and to his 
conscience. Leo X., to meet the expenses of the Roman Court, 
and for the completion of St. Peter's at Rome, raised money by 
an indiscriminate sale of indulgences. His commissary, John 
Tetzel, had told the people that when one dropped a penny into 
the box for a soul in purgatory, so soon as the money chinked 
in the chest the soul flew up to heaven. Luther opposed: 
Tetzel replied. Luther dutifully submitted his propositions to 
Pope Leo X. The papal legate, Caietan, foiled by Luther's 
firm placing of Scripture above the pope, when he had thought 
to bring the poor monk to reason, said, " I will not speak to the 
beast again ; he has deep eyes, and his head is full of specula- 
tion." Leo X. forced Luther into open opposition to the see of 
Rome by issuing, in November, 15 18, a bull declaring the pope's 
power to issue indulgences which will avail not only the living 
but also the dead who are in purgatory. Luther still held by 
his Church, but appealed from the pope to a General Council. 
Thus the first movements in the public career of Luther corre- 
sponded in time with the work of Erasmus upon the New 
Testament. 

When the outcry against Luther became violent, Erasmus 



236 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1520 

urged moderation ; and, as he said in May, 15 19, endeavoured 
to carry himself as evenly as he could with all parties, that he 
might more effectually serve the interests of learning and 
religion. 

In June, 1520, Leo X. published a bull formally condemning- 
as heretical forty-one propositions collected from Luther's writ- 
ings. The pope gave the heretic sixty days within which he 
was to recant if he would not suffer punishment for heresy. The 
breach then was complete. Luther denounced "the execrable 
bull of Antichrist," and wholly separated himself from communion 
with the Church of Rome. He had denied, he said, Divine 
Right in the papacy, but now he knew it to be the kingdom of 
Babylon. In October, 1520, Charles V. was crowned emperor. 
At the Diet of Worms, held in the beginning of 1521, the pope's 
bull was about to be confirmed against Luther in his absence, 
when the Elector of Saxony and other of his friends urged that 
he should not be condemned unheard. He was summoned,, 
and went boldly, saying that if he knew there were as many 
devils at Worms as tiles upon the houses, he would go. It is 
said by a Romanist biographer, Audin, that when, in April 1521, 
on his way to the Diet of Worms, where he maintained his 
cause before the assembled cardinals, bishops, and princes of 
Germany, as the towers of Worms came in sight, Luther stood 
up in his carriage and first chanted his famous hymn, " Eine 
feste Burg ist unser Gott " (A mighty stronghold is our God), 
which Audin called the " Marseillaise of the Reformation." 

1 8. William Tyndal was of about Luther's age, born pro- 
bably in 1484, at Stinchcomb, or North Nibley, Gloucestershire.. 
He was educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, graduated at 
Oxford, was then for some years at Cambridge, and, about 
15 19, became tutor in the family of a Gloucestershire gentleman, 
Sir John Walsh, of Little Sodbury. He translated into English 
the Enchiridion of Erasmus, which argues that Christian life is 
a warfare against evil, sustained rather by obeying Christ than 
by faith in scholastic dogmas. As the controvery about Luther 
gathered strength, Tyndal supported Luther's cause so earnestly 
that he was cited before the Chancellor of the Diocese of 
Worcester, and warned. In dispute afterwards with a Wor- 
cestershire divine, he said, "If God spare my life, ere many 
years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know 
more of the Scriptures than thou dost." 

About 1523 — the year in which Lord Berners published his 



to a.d. 1525.] WILLIAM TYNDAL. 237 

translation of Froissart's Chronicle— Tyndal came to London, 
where M ore's friend, Cuthbert Tunstal, who was at the Diet 
of Worms in 1521, had been made bishop in October, 1522, 
and became Keeper of the Privy Seal in the following May. 
Tyndal failed to obtain, through the good offices of Sir 
Harry Guilford, one of Sir John Walsh's friends, appoint- 
ment fas one of Tunstal's chaplains ; but he preached some 
sermons at St. Dunstan's, and was received into the house 
of Humphrey Monmouth, a rich draper, liberal of mind and 
purse. There he was for about half a year, and, as Mon- 
mouth said afterwards, when in trouble for his own opinions, 
"he lived like a good priest, as methought. He studied 
most part of the day and of the night at his book, and he 
would eat but sodden meat by his good will, nor drink but 
small beer." Tyndal was a small and thin man, who lived 
sparely and studied without stint. He must have been already 
at work in Monmouth's house on his translation of the New Tes- 
tament from Greek into English. Finding, as he said afterwards 
of himself, "not only that there was no room in my Lord of 
London's palace to translate the New Testament, but also that 
there was no place to do it in all England," Tyndal left England 
for Hamburg, where he increased his knowledge of Hebrew. 
He was skilled in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, in Italian, Spanish, 
French, and German. Although no copies of such an edition 
are now extant, there is reason to believe that Tyndal at once 
printed, somewhere on the Continent, his translation into English 
of two of the Gospels, those of Matthew and Mark. He then, in 
1525, secretly printed, beginning to print at Cologne and finish- 
ing at Worms, 3,000 copies of his translation of the New Testa- 
ment into English, in a quarto edition, of which only one frag- 
ment remains. There was added to it immediately a second 
edition of 6,000 copies in octavo, printed at Worms. This was 
three years after Luther's publication, in September, 1522, of his 
-translation of the New Testament into German. 

19. Edicts against the issue of his New Testament caused 
Luther to write a treatise on " The Secular Power," in which he held 
that princes were usually paltry fools, ordained only to serve God 
as a dignified sort of executioners for punishment of the wicked, 
and not even themselves carrying their artifice so far as to pre- 
tend to be good shepherds of the flock. But Henry VIII. did 
so pretend. He had written against Luther, whom he styled 
" the arch-heretic," a Latin treatise on The Seven Sacraments 



238 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1520 

published in London in 1521, and at Antwerp in 1522, for which 
Pope Leo X. conferred on Henry the title of " Defender of the 
Faith," which was confirmed to him by Leo's successor. In 1523 
Luther was in full activity, and two of his followers were burnt 
at Brussels. In October, 1524, Luther abandoned the monastic 
habit ; and in 1525, while Tyndal was printing his New Testa- 
ment, Luther, aged forty- two, married Catherine Bora, who had 
been a nun. 

20. Tyndal was aided in his work by William Roy, a 
Minorite Friar educated at Cambridge, whose help he needed but 
whom he did not like ; for he described him as " a man some- 
what crafty when he cometh unto new acquaintance and before 
he be thorough known." Tyndal adds concerning Roy that " as 
long as he had gotten no money, somewhat I could rule him ; 
but as soon as he had gotten him money he became like himself 
again. Nevertheless, I suffered all things till that was ended 
which I could not do alone without one both to write and to 
help me to compare the texts together. When that was ended 
I took my leave, and bade him farewell for our two lives and, as 
men say, a day longer." The same William Roy, aided by 
Jerome Barlowe, another Minorite, published at Strasburg, in 
1528, a satire in verse known as The Burying of the Mass, with 
" Rede me and be not wroth " for the first words upon its title- 
page, and a woodcut of a satirical shield of arms with two fiends 
as supporters, for Wolsey, who is styled " the vile butcher's son" 
and " the proud cardinal." It contains axes to signify cruelty,, 
bulls' heads for sturdy furiousness, a club for tyranny, and in the 
centre a figure described as 

" The mastiff cur bred in Ipswich town 
Gnawing with his teeth a kinges crown," 

The arms have this couplet above them, signifying Wolsey's 
pride : 



" I will ascend, making my state so high 
That my pompous honour shall never die ;" 



and these below : 

"O caitiff, when thou thinkest least of all, 
With confusion thou shalt have a fall." 

This was in 1528, when Wolsey felt so strong in his supremacy 
that he could venture, without the king's knowledge, to order 
heralds to declare war against Spain. His fall was in October, 
1529. 

21. Meanwhile, copies of Tyndal's translation of the New 



TOA.D. 1527.3 ROY. TYNDAL. HENRY VIII. 239 

Testament, published in 1525 at the cost of English merchants 
abroad, had, by their agency, reached England in March, 1526. 
In the same month Henry VIII. received Luther's second letter 
to His Majesty, written in the preceding September, and printed 
before it reached the king. In the autumn of 1526, in a sermon 
at Paul's Cross by Cuthbert Tunstal, then Bishop of London, 
Tyndal's New Testament was officially denounced, and copies 
of it were then publicly burnt. In December, 1526, appeared in 
Latin King Henry's answer to Luther, printed with Luther's 
letter and an address to the pious reader. At the beginning of 
1527 there was published also in English A Copy of the Letters 
wherin the most Redoubted and Mighty Prince onr Soverayne 
Lorde Ky?ige Henry the Eight, Kynge of Englande and of France, 
Defensor of the Faith, and Lorde of Ireland, made Answer unto 
a certayne Letter of Ma?'tyn Luther, &c. This had a special pre- 
face, in which it was said that Luther " fell into device with one 
or two lewd persons born in this our realm for the translating of 
the New Testament into English, as well with many corruptions 
of that holy text, as certain prefaces and pestilent glosses in the 
margins, for the advancement and setting forth of his abominable 
heresies ; intending to abuse the good minds and devotion that 
you our dearly-beloved people bear toward the Holy Scripture, 
and to infect you with the deadly corruption and contagious 
odour of his pestilent errors. In the avoiding whereof, we, of 
our especial tender zeal towards you, have, with the deliberate 
advice of the most reverend father in God, Thomas Lord Cardinal, 
Legate de Latere, of the see apostolic of York Primate, and our 
Chancellor of this realm, and other reverend fathers of the 
spiritualty, determined the said and untrue translations to be 
burned, with further sharp correction and punishment against 
the keepers and readers of the same ; reckoning of your wisdoms 
very sure that ye will well and thankfully perceive our tender 
and loving mind toward you therein, and that ye will never be 
so greedy upon any sweet wine, be the grape never so pleasant, 
that ye will desire to taste it, being well advertised that your 
enemy before hath poisoned it." In this year 1527, Henry VIII., 
with his eye upon Anne Boleyn, began questioning the lawfulness 
of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. 

22. Tyndal doubtless referred to Luther's version of the New 
Testament into German while he was making his own from the 
Greek. More than half of Luther's short preface to his New 
Testament is incorporated in the prologue to the New Testament 



240 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1520 

of Tyndal, who used also, with a few additions, Luther's marginal 
references, simply translated some of his glosses, gave the sense 
of others, and added many of his own. It was asserted, also, by 
the English bishops that there were 3,000 errors in Tyndal's 
translation. Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, bought up all 
copies that he could find. In March, 1528, Sir Thomas More 
(§13) was licensed by his old friend Tunstal to have and read 
Lutheran books in order that he might confute them, "forasmuch 
as you, dearly-beloved brother, can play the Demosthenes both 
in this our English tongue and also in the Latin." More had 
been made Treasurer of the Exchequer in 1520, had become 
Sir Thomas in 1521, a month after his appointment as Master 
of the Requests. In 1523 he was chosen Speaker of the House 
of Commons, when a Parliament was summoned to raise money 
for a war with France, and he had then offended Wolsey by 
opposing an oppressive subsidy. Henry VIII. delighted in his 
society, and would pay hkn unceremonious visits in the house at 
Chelsea to which he had removed from Bucklersbury. " Great 
honour," said one of his family, "was this to him." "Yes," 
answered More, " the king is my very good master ; but if my 
head would win His Majesty a castle in France, it would not fail 
to be struck off my shoulders." In 1527 Tunstal and More were 
joined with Wolsey in an embassy to France. On their return 
Wolsey opened a court for the remedy of abusions in the Church. 
One of the first called before it, in November, 1527, was Thomas 
Bilney, whom Tunstal persuaded at that time to recant ; and he 
was released after carrying a fagot in procession, and standing 
bareheaded before a preacher at Paul's Cross. In 1528 the king 
made More Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. This was 
his position, and he was forty-eight years old, when he was 
licensed by Tunstal to read Lutheran books that he might use 
his skill in argument against them. He produced in the same 
year, and published in 1529, a Dialogue in four books, being in 
form of the report to a friend of dialogue between himself and a 
confidential messenger whom the friend had sent to question 
More upon religious controversies of the day. The discussion 
was of image-worship, prayer to saints, going on pilgrimages, 
and other topics to be met with argument against the views of 
Luther and Tyndal. The new English translation of the Testa- 
ment More would take as a New Testament only in the sense of 
its being Tyndal's or Luther's. More illustrated his complaint 
against the text bv citing Tyndal's substitution of the words con- 



TO a.d. 1532.] MORE AGAINST, TYNDAL. 24.I 

gregation, elder, favour, knowledge, repentance, for church, priest, 
grace, confession, and penance. In this Dialogue More main- 
tained that the English ought to have the Bible in their mother 
tongue ; and said that " to keep the whole commodity from any- 
whole people because of harm that by their own folly and fault 
may come to some part, were as though a lewd (unlearned) 
surgeon would cut off the leg by the knee to keep the toe from 
the gout, or cut off a man's head by the shoulders to keep him 
from the toothache." A trustworthy version might, he thought, 
be used prudently for distribution by the clergy. More published 
also, in 1529, a Supplication of Souls, in reply to a short invec- 
tive called "The Supplication of Beggars," written by Simon 
Fyshe. He answered John Frith's tract on " The Sacrament of 
the Altar," and remained active in controversy with the Reformers 
from 1529 until 1533, appealing to the people through the press 
with tracts designed to meet and confute those of Tyndal and 
others. Tyndal produced An Answer unto Sir Thomas Morels 
Dialogue, written in 1530, and published in the spring of 1531 ; 
and in 1532 appeared M ore's Confutation of Tyndal's answer. 
The spirit of Tyndal's argument for the impugned parts of his 
translation was expressed in his saying that the clergy had led 
men to "understand by the word church nothing but the shaven 
flock of them that shore the whole world;" but that it "hath yet, 
or should have, another signification, little known among the 
common people nowadays. That is, to wit, it signifieth a con- 
gregation ; a multitude or a company gathered together in one, 
of all degrees of people." In short, he avoided words to which 
a special and, as he thought, false meaning had become attached ; 
and thus incurred strong condemnation as a partisan translator 
from those who believed such special meanings to be true. More 
in his rejoinder, and elsewhere in his controversial writing of 
these years, was at times false to the principles laid down in his 
Utopia and illustrated by the main course of his life. He was 
not himself a persecutor, but he was defending his own Church 
at a time when it believed that thousands might be saved from 
everlasting fire by terror of the burning of a few. He flinched 
from the practical enforcement of that doctrine when he himself 
wielded the terrors of the law. But abroad and at home it was 
enforced by governments, when, in reply to Tyndal's sentence, 
" If our shepherds had been as willing to feed as to shear, we 
had needed no such dispicience, nor they to have burnt so many 
' • as they have," More admitted that there would have been less 

Q 



242 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1504 

heresy if there had been more diligence in preaching, and said, 
" Sure if the prelates had taken as good heed in time as they 
should have done, there should peradventure at length fewer 
have been burned thereby. But there should have been more 
burned by a great many than there have been within this seven 
year last passed ; the lack whereof, I fear me, will make more 
burned within this seven year next coming than else should have 
needed to have been burned in seven score." Let us be just to 
More, without forgetting that he has left this sentence, written in 

1532, to be quoted against him. He was then Lord High Chan- 
cellor, and while he held that office, from October, 1530, until 

1533, although unjustly accused of cruelties, he did support 
in controversy — and that not in a single passage — the fierce 
policy of persecution. If he did not himself light martyr fires, 
he at least publicly assented to the argument by which they were 
sustained. By zeal for his Church, when days of conflict came, 
M ore's calm philosophy was passed as through a furnace, and 
did not come out unsinged. 

23. More was made Chancellor after the fall of Wolsey, whose 
condemnation by the English people after he became in their 
eyes an impersonation of ecclesiastical pride was expressed 
most vigorously in the satire of John Skelton (ch. v. § 34). 
During the earlier part of Henry VIII.'s reign Skelton was in 
favour with his old pupil. He was rector of Diss, in Norfolk, as 
early as 1504, and remained so nominally until his death, 
though he is said to have been suspended from his functions 
by Dr. Richard Nix, his diocesan, for inclination towards the 
opinions of the Reformers. The particular offence said to have 
been charged against John Skelton by the Dominicans was 
that he had violated the rule of celibacy, by secret marriage to 
the mother of his children. Among his lesser poems were four 
against a Sir Christopher Garnesche, gentleman usher to Henry 
VIII., with whom Skelton had a flyting, after the manner of 
that between Dunbar and Kennedy in Scotland (§ 3), or that in 
France of Sagon with Marot. In Wolsey's earlier days, when 
he was simply a rising churchman (who early in 15 14 became 
Bishop of Lincoln, and before the close of the year Archbishop 
of York, and who in 15 16 began to build for himself at Hampton 
Court), Skelton was among his friends. So he remained 
until a short time after Wolsey had been appointed the pope's 
sole legate a latere, in June, 15 19. But in that year Warham, 
Archbishop of Canterbury, complained to the king of Wolsey 



to a.d. 1529.] JOHN SKELTON. 243 

as oppressor of the clergy ; and in 1522, when the election of 
Adrian VI. disappointed him of the papacy, Wolsey, who was 
maintaining war against France without a Parliament, levied a 
loan of a tenth on lay subjects, and a fourth on the clergy. In 
1523, when Wolsey's illegitimate son, Thomas Winter, was made 
Archdeacon of York, and again Wolsey was disappointed of the 
papacy by election of Clement VII., Convocation and Par- 
liament both met. From the clergy Wolsey then got a subsidy 
of half their annual revenue ; from the laity he asked four 
shillings in the pound, and got half that amount. The supreme 
minister, then rising yearly in power and wealth, was- housed 
luxuriously in his palace at Hampton Court; the English people 
suffered from his exactions, and he was daily pointed at by 
Church reformers, who inveighed against the " pomp and pride " 
of a high clergy, more ready to shear than feed their sheep. 
Then it was that John Skelton, who felt with the people, poured 
upon Wolsey from the voice of one the wrath of many. His 
form of verse was itself popular — earnest, whimsical, with 
torrents of rhyme added to short lines kindred in accent and 
alliteration to the old national form of verse. His Speke Parrot, 
in Chaucer's seven-lined stanza, spoke its satire through a 
medley of apt sayings, jumbled together and pleasantly blended 
with scraps from the parrot's feast of languages. The parrot 
appeared frequently as a court bird in the European literature 
of these times; and although parrots had been brought into 
Europe by the followers of Alexander the Great, many centuries 
before, their diffusion in the earlier years of the sixteenth cen- 
tury was due to the followers of Columbus, for it was one of 
the smaller results of the discovery of the New World. Skelton's 
Parrot was gaily painted as a ladies' pet, and a philologist who 
picked up phrases in all tongues, and also, as he said, ' 

" Such shredis of sentence, strowed in the shop 
Of auncyent Aristippus and such other mo 
I gader togyther and close in my crop." 

Whatever else may be obscure in his whimsically disjointed 
oracles, it is clear that he meant Henry VIII. and Wolsey by 
the dogs Bo-ho and Hough-ho (Bow-wow and Wow-wow), 
when he said : 

" Bo-ho doth hark well, but Hough-ho he ruleth the ring; 
From Scarpary to Tartary renown therein doth spring, 
With, He said, and We said, I wot now what I wot, 
Quod magnus est dominus Judas Scarioth." 

Q 2 



244 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1523 

Elsewhere Wolsey was he who makes men to jumble, to 
stumble, to tumble down like fools, to lower, to drop, to kneel, 
to stoop, and to play couch-quail. " He carrieth a king in his 
sleeve, if all the world fail." Since Deucalion's flood, spoke 
the Parrot, there were never seen " so many noble bodies under 
one daw's head ; so many thieves hanged and thieves never the 
less ; so much prisonment for matters not worth an haw ; so 
bold a bragging butcher, and flesh sold so dear ; so many 
plucked partridges, and so fat quails ; so mangy a mastiff cur 
the great greyhound's peer ; so fat a maggot bred of a flesh-fly ; 
was never such a filthy Gorgon, nor such an epicure, since 
Deucalion's flood I make thee fast and sure." 

The same public scorn of Wolsey was poured in Skeltonic 
rhyme through Skelton's " Why Come ye Not to Court?" All 
was wrong in the land ; the English nobles were extinguished 
under the red hat. " Our barons be so bold, into a mouse-hole 
they would run away and creep, like a mayny of sheep ; dare 
not look out at door, for dread of the mastiff cur, for dread of 
the butcher's dog would worry them like an hog." " I pray God 
save the king," says Skelton, " wherever he go or ride, I pray 
God be his guide." But " once yet again of you I would frayne 
(ask), Why come ye not to Court ? To which court ? To the 
King's Court, or to Hampton Court? Nay, to the King's 
Court : the King's Court should have the excellence. But 
Hampton Court hath the pre-eminence, and Yorkes Place with 
my lordes grace, to whose magnificence is all the confluence, 
suits, and supplications, embassades of all nations. A straw 
for law, it shall be as he will. He regardeth lordes no more 
than potshordes ; he is in such elation of his exaltation, and the 
supportation of our sovereign lord, that, God to record, he 
ruleth all "at will without reason or skill. Howbeit the pri- 
mordial of his wretched original, and his base progeny, and his 
greasy genealogy — he came of the sang-royal that was cast out 
of a butcher's stall." In more than 1,200 of such short lines 
Skelton's " Why Come ye Not to Court?" poured out the anger 
of the people against Wolsey. 

" He maketh so proude pretens 
That in his equipolens 
He jugyth him equivalent 
With God omnipotent : 
But yet beware the rod, 
And the stroke of God." 

Skelton felt deeply, or he could not have braved Wolsey in his 



-to A. d. 1529.] SKEL TON'S "COLIN CLOUT." 245 

day of power with so bold a satire. In this poem he painted 
the condition of the court. 

There was yet another piece, his Colin Clout, which also 
denounced Wolsey, but of which the main purpose was to 
paint the condition of the country. Colin Clout represented in 
his poem the poor Englishman of the day, rustic or town-bred. 
The name blends the two forms of life : Colin is from colonus, 
(tiller of the soil), whence clown ; Clout, or Patch, sign of a 
sedentary calling, stands for the town mechanic, such as Bottom 
the Weaver, and his " crew of patches, base mechanicals." In 
Skeltonic verses, about equal in number to those of "Why Come 
ye Not to Court?" Colin Clout uttered his simple thought upon 
the troubles of the Church, and all the evil that had come of 
the corruption of the bishops and high churchmen. " That the 
people talk this, somewhat there is amiss," said Skelton. In 
this poem the reference to Wolsey was only incidental, and the 
desire was to sustain the Church by showing what reform of 
discipline it needed if it was to "let Colin Clout have none 
manner of cause to moan." While bishops' mules eat gold, 
u their neighbours die for meat." Heresies multiply. 

" Men hurt their souls. 
Alas, for Goddes will, 
Why sit ye, prelates, still, 
And suffer all this ill ? 
Ye bishops of estates 
Should open the broad gates 
Of your spiritual charge, 
And come forth at large, 
Like lanterns of light, 
In the people's sight, 
In pulpits awtentyke 
For the weal publyke 
Of priesthood in this case." 

Colin Clout closed his rhyming with a prayer to Christ : 

" Such grace that He us send 
To rectify and amend 
Things that are amiss 
When that His pleasure is. Amen." 

Among Skelton's other poems two have yet to be named. 
One of these was a coarse humorous piece upon the Brewing 
or Tunning of Elynour Rummy 'ng, who kept an ale-house on a 
hill by Leatherhead, and became known to the courtiers of 
Henry VIII. when the court was at Nonsuch, about six miles 
off, The other poem was a Morality Play called Magnificence. 



246 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1523 

Skelton died in June, 1529, before the fall of Wolsey, sheltered 
from his wrath by the sanctuary of Westminster, where he was 
befriended by John I slip, the Abbot. The old privileges of 
sanctuary were abridged in the latter years of Henry VIII.'s 
reign, and abolished in the last year of the reign of James I. 

24. The Morality Play does not represent a transition 
from the miracle-play to the true drama, but was simply one of the 
forms taken by that allegorical literature (ch. iii. § 7 ; ch. iv. 
§ 9, 16, 27 ; ch. vi. § 2) which had its narrative form in poems 
like the " Bowge of Court" (§ 5), or the "Pastime of Pleasure" 
(§ 7). Miracle-plays (ch. iii. § 9 ; ch. iv. § 5) remained miracle- 
plays, and were still being acted. These allegorical plays were 
also written to be acted. There the resemblance ends, except 
as to that earnestness of purpose which they have in common 
with most forms of English Literature. There were no morality- 
plays before the reign of Henry VI., and they did not become 
widely popular until their personification of the virtues and vices 
in action could be used for an appeal to the people on great 
public questions in debate among them. They had a use of their 
own when, north and south, in the days of Henry VIII., they 
were planned by men who sought the reformation of abuses ; 
they helped them to express or form opinions of the people. 
The best examples of this kind of literature belong, therefore, 
to the reign of Henry VIII. They are the " Magnificence" of 
Skelton, and Sir David Lindsay's " Satire of the Three Estates," 
written in Scotland about six years later. Of these two, 
Lindsay's work is the more important, and will presently be 
dwelt upon. Skelton's Magnificence, in verse humorous and 
earnest, showed how Felicity argued with Liberty, who was 
over-impatient of restraint ; how Measure entering, set forth 
that "Liberty without Measure proveth a thing of nought;" 
how wealthful Felicity and Liberty allowed Measure to guide 
them, and resolved that— 

" There is no prince but he hath need of us three — 
Wealth, with Measure and pleasant Liberty." 

Magnificence then entered, and took them discreetly for com- 
panions, but was presently beguiled by the vice Fancy, and 
practised upon by Fancy himself, under the name of the virtue 
Largeness, and by the vices Counterfeit Countenance, Crafty 
Conveyance, Cloked Collusion, Courtly Abusion, and Folly, 
under the names of Good Demeanaunce, Surveyance, Sober 
Sadness (Seriousness), Pleasure, and Conceit. They separated 



to a.d. 1530.] THOMAS CRANMER. 2/tf 

Magnificence from Measure, Liberty, and Felicity, then left him 
to be beaten down by the blows of Adversity. He was next 
visited by Poverty, mocked by the vices that betrayed him, and 
left to give entrance to Despair. Upon Despair followed Mis- 
chief, and fallen Magnificence was about to slay .himself, when 
Good Hope entering put to flight those tempters, arrested the 
sword, and told the sufferer that his physician is the Grace of 
God. Then came Redress and Sad Circumspection ; and 
finally, by help of Perseverance, he rose to a higher than his 
old estate, after he had been taught — 

" How suddenly worldly wealth doth decay ; 
How wisdom, through wantonness, vanisheth away ; 
How none estate living of himself can be sure, 
For the wealth of this world cannot endure." 

25. Wolsey, in June, 1529, when Skelton died, was near- his 
fall. It was the month in which Queen Katherine was called 
before that legatine court of Cardinals Wolsey and Campeggio, 
which, at the end of July, thwarted the king's impatience by 
declaring that no judgment of divorce could be pronounced 
until the pope's assent had been received. On the 17th of the 
following October Wolsey was deprived of his office of Chan- 
cellor, stripped of his wealth, and ruined utterly. He died next 
year. 

George Cavendish, who had entered Wolsey's service as 
a gentleman usher about the year 15 19, and had been faithfully 
attached to him during the last ten years of his life, spoke with 
the king immediately after Wolsey's death. He was invited into 
Henry's service, but presently retired to his own little estate in 
Suffolk, with the wages due from the cardinal, a small gratuity, 
and six of the cardinal's best cart-horses to convey his furniture. 
Cavendish wrote, about the year 1554, an interesting Life of 
Wolsey. It was used as a source ot information by the 
chroniclers whom Shakespeare read, but was not itself printed 
until 1661, a hundred years after its author's death. 

Thomas Cranmer was, at the time of the fall of Wolsey, 
forty years old, Doctor of Divinity, Archdeacon of Taunton, a 
Theological Examiner at Cambridge, and a known expert in 
Canon Law. There being plague at Cambridge in August, 1529, 
Dr. Cranmer was then staying with two pupils at the house of their 
father, Mr. Cressy, at Waltham,in Essex. The king happening 
to come to Waltham, his almoner and secretary, Edward Fox 
and Stephen Gardiner, who had been to Rome upon the matter of 



248 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1530 

the king's divorce, were lodged with Mr. Cressy. At supper 
Dr. Cranmer argued that if the king's marriage was null by any 
Divine law, the pope could not uphold it, since he could not 
cancel any law of God. The question might, therefore, be 
settled on its own merits by learned men. Report made to the 
king of this opinion of Cranmer's caused him to be sent for, and 
in or before February, 1530, Dr. Cranmer published in support 
of his argument a treatise, of which no copy remains. The 
king at the same time made this new ally one of his chaplains, 
and gave him a benefice. At the end of 1530 Cranmer went to 
Rome with Sir Thomas Boleyn (become Earl of Wiltshire and 
Ormond) and with others. There his book was presented to 
the pope, and he undertook to dispute openly against King 
Henry's marriage with Queen Katherine. He returned to 
England in 1531, and was much with the king at Hampton 
Court. In August of that year Thomas Bilney, who, being 
resolved to recant his recantation, had preached publicly in 
Norfolk, was, on the writ of Dr. Nix, the bishop of the diocese, 
burnt for his faith at Norwich. Dr. Nix was a man eighty years 
oM, infirm and blind. At this time one Richard Byfield, who 
had been Chamberlain of the Benedictine Monastery of Bury 
St. Edmunds, was engaged in the introduction of the numerous 
Reformation tracts issued by Tyndal and others in Latin and 
English. He had landed a supply at Colchester, in Midsummer, 
1530 ; a second supply at St. Catherine's, in November, 1530, 
which was seized ; a third supply he brought to London in the 
spring of 1531 ; but in the beginning of November, 1531, he was 
arrested, and before the end of the month burnt. 

Among the Reformation tracts brought into England in the 
year 1530 was a little book of Tyndal's on the question of the 
king's divorce. It was called The Practice of Prelates; whether 
the King's Grace may be Separated from his Queen because 
she was his Brother's Wife. Ascribing to Wolsey's ambition 
the sufferings of the people and the scheme for the king's sepa- 
ration from his wife, it declared the scheme to be without war- 
rant from Scripture, and one against which the most glorious 
king might be warned by one, however mean, who spoke with 
the authority of God's word, which is "the chiefest of the 
Apostles, and Pope, and Christ's Vicar, and Head of the 
Church, and the Head of the General Council." 

26. Tyndal issued this tract from Marburg, in Hesse, where, 
in the same year, 1530, on the 17th of January, he finished 



to A.D. 1533.] COVERDALE. ELFOT. 249 

printing his Translation of the Pentateuch. He had completed 
this with the help of Miles Coverdale, a Yorkshireman, then 
forty-three years old, who had been an Austin Friar at Cambridge. 
The prior of Coverdale's house was Dr. Robert Barnes, a 
good scholar, who had cultivated scholarship in those about 
him, reading Plautus, Terence, and Cicero, lecturing upon St, 
Paul's Epistles, and encouraging discussions upon Scripture. 
Dr. Barnes had become a leader in arguments of Reformation 
held by Cambridge men of different colleges at a house called 
the " White Horse." Compelled by Wolsey, Barnes recanted; 
but being a second time in extreme peril, he escaped to Ger- 
many, where he found friends in the Lutheran chiefs. While 
resident at Wittenberg he was employed in several negotiations. 
His friend Coverdale also escaped to the Continent, where he 
joined Tyndal in his work as a translator of the Scriptures. 

In January, 1532, Henry VIII.'s new favourite, Cranmer, 
was sent as king's orator to the Imperial Court. He was six 
months at Nuremberg associated with the English ambassador, 
Sir Thomas Elyot, who had it among his instructions to seek 
the arrest of Tyndal. This Thomas Elyot, a Suffolk man, 
whom Henry VIII. had knighted, was a writer of mark. In 
the preceding year, 1531, his chief book, named The Governor, 
had been published — a prose treatise on education, generous and 
wise in its tone, which opposed the custom of ill-treating school- 
boys. He also translated Plutarch's treatise upon Education, and 
other moral and thoughtful pieces from the Greek, published^ in 
1533 The Castle of Health, and in 1538 produced the first Latin 
and English Dictionary published in England. Elyot died in 
1546, having published in the preceding year a Defence or 
Apology of Good Women. We return to the time of his em- 
bassy to the Emperor, in 1532. On the 22nd of August in that 
year Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, died. Then Cranmer 
was summoned home to be his successor. King Henry had been 
privately married to Anne Boleyn when Cranmer was installed 
in his archbishopric, the last Archbishop of Canterbury who 
took the oath of obedience to the see of Rome. He took this 
oath on the 30th of March, 1533, after a protestation that it 
did not bind him to do anything contrary to the laws of God, 
the king's prerogative, or the commonwealth and statutes of 
the kingdom. Anne Boleyn's daughter Elizabeth, afterwards 
Queen Elizabeth, was born on the 7th of September in the 
same year, 1533. 



250 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 153a 

John Bourehier, Lord Berners, the translator of Frois- 
sart into some of the best prose English of his time, died in 
1532, at the age of sixty-five. He was born at Therfield, in 
Hertfordshire, was educated at Oxford, travelled abroad, dis- 
tinguished himself in the king's service when there was insur- 
rection in Devonshire, earned the favour of Henry VI L, and 
was made by Henry VIII. his Chancellor of Exchequer for life. 
He was lieutenant of Calais and the Marches when he died at 
Calais, in 1532. He translated Froissart's Chronicle (published 
by Pynson, in 1523), the " Golden Book" of Marcus Aurelius, and 
other works, wrote also a Latin sacred play, Ite in Vineam Meam, 
which was acted in church at Calais after vespers. 

For some time Tyndal was effectually shielded from designs 
against him by the English Government. His best friends 
abroad were members of the English Company of Merchant 
Adventurers. These also supplied money wherewith to keep 
the press at work. In 1535 Tyndal was living with Thomas 
Poyntz, an English merchant, at Antwerp, when he was arrested 
while his watchful host was gone to a great annual fair. After 
long detention in the Castle of Vilvorde, he was condemned by 
the Privy Council of Brussels, under a decree against heresy 
which had been issued in 1530, on the Emperor's authority. 
Tyndal was strangled and burnt at Vilvorde, on the 6th of 
October, 1536, and his last words were, " Lord, open the King 
of England's eyes." 

27. While Tyndal was in his prison at Vilvorde, the King of 
England had been active at home. Fisher, More, and Anne Boleyn 
were during that time condemned and executed. Cranmer,when 
made archbishop, had held an ecclesiastical court at Dunstable, 
and in May, 1533, pronounced sentence of divorce between King 
Henry and Queen Katherine, whose daughter Mary was then 
seventeen years old. The pope by a brief declared this divorce 
to be illegal. Katherine went to Kimbolton, and claimed still to 
be a queen. The stately coronation of Anne Boleyn followed ; 
then in September the birth of her daughter Elizabeth. Parlia- 
ment had passed, in the same year 1533, an Act against appeals 
to Rome, asserting the king's supremacy within his realm. 
Another statute declared it to be no heresy to speak against the 
pope ; but as to other points heretics had their judges at home,, 
and upon lawful conviction and refusal to abjure, or relapse 
after abjuration, they were to be " committed to lay power to 
be burned in open places, for example of other, as hath been 



TO A. D. 1536.] TYNDAL. FISHER. MORE. 1^1 

accustomed." Cranmer took part in the examination of John 
Frith, and assented to the sentence by which he was burnt in 
Smithfield, in July, 1533, together with Andrew Hewit, a tailor's 
apprentice. The learned John Fisher (ch. v. § 35, ch. vi. § 9), 
Bishop of Rochester since 1504, had used earlier than More his 
skill in controversial tracts against the Lutherans. A sermon of 
his " against the pernicious doctrine of Martin Luther" had been 
printed by Wynken de Worde, in 152 1. A sickly servant-girl, 
named Elizabeth Barton, had lived at Aldington, within twenty 
miles of Rochester, and claimed prophetic powers. They were 
used and, it may well be, sometimes prompted, against en- 
croachers on the pope's authority. She became a nun in 
Canterbury, was known as the Holy Maid of Kent, and was 
much quoted without serious hurt to herself, until she began to 
prophesy against the king's divorce. She was then joined with 
others in a charge of treasonous conspiracy, and she was ex- 
ecuted with five monks at Tyburn, in April, 1534. The Bishop 
of Rochester, who had spoken with her, was attainted for mis- 
prision of treason. He was sentenced to forfeiture of his goods, 
and imprisonment for life. Meanwhile, an Act had been passed 
"for the establishment of the king's succession," which de- 
clared the first marriage "unlawful and void;" the second 
marriage " undoubtful, true, sincere, and perfect," and its 
children heirs to the crown. To write or print an opposite 
opinion was declared to be high treason, and to say otherwise 
by word of mouth was misprision of treason. All nobles of the 
realm, temporal and spiritual, were by the same Act required, 
when called upon, to take oath that they would maintain and 
defend it. Incidentally this Act included in its preamble a 
renunciation of the pope's authority in England. John Fisher 
and Sir Thomas More were called upon to take the oath, and 
after their refusal to swear assent to the preamble of the Act, 
though they were ready to accept its substance, and swear fealty 
to the succession it established, they were committed to the 
Tower. 

An Act of the Parliament which met in November, 1534, made 
Henry VIII. absolute master of the Church of England, with 
u authority to reform and redress all errors, heresies, and abuses 
in the same." In 1535, on the 22nd of June, John Fisher, then 
eighty years old, was beheaded on Tower Hill. A fortnight 
afterwards, on the 6th of July, followed the execution of Sir 
Thomas More. In the same summer there was commenced a 



252 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1530 

visitation of the monasteries. It was followed by an Act, passed 
in March, 1536, which dissolved and confiscated to the king 
religious houses of less value than two hundred pounds. The 
members of these monasteries were to be removed into the 
larger houses. On the 19th of May, 1536, Anne Boleyn was 
executed upon Tower Hill, and on the 20th Henry was married 
to Jane Seymour. Queen Katherine had died on the preceding 
New-year's day. Her daughter Mary, who had held by her 
mother, made submission to her father in all things after the 
execution of Anne Boleyn, and was restored to favour. 

28. At this time Hugh Latimer, aged about forty-five, 
was newly-made Bishop of Worcester. He was born about 
1 49 1, and was the only son among seven children of Hugh 
Latimer, a yeoman, who rented a farm at Thurcaston, in 
Leicestershire. When fourteen years old, he went to Clare 
Hall, Cambridge, obtained a fellowship of his college while 
yet undergraduate, took his degrees of Bachelor of Arts and 
Master of Arts in 15 10 and 15 14, and at the age of about 
twenty-four was ordained priest at Lincoln. At the age of 
thirty he graduated Bachelor in Divinity, and his speech on 
the occasion was against opinions of Melancthon, for he was 
then active in argument against those who opposed the pope's 
authority. Bilney, being among those who heard the speech, 
went to Latimer's rooms afterwards and argued with him. To 
the influence of Bilney Latimer in later years ascribed his great 
change of opinion. This change soon caused him to be summoned 
before Wolsey on a charge of heresy ; but he was then content 
to subscribe such articles as were proposed to him. Latimer's 
opposition to the pope, which involved support of the king's 
supremacy, was made known to Henry VIII. by his physician, 
Dr. Butts, and in March, 1530, Latimer was called to preach 
before the king at Windsor. Henry then made Latimer his 
chaplain; and, not offended by his letter written in December, 
" for restoring again the liberty of reading the Holy Scriptures," 
in the following year, 1531, he gave Latimer, at the suggestion 
of Dr. Butts, the rectory of West Kington, in Wiltshire. The 
new rector's preaching was soon declared to be heretical ; he 
was summoned before Stokesley, Bishop of London, and after- 
wards before Convocation. He was excommunicated and 
imprisoned, but made his submission, and by special request 
of the king went home absolved. A year afterwards, Cranmer 
became archbishop, and was Latimer's friend. In 1534? 



TOA.li. 1537.] LATIMER. COVERDALE. 253 

Latimer preached before Henry VIII. on Wednesdays in Lent ; 
and in the autumn of 1535, when, by Act of Parliament, an 
Italian, who was non-resident, had been deprived of the 
bishopric of Worcester, Hugh Latimer was elected in his 
place. 

29. At this time Miles Coverdale (§ 26) was printing 
at Zurich a complete translation of the Bible into English. At 
the close of 1534 the English clergy had carried in Convocation 
against a strong party headed by Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of 
Winchester, a petition to the king for a translation of the Scrip- 
tures into English. Thomas Cromwell, the fuller's son, who had 
once been clerk in the factory of English merchants at Antwerp, 
and is said in his earlier days to have learnt by heart Erasmus's 
translation of the New Testament during a journey to and from 
Rome, had passed from Wolsey's service into that of King Henry. 
He became, in 1534, Secretary of State, and actively supporting 
the vote of Convocation, was in search of an English Bible which 
might go among the people and escape the charge of containing 
heresies. Coverdale's translation was submitted to the English 
bishops, who said that it had many faults. "But," said the king, 
"are there any heresies maintained thereby ?" And when they 
said that they had found none, he answered, " Then, in God's 
name, let it go among the people." The royal licence was ob- 
tained, but the introduction of Coverdale's translation, printed in 
1535, was delayed by the necessity of striking out the name of 
the king's "most dearest, just wife, Anne," which stood with his 
own in the dedication. The first printed copies of the whole 
Bible were admitted into England in 1536, the year of the burn- 
ing of Tyndal, the year also in which Tyndal's New Testament 
was first printed in England. Coverdale's translation was de- 
scribed on the title-page as having been made from the German 
and Latin — " faithfully and truly translated out of Douche and 
Latin into English." He said that he had five several transla- 
tions by him, and followed his interpreters. A new edition,, 
revised and corrected, appeared in 1537, printed in England. 
In July of the same year, 1537, there was published abroad a 
complete Bible in folio, professing to be " truly and purely trans- 
lated into English by Thomas Matthew." This was formed out 
of the translations of Tyndal and Coverdale, under the superin- 
tendence of John Rogers, who assumed the name of Matthew. 
He was the son of a John Rogers, of Deritend, in Birmingham, 
was born there about 1509, educated at Pembroke Hall, took his 



254 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1537 

B.A. in 1526, and afterwards became chaplain to the English 
merchants at Antwerp, where Tyndal and Coverdale found in 
him a friend and ally. His Bible, known as Matthew's Bible, 
included all that had been done by Tyndal, namely his Penta- 
teuch followed by other translations of his down to the end of 
the second book of Chronicles, and his New Testament. The 
other canonical books Rogers gave in a strict revision of Cover- 
dale's translation, and the Apocrypha he gave in a translation of 
his own. Having issued his Bible, Rogers married in the same 
year, and went to Wittenberg, where he was minister of a con- 
gregation during the rest of the reign of Henry VIII. In 1538 
Thomas Cromwell had become Lord Cromwell of Oakham, Lord 
Privy Seal, and the king's vicegerent in all causes touching eccle- 
siastical jurisdiction and the godly reformation of heresies and 
abuses in the Church. By virtue of this office he sat in Convo- 
cation above the archbishops. Since Henry agreed that diffusion 
of an English Bible was good policy against the pope, Cromwell, 
in 1538, was planning a re-publication at Paris of Tyndal's trans- 
lation in a form that would adapt it for free use. Miles Cover- 
dale had looked to Thomas Cromwell as his friend and patron 
even when Cromwell was Wolsey's retainer. In February and 
March, 1538, he was in Berkshire, officially examining church 
service books to see that the pope's name had been duly erased 
from their pages. He was then sent by Cromwell to Paris, where 
he was to superintend the printing of the Bible known as Crom- 
well's, and there he was in some peril from the Inquisition ; the 
printing begun at Paris was therefore finished in London. 
Cromwell also employed Richard Taverner, an Oxford Re- 
former who was then attached to the court, on a careful revision 
of Matthew's Bible. Taverner 3 s Bible was published in folio in 

1539, with a dedication to the king; and in April of the same 
year, 1539, appeared Coverdale's revision of Tyndal's work and 
his own, in the folio known as Cromwell's {or the Great) Bible. 
Cromwell then was Lord Great Chamberlain, and he, in the fol- 
lowing year, 1540, was made Earl of Essex, when there appeared 
the most authoritative of the versions made in Henry VIII.'s 
reign. It was a revision of Tyndal, planned by Cranmer as 
Archbishop of Canterbury, and made by direct collation with 
the Hebrew and Greek texts. It was first published in April, 

1540, with a prologue by Cranmer, and is known as Cranmer 3 s 
Bible. This became, and remained till 1568, the translation 
appointed to be read in churches. Its version of the Psalms is 



to a.d. 1540.] BIBLE TRANSLATIONS. LELAND. 255 

retained to this day by the Church of England in its Book of 
Common Prayer. 

But heresy, especially that of the Sacramentarians, who 
denied real presence in the Eucharist, was still being attacked 
with fire and fagot. John Nicholson, known as Lambert, was 
publicly argued with by the king himself and bishops in West- 
minster Hall, silenced, and burnt. Cromwell read the sentence. 
An Observant Friar, named Forest, was burnt alive in an iron 
cage for denial of the king's ecclesiastical supremacy, after Hugh 
Latimer, Bishop of Worcester (§ 28), had argued with him in 
vain. The final Act for the Dissolution of Abbeys was passed and 
enforced in the same year, 1539, in which Cromwell's Bible ap- 
peared, and in which also appeared "An Act Abolishing Diversity 
of Opinions." This law was dictated in person by the king to a 
"tractable Parliament." It became known as the "Act of the Six 
Articles," or " Whip with the Six Strings." It declared for tran- 
substantiation, auricular confession, vows of chastity, and private 
masses, against communion in both kinds, and against marriage 
of priests. To the king's opinion upon these six points English- 
men were to conform their teaching upon pain of death. Latimer, 
who could not so teach, resigned his bishopric of Worcester, and 
was placed in custody of Dr. Sampson, Bishop of Chichester. 
But in the next year, 1540, Dr. Sampson became himself a 
prisoner. 

The year 1540 was the last year of the life of Thomas Crom- 
well. Jane Seymour, married in 1536, had died in 1537, soon 
after giving birth to her son Edward. Henry's next marriage 
was chiefly forwarded by his friend Thomas Cromwell. It was 
with Anne of Cleves, whom he found less fascinating in person 
and character than in her portrait by Holbein. Henry married 
her in 1540, divorced her in a few months, extended to Thomas 
Cromwell his disgust at the new wife, and, on a charge of trea- 
son and heresy, sent him to execution in July of the same year. 

30. During this time John Leland, the King's Antiquary, 
was travelling about England and gathering such information as 
is left to us in his Itinerary. Leland was born in London about 
1506. He was one of the boys under William Lily (§ 11) 
at St. Paul's School. Thence he proceeded to Christ's College, 
Cambridge. He took his degree of B.A. early in 1522, went then 
to Oxford, thence to the University of Paris. He became chap- 
lain and librarian to Henry VIII., who gave him, in June, 1530, 
the rectory of Poppeling, in the Marches of Calais. About 1533 



256 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1490- 

he obtained the title of King's Antiquary; three years later he 
had special licence to keep a curate at Poppeling, and work in 
England. Then he was for six years, by royal commission, tra- 
velling over England, taking a particular account of the cities, 
towns, and villages of each county ; describing also the situation, 
soil, course of the rivers, and number of miles from place to place. 
He set down the several castles, religious houses, and other 
public and private buildings, with account of the families of best 
note resident therein. He recorded windows and monuments of 
antiquity belonging to the several- cathedrals, monasteries, &c. 
He inspected also their libraries, took exact catalogues of books, 
even made transcripts of matter useful to his purpose of setting- 
forth a trustworthy account of the history and antiquities of the 
kingdom. Leland, although a Church reformer, lamented the 
havoc made of valuable libraries at the dissolution of the monas- 
teries, and he did what he could to bring into safe keeping the 
treasures of literature that he found. Foreign scholars were 
eager in search. Leland did what he could for England, and 
was thus employed in 1540, for that was the fourth of his six 
years of exploration. 

31. We look northward again. Before the voice of Dunbar 
was silent, Lindsay took up the strain and was free Scotland, 
canny, humorous, sincere, with a direct earnestness that brings 
out notes of the deeper poetry of life ; the voice for Scotland of 
that spirit of reformation which had grown up, as we have seen, 
among true men of all theological creeds during the fifteenth 
century, and had been strengthened by all influences of the time. 
Whatever makes a man most man brings out the voice that 
reaches far beyond the present. The foundations of Scottish 
literature were laid by our Edward I., when he forced on the 
Scotch their war of independence, and so gave to their country- 
men a Wallace and a Bruce (ch. iii. § 25 ; ch. iv. § 34); their 
countrymen and ours, the Lowland Scots, being, in fact, most 
English of the English. Their country, an old place of refuge for 
the patriotic fugitives from Norman rule, was little oppressed with 
castles of early Norman build. The Norman castles of which 
ruins are now to be found in Scotland show their later date 
almost invariably by the more ornamented style of Edward I. 

David Lindsay, born about 1490, was the eldest of five 
sons. His father, also a David, was son to the second son of a 
Lord Lindsay of Byres, and inherited a smaller estate in Had- 
dingtonshire, which he left when he bought house and land 



toa.d. 1513.] DAVID LINDSAY. 257 

known as the Mount, upon Mount Hill, five or six miles to the 
north-west of Cupar, county town of Fife. It was after the mar- 
riage of the Thistle and the Rose (§ 1) that David Lindsay began 
his court life. Prosperous Scotland was then busy in her dock- 
yards ; and King James IV. achieved the construction of what 
passed as a monster vessel, the Great Michael, 240 feet long, its 
hull cannon-proof because ten feet thick and of solid oak. In 1 509, 
Henry VII. died, and the new King of England promised to give 
more trouble to his neighbour. Young David Lindsay was then 
leaving college. He had been sent to school in Cupar, and had 
seen sometimes the Mysteries and Moralities there acted upon 
ground near the Castle Hill, which is still called the Play Field. 
In 1505, the year of the birth of John Knox, Lindsay proceeded 
to the University of St. Andrew's, and while he was a student 
there, about seventeen years old, the death of his father gave 
him the Mount for inheritance. He stayed another two years 
at St. Andrew's, and was altogether four years in the University, 
under the rectorship of the Reverend David Spens. There was 
in his time only one college at St. Andrew's, that of St. Salvador. 
St. Leonard's was founded about three years after Lindsay left. 
After study of books came, perhaps, study of men by travel ; but 
Lindsay was soon in service at the Scottish court. When, on 
the 1 2th of April, 1512, the prince who became James V. was 
born, on the same day David Lindsay, aged about twenty-two, 
was one of those appointed to attend upon him. In the following 
year Henry VIII. was going to war with France, and France 
knew how to procure again the help of her old Scottish ally. 
For love of freedom, because the kings of England sought to 
subdue Scotland, Scotland had become the natural ally of France. 
Every venture made by England in war of ignoble ambition 
against France, brought the Scots over the border to enjoy the 
opportunity of England's weakness, and create diversion on 
behalf of their ally. Until Henry VII.'s time the policy of our 
kings maintained Scotland in a constant league with France, 
so close that French words, clipped and nationalised, became 
familiar on Scottish lips ; and even the national " great chieftain 
of the pudding race" — notwithstanding all scornful comparison of 
it with French ragouts — the haggis, was given to Scotland by the 
French allies. Its name is the French hachis. Folio wing the 
old usage, in 15 13, King James IV. resolved, in aid of France, 
to invade England. Having come, on his way, to Linlithgow, 
with Lindsay in attendance on him, he was there sadly praying 

R 



258 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d 15x3 

for success in his adventure, when a man in a blue gown, bare- 
headed, and apparently fifty years old, came rapidly forward 
among the lords to the desk where the king was at his prayers. 
There, without homage or salutation, he leaned on the desk and 
said, " Sir king, my mother has sent me to thee, desiring thee 
not to go where thou art purposed, which if thou do thou shalt 
not fare well in thy journey, nor none that is with thee. Further, 
she forbade thee to mell nor use the counsel of women, which if 
thou do thou wilt be confounded and brought to shame." Even- 
song was then near done ; the king paused as if to answer, but in 
the meantime, before the king's eyes and in the presence of all, 
this man vanished away and could be no more seen. "I heard," 
says Lindsay of Pitscotie, who tells the tale, a tale which Buchanan 
records upon Sir David Lindsay's personal testimony ; " I heard 
Sir David Lindsay, lion herald, and John Inglis, the marshal, 
who were at that time young men and special servants to the 
king's grace, thought to have taken this man but they could not, 
that they might have speired further tidings at him, but they 
could not touch him." In August, 15 13, King James, at the head 
of an army, entered England ; on the 9th of September he was 
one of the ten thousand dead Scots upon whom the night fell 
over Flodden Field. 

Lindsay's young prince, aged one, became King James V. — 
Stuart the seventh. The child's mother, Henry VIII. 's sister, aged 
but twenty-four, was made Regent and, being a Tudor, lost no 
time in marrying again. She gave birth to a posthumous child 
in the following April ; and four months after that, since she might 
not leave Scotland, became wife to the handsome young Archi- 
bald, Earl of Angus, grandson to the Earl of Angus known as 
" Bell the Cat," and nephew to Gavin Douglas, the poet. At a 
later date Lindsay reminds King James of state service rendered 
to him at the beginning of his reign : 

" How as ane chapman beris his pack 
I bure thy grace upon my back, 
And sumtymes stridlingis on my nek, 
Dansand with money bend and bek ; 
The first sillabis that thou did mute p 
Was ' Pa— Da— Lyn.' Upon the lute 
Then playit I twenty springis perqueir {par caeur) 
Quhilk was great plesour for to heir 
Fra play thou leit me never rest, 
But ' Gynkertoun' thou luffit ay best; 
And ay, quhen thow come fra the scuel 
Then I behaffit to play the fule." 



to a. d. i 5 22.] GAVIN DOUGLAS. 259 

32. Gavin Douglas (§ 4), rector of Hawick, who had 
become provost of the church of St. Giles in Edinburgh, 
finished in July, 1 513, about two months before the disaster at 
Flodden, a complete Translation of the JEneid into heroic 
couplet. This is our earliest translation of the "^Eneid," or of 
any Latin classic, into verse. It gave all the twelve books of 
Virgil, and joined to them a version of the supplementary thir- 
teenth book added by Maphaeus Vegius, a pious and clever 
author, native of Lodi, who died a canon of St. Peter's at 
Rome, in 1458. Gavin Douglas showed himself a poet with 
fresh energy, not only in his translation, which has the strength 
of simplicity, but also in original prologues that introduce the 
several books. He was ready also, even out of season, to mind 
his office as a clergyman, as when he translated the sybil into a 
nun who advised ^Eneas, the Trojan baron, to persevere in 
counting his beads. Two months after this work was finished, 
the poet lost his two elder brothers at Flodden ; his father died 
within twelve months afterwards of grief at their lo-s. The title 
and estates descended to the old earl's grandson, Gavin Douglas's 
nephew, that Archibald whom the widowed queen married within 
the year of her mourning. The Archbishop of St. Andrew's (a 
natural son of the late king's) also fell at Flodden, and Queen 
Margaret nominated Gavin Douglas to the primacy. He took 
possession of the archbishop's palace, and was besieged in it by 
one of the other claimants ; but a third claimant obtained the 
pope's grant of the see, and Douglas yielded. The remaining 
disputants opposed armed followings to one another in the 
cathedral, but came to a compromise. In 1515 the bishopric of 
Dunkeld became vacant, and queen and pope both nominated 
Gavin Douglas to the see ; but he was accused of procuring bulls 
from Rome, and was made to feel the authority of his old rival 
at St. Andrew's, who imprisoned him for about a year. He was 
released when the Duke of Albany became regent ; and he got 
his bishopric by David Beaton's mediation, although Andrew 
Steward did hold out against him, and fire on him from palace 
and cathedral. The new bishop carried his cathedral, like a fort, 
by force of arms, but without serious bloodshed. In 1521 the 
strife of parties compelled Gavin Douglas to take refuge in 
England. He was well received, and pensioned at the court of 
Henry VIII. In February, 1522, he was in Scotland declared a 
traitor. The revenues of his see were sequestrated, and the pope 
was appealed to lest by chance there might be given to Douglas 

R 2 



200 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 15 i S 

the Archbishopric of St. Andrew's, then again vacant. James 
Beaton (uncle to David) was made Archbishop of St. Andrew 1 sj 
and in the same year, 1522, Gavin Douglas died in London of 
the plague. 

33. William Dunbar, of whose last years nothing is known, 
was then living. He died, an old man, before 1530. 

John Mair (Latinised Major) taught both Knox and 
Buchanan. He was a scholastic theologian, born near North 
Berwick, in 1469, who went early in his life to Paris, taught 
there philosophy and theology ; became in 1506 a doctor of the 
Sorbonne ; became in 15 19 Professor of Divinity at St. Andrew's; 
afterwards went again to Paris, but returned to St. Andrew's, 
and there spent the last twenty years of his life. His writings 
were in Latin, theological and moral treatises, and a History of 
Great Britain, in six books, which joined the chronicles of Eng- 
land and Scotland, and was published at Paris in 1521, the year 
in which Luther appeared at the Diet of Worms. This book, by 
a Scottish Doctor of the Sorbonne, was not sparing in condem- 
nation of the corruptions of the clergy and the usurpations of 
the court of Rome. For each period Mair gave first the Eng- 
lish history and then the Scottish. For its free speech, Mair's 
history was placed by the orthodox abroad below its author's 
scholastic writings. Mair died in 1550. 

34. The successor to Dunbar and Douglas was David 
Lindsay, whose work as a poet is inseparably associated with 
the social history of Scotland in his time. 

In 151 5, Francis I. came to the throne of France, ratified 
peace with England (his predecessor, Charles VIII., had 
married a sister of Henry VIII); and, with little consultation, in- 
cluded Scotland in the treaty, on condition of her good behaviour. 
This, after Flodden, piqued the Scots ; but they accepted the 
apologies of France. In May, 15 15, the Duke of Albany, son 
to a younger brother of Jamas III., came, with a fleet of escort 
and a small court of gay French companions, to be regent of Scot- 
land. He came from a life of luxury, had been Lord High Admiral 
of France, and had been bred to French despotic ideas of the 
relation between ruler and people. The Scot throve often in 
France ; but the Frenchman could not so well make himself at 
home in Scotland. The new regency proposed to take the royal 
children from the queen. The queen showed them defiantly to 
the commissioners frorn behind the portcullis of Edinburgh 
Castle, and took them to Stirling. But a besieging force obliged 



toa.d. i 5 22.] JOHN MAIR. ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND. 26l 

her to give up the king and his infant brother Alexander to 
the custody of Parliament. In the next year, 15 16, feud of 
Douglases or Anguses against Hamiltons, and other contests, 
filled the land with slaughter. The regent tried main force ; 
could not manage the people in that way; sent to France for 
men, and thereby almost raised an insurrection. Angus was 
overmastered and dispatched to France, where he was kept 
close. The queen escaped to England, where she bore a daugh- 
ter. Her husband, escaping from France, joined her, and 
became for Henry VIII. an instrument wherewith to vex the 
Scots. Upon plea of negotiation necessary for protectios 
against England, the Duke of Albany returned to France when 
he had been little more than a year in Scotland. The Estates 
gave him but four months' leave of absence. He left French- 
men in charge of Dumbarton, Dunbar, and Inchgarvie, and a 
trusted French favourite, La Bastie, acting as warden of the 
marches. There La Bastie was killed next year. The Scots made 
great parade of a search for the murderers, without meaning to 
catch them. Yet the alliance with France had just been 
renewed. The regent overstayed his time, and was reminded of 
the fact. He was wanted at home. The party of Angus, that 
is to say, the Douglases, battled again for predominance, and, 
with the help of fighting borderers, almost raised a civil war. 
During these days of confusion, James V. was a child, and 
David Lindsay faithful in attendance on him. 

In April, 1520, Arran and many of the western nobility met 
at Edinburgh, in the house of Bishop James (not David) Beaton, 
to plan the seizure of the Earl of Angus. Angus, informed of 
this, asked his uncle, Gavin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, to 
calm the resentment of his enemies. The bishop met James 
Beaton in the church of the Black Friars, and urged him to 
be peacemaker. Beaton protested that he knew of no design 
to break the peace, and striking his breast with too much 
animation, to enforce his denial on his conscience, the blow rang 
on a coat of mail under the sacred vestments. " My lord," said 
Gavin Douglas, " I perceive your conscience is not good; I hear 
it clattering." The word " clattering " had a double sense, for in 
Scottish dialect it meant also "telling tales." There was presently 
a battle in the street, after which seventy-two lay dead; and 
Bishop James Beaton, who had taken refuge behind the altar, 
owed his life to the intervention of Douglas. Angus then held 
Edinburgh by an armed force. But his Tudor wife had turned 



262 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1521 

against him, was tired of him, and laboured to bring Albany 
back. In November, 1521, after more than five years' absence, 
Albany returned. The orders of the Estates had become 
threatening, for they had declared that if he was not in Scotland 
by Midsummer, Scotland would declare him infamous, deprive 
him of office, break with France, make peace with England ; 
and even join Henry VIII. against France. When Albany 
came back, the queen's warm welcome was imputed to dishonest 
motives. He was essentially a Frenchman, disliked by the 
people. The death of the infant prince, Alexander, was ascribed 
to him. Some asked, was the king safe? Would Albany 
kill him to rule in his place, or carry him to France and make 
another Frenchman of him ? Scotland had no pleasure in the 
unnatural alliance forced upon her by the English crown ; 
dislike for it was becoming active. But then Henry VIII. 
threatened the Scots, and commanded them to turn out Albany ; 
so they were driven to stand by him. Henry had broken with 
France ; he had joined Spain and the pope. Scotland was not 
to be driven ; and thus King Henry's threat checked the rise 
of an English party. In the following year. 1522, an army of 
80,000, raised in Scotland, moved towards the border, causing 
fear in England. But it did nothing. The insulting threat was 
withdrawn, and the Scottish leaders were now for a policy of 
strong defence, not of invasion. Albany went, by his own 
desire, to France ; and thither also went his rival Angus. 
Still there was border war v.ith England. In September, 
1523, Albany returned from France with 3,000 footmen and 
500 men-at-arms in 50 vessels. He gathered much of the dis- 
banded army. It was ready to serve Scotland by acting as a 
check on England's border war, but it would not again play 
into the hands of France by invading England. Nothing was 
done, and Albany lost credit still. In May of the next year, 1524, 
Albany and nearly all the Frenchmen went to France for good, 
leaving Scotland headless and distracted. Wolsey then wrote to 
the queen that Henry VIII. meant only love to his nephew. The 
desire was to win Scotland from France. There was even talk of 
an eventual union of crowns, by marriage of James V. with the 
Princess Mary of England. Queen Margaret, the Rose of 
Dunbar's poem, having shifted her love, in hate of Angus 
denounced war on him if he should enter Scotland. 

James V. was then in his thirteenth year, and it seemed that 
the best way to check the French party and keep cut Albany, 



to a.d. 1526.] HECTOR BOECE. JOHN BELLENDEN. 263 

was " the erection " of the boy as king by the Estates. The 
king himself rebelled at confinement. A gentleman who 
opposed him he struck through the arm with his dagger ; 
and he raised his dagger to a porter who restrained his 
going forth. Then it was settled that the Earl of Cassilis 
and three others should ride with the king, and that he 
might ride with them where he would, so that they brought 
him at night into Stirling Castle ; but they never ventured out 
more than a mile from Stirling. A letter of liberal promise 
was conveyed from Henry VIII. to his nephew, and suddenly, 
one day in August, 1524, the king was brought from Stirling 
to Edinburgh, where he received sceptre, crown, and sword 
of honour in the old Tolbooth. Many leaders in the Estates 
signed a bond to stand by " the erection," and this was the 
Revolution of 1524. Wolsey and Henry VIII. highly 
approved of the whole proceeding. 

The young king was flattered into love of his uncle, and 
had no goodwill to France. Meanwhile emissaries of France 
were active. In the following year, 1525, the capture of Francis 
I., at Pavia, excited generous sympathy of Scotland for the old 
ally. The English emissaries were unpopular, and were 
abused by women in the street. In 1526 the Earl of Angus 
came to Scotland, humbling himself to his queen. The boy 
king, told that he might choose his own guardians, took Angus 
for one of three. Each was to be guardian for three months 
at a time. Angus, at the end of his first three months, would 
not give up his office, but kept the king in merciless restraint. 
Forcible attempts were made in vain for his release. Angus 
said, " If his enemies got hold of him by one side, his friends 
would keep him by the other, so that he should be torn in 
twain." 

35. It was during this time that Hector Boece (Boyce), 
Professor of the College of Montacute, published at Paris, in 
1526, his Latin History of the Scots, in nineteen books. 
Boyce was born at Dundee about 1465, educated at Aberdeen 
and Paris, where he taught philosophy, and afterwards was 
Principal of King's College, Aberdeen. Erasmus corresponded 
with him, and the King of Scotland pensioned him. He died 
about 1536, in which year a free prose translation of Boece's 
History by John Bellenden, as the Hy story and Chroniklis 
of Scotland, was printed at Edinburgh. This forms one of the 
most important pieces of old Scottish prose. Boece's History, 



264 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1528. 

which started from mythical times, was rich in entertaining 
fable told with zest ; two mysterious authorities, Veremund and 
Campbell, doing for its author the same service done for 
Geoffrey of Monmouth by his Breton books (ch. iii. § 8). Boece, 
indeed, may have received his inspiration from an edition of 
Geoffrey of Monmouth, which had been published at Paris in 
1 5 17. John Bellenden, the translator of Boece, matriculated as 
a student of St. Andrew's in 1508. He was liberally educated, 
and obtained much credit as a poet at the Scottish court. Like 
Lindsay, he was in James's service from the time of the 
king's infancy. His translation of Boece was made at request 
of the king, for whom also he began a translation of Livy, of 
which he only completed the first five books. Bellenden, when 
he published his translation of Boece, was a doctor in the 
Church, Archdeacon of Moray, and Canon of Ross ; but he 
added to his translation an earnest letter to James V. on the 
miseries of wicked princes and the duty of a king. Bellenden's 
chief poem was a Prohe?ne of the Cosmographe, written for the 
king's instruction. He died at Rome, in 1550, an earnest honest 
man, and stout opponent of the Reformation. 

36. In May, 1528, King James escaped to Stirling ; he was 
then seventeen years old, and thenceforth his own master. 
When he ceased to hold the person of the king, Angus was 
ruined. In the same year Queen Margaret succeeded in 
obtaining her divorce from him, and married the new man of 
her choice, young Harry Stewart, son of Lord Evandale. King 
James applied himself vindictively to the punishment of 
Angus. His estates were forfeited, and he was driven to 
England, where Henry VIII. received him kindly, but His 
Majesty had then no time for Scotch affairs. 

While Angus and the English party held possession of the 
king, he had been separated from the patriotic David. Lindsay 
(§ 31), although Lindsay's payment as one of the king's personal 
attendants was not stopped. When King James broke bounds 
and became independent, Lindsay again was by his side, and 
thenceforth stood by him always as a faithful counsellor. He 
sought incessantly to use his genius as a poet and his influence 
as a friend, for the benefit alike of James V. and of Scotland. 
Never had king a poet friend who preached to him more inde- 
fatigably. First, there was Lindsay's Dream, the first of his 
longer works, written apparently in 1528, the first year of the 
king's independent rule. It contains 1,134 lines, and is through- 



a.d. 1528.] LINDSAY'S DREAM. 265 

out in Chaucer's stanza. In a prefatory epistle to the king, he 
reminded his master how 

" Quhen thou wes young, I bure ye in myne arm, 
Full tenderlie, tyll thou begouth to gang, 
And in thy bed oft happit thee full warme ; " 

how he had been his playfellow in childhood, and had told him 
in his youth " of antique stories and deeds martial ;" but now, 
he said, with the support of the King of Glory, he would tell a 
story altogether new. He told, in a prologue of the usual 
fashion, how, after he had lain sleepless in bed, he rose and 
went out, on a January morning, to the seashore, there climbed 
into a little cave high in a rock, and sat with pen and paper, 
meaning rhyme. But instead of rhyming, he wrapped himself 
well up, and after a wakeful night, was lulled to sleep by the 
sound of the waves, which he had been comparing to this false 
world's instability. " Heir endis the proloug, and folio wis the 
dreme." A fair lady, Dame Remembrance, came into Lindsay's 
Dream, and took him with her first to hell, where they saw popes, 
emperors, kings, conquerors, cardinals, archbishops, " proud and 
perverse prelates out of number," with many other churchmen. 
They suffered, Remembrance said, for covetousness, lust, and 
ambition; also because they had not taught the ignorant, "pro- 
voking them to penance by preaching;" and because they had 
not made equal distribution of the patrimony and rent of holy 
kirk, but misspent temporally all that they should have divided 
into three parts, one for the maintainance of the Church, one for 
themselves, one for the poor. There also were captive kings 
and nobles who suffered for their pride or cruelty, or who had 
given up eternal bliss for the delights of earth. From hell, 
Remembrance took the poet up, through earth, water, and the 
upper air, beyond the moon and sun and planets, to the firma- 
ment "fixit full of sterries brycht," and to the ninth sphere, 
prime mover of the rest ; although the planets have also a 
motion in their proper spheres from west to east, some swift, 
some slow, 

" Quhose motioun causes contynewallie, 
Rycht melodious harmonie and sound, 
And all throw mouying of those planetes round." 

On they went, through the crystalline heaven, to the empyrean, 
where they saw the happiness of heaven. Returning thence 
against his will, the poet questioned his companion about the 
earth ; was told its shape, size, divisions, and subdivisions ; 



266 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1528 

then he asked about Paradise, and passed, with a significant 
transition, from Paradise to Scotland. Scotland, at his request, 
was shown to him by Dame Remembrance, and when he 
saw that it was a fair country, he says, " I did propone ane 
lytill questioun : 

" ' Quhat is the cause our bounded ben so bair ?' 
Quod I ; 'or quhate does mufe our miserie ; 
Or quareof does proceed our pourtie ? ' " 

Scotland had natural wealth, and a people both ingenious and 
strong to endure. Lindsay asked, therefore, to be told " the prin- 
cipal cause wherefore we are so poor." The answer to this 
question brought him to the purpose of his poem, as a warning 
to James V., now master of his realm. Remembrance said, 
"The fault is not— I dare well take on hand— nother in to the 
peple nor the land. The want is of justice, policy, and peace." 
"Why then," asked Lindsay, "do we want justice and policy 
more than they are wanted by France, Italy, or England ?" 
" Quod sche : ' 1 fynd the fait in to the heid. For they in whom 
does lie our whole relief, I find them root and ground of all our 
grief.'" " The poverty of the nation comes," said Remem- 
brance, " from the negligence and insolence of infatuate 
chiefs, ' 

" Hauand sraal' ee unto the common Weill, 
Bot to thare singulare proffect euerilk deill." 

As Lindsay and his guide thus talked, there came a lean and 
ragged man, with scrip on hip and pikestaff in his hand, as one 
who is leaving home. This was the well-being of Scotland, 
John the Common Weal. Few cared for him, he said in Scot- 
land ; the spiritual estate never paid heed to his complaint, and 
among the laity there was nought else but each man for him- 
self; so John the Common Weal must leave the land. " But when 
will you come back again ? " asked Lindsay. 

" ' That questionn, it sail be sone desydit/ 

Quod he : ' there sail na Scot have confortying 

Off me, tyll that I see the countre gydit 

Be wysedome of ane gude auli prudent kyng, 
Quhilk sail delytehim maist, above all thyng, 

To put justice tyll executioun, 

And on string traitouris mak puneisioun. 
Als yit to the I say ane uther thyng : 

I se, rycht weill, that prouerbe is full trew : 
Wo to the realme that hes ouer young anekyng."* 

This text from Ecclesiastes x. 16, "Woe to thee, O land, when 
thy king is a child," was often quoted by our English writers in 



toa.d. i 5 2 9 .] LINDSAY'S COMPLAINT. 1&] 

the earlier part of the reign of Richard II. The course of Scot- 
tish history now brought it home to Lindsay, and he did not 
refrain from uttering it, although it was to a young king of seven- 
teen or eighteen that he told the dream of which this was the 
pith. Remembrance seemed to the poet to have brought him 
back to the cave in which he slept, and there, when a pissing 
ship seemed to discharge all its cannon, he awoke and besought 
God to send grace to the king to rule his realm in unity and 
peace. " Heir endes the dreme and begynnis the exhortatioun 
to the kynge's grace." " Sir," it begins, " since God of His pre-' 
ordinance hath granted thee to have the governance of His 
people and create thee a king, fail not to print in thy remem- 
brance that He will not excuse thine ignorance if thou be reckless 
in thy governing . . . and since that thou must reap as thou hast 
sown, have all thy hope in God, thy Creator, and ask Him grace 
that thou maybe His own." With Lindsay for unwearied coun- 
sellor, James V. could not plead that he was uninformed as to 
his duties. This poem ended in reminder of what paths were to 
be followed, and what shunned, with a warning of the evil end 
of those who had not condescended to good counsel. " And, 
finally, remember thou mon dee . . . Ouhar have they gone, 
thir papis and empriouris?" For some of them that question 
had been answered in the beginning of the poem. The visions 
of hell and heaven were no purposeless opening to Lindsay's 
Dream of a king's duty to John the Common Weal. 

Lindsay's next poem was The Complaint, also addressed to 
the king, and written, probably in 1529, the year of Skelton's 
death, soon after James escaped from thraldom. It is in 
510 lines of octosyllabic rhyme, and professed to complain 
that, now the king was his own master, greedy men sought 
and had gifts from him, while his old friend "Da Lyn" was 
overlooked. This may have been seriously meant, and the 
"Complaint" may be associated with the fact that in 1530, 
Lindsay, then about forty years old, was knighted, and 
made Lion King of Arms, with lands and produce of lands 
assigned to secure payment of salary. But in his poem named 
the " Complaint, 1 ' Lindsay chiefly recalled with strong censure the 
history of the " erection " of the young king at the age of twelve 
by new rulers, " for commoun weill makand no cair ; " and what 
Lindsay regarded as the wilful endeavour of those who then 
possessed him to corrupt and cheat him by base flatteries and 
allurements to a self-indulgence that would make him weakly 



268 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1529 

subject to their will. The prelates who then ruled should have 
shamed to take the name of spiritual priests : 

" For Esyas in to his wark 
Calles thame lyke doggis that can nocht bark, 
That callit ar preistis, and can nocht preche, 
Nor Christis law to the people teche. 
Geve for to preche bene thare professioun, 
Quhy sulde thay mell with court or sessioun, 
Except it war in spirituall thyngis." 

There was discord among great lords, till suddenly the king 
escaped : 

" Then rais ane reik, or ever I wyste, 
The quhilk gart all thare bandes bryste : 
Than thay allone quhilk had the gyding, 
Thay could nocht keip thare feit frome slyding ; 
Bot of thare lyffes thay had sic dreid, 
That thay war faine tyll trott over Tweid." 

John Upland was blithe, said Lindsay, to see order restored ; but 
it had yet to be restored in the spiritualty. The king was 
admonished, therefore, to have an eye to the clergy, and make 
their lives better conform to their vocation, make them preach 
earnestly, and leave their vain traditions, which deceived the 
simple sheep for whom Christ shed his blood — 

" As superstitious pylgramagis 
Prayand to gravin ymagis, 
Expres againis the Lordis command." 

Lindsay added a warning to the king of the fate of Jeroboam, and 
many more, princes of Israel, who assented to idolatry. Sir David 
Lindsay has been rightly called the poet of the Scottish Refor- 
mation ; but the reformation sought by him in the most active 
years of his life was far more social than doctrinal. He had 
bitter cause to direct the king's attention to the pride of prelates 
who, in the year of the king's escape from the hands of Angus, 
fcrst lighted a martyr fire in Scotland. It was rare in Scotland 
to hear any preaching, except from the Black and Grey Friars; 
George Crichton, who succeeded the scholar and poet, Gavin 
Douglas, as Bishop of Dunkeld, once thanked God that he knew 
neither the Old Testament nor the New, but only his breviary 
and his pontifical. For this he passed into a proverb with the 
people, who would say, " Ye are like the Bishop of Dunkeld, that 
knew neither the new law nor the old." But when Tyndal's New 
Testament was ready, traders from Leith, Dundee, and Montrose 
smuggled copies of it into Scotland; Lutheran opinions spread; 



toa.d. iS3°-] THE TESTAMENT OF THE PAPINGO. 2bg 

and on the 29th of February, 1528, young Patrick Hamilton, not 
twenty-five years old, born of a good Scottish house, an abbot and 
a scholar, who had learnt to think in Paris and in Germany, was 
burnt for his religion at St. Andrew's. In the midst of the flames 
he was called upon by some spectator, if he still held to his faith 
to give a last sign of his constancy. At once he raised three 
fingers of his half-burnt hand, and held them raised until he died. 
Each fagot kindled a new fire of zeal. " Gif ye burn more," said 
a friend to one of the bishops, " let them be burnt in the cellars, 
for the reik of Mr. Patrick Hamilton has infected as many as it did 
blow upon." Calvin was then only nineteen years old, John Knox 
but- three-and-twenty. Lindsay's " Complaint" was followed, in 
1530, by The Testament of the Papingo, or Popinjay, in 1,183 lines 
of Chaucer's stanza, a Scottish " Speke Parrot ' (§ 23). In this 
poem, Lindsay, after a preface in praise of the poets who preceded 
him and Scottish poets of his time, feigned that he had the care 
the king's parrot, and took her, one bright morning, into a garden, 
There he set her on a branch, from which, in spite of warning, 
"Thou art right fat, and not well used to fly," the ambitious bird 
must needs climb to " the highest little tender twist." A gust of' 
wind broke the branch under her ; she fell, swooned, recovered 
voice, and blamed false Fortune, who had brought her to court to 
be ruined by ambition. Then she desired, before her death, to 
send some counsel to the king. " Heir followis the first Epystyll 
of the Papingo, direct to Kyng James the Fyft." The Parrot 
bequeathed to the king her true unfeigned heart, with much 
serious advice to him as to the performance of his duties, for 

" Be thov found sleuthfull or negligent, 
Or iniuste in thyne exicutioun, 
Thov sail nocht faill devine puneissioun." 

Let him take note that he was the last king of five score and 
five — 

" Offquhose number fyftie and fyve bene slane, 
And, most parte, in thare awin mysgouernance." 

The Parrot then dictated a second letter to her brethren of the 
court, against ambition, and the misuse of prosperity, against court 
vices and court perils. She recalled the unhappy ends of the last 
four Scottish kings from James I. to James IV. ; the recent fall 
of Wolsey (in October, 1529) ; and the fall from power of the Earl 
of Angus (in 1528). To the courtiers, therefore, the Parrot said, 
there is no constant court but one, where Christ is King, whose 
time interminable and high triumphant glory is never gone. 



270 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1530 

" Heir followis the commonyng betvix the Papingo and hir holye 
execvtovris." The Magpie, a canon regular and prior, seeing 
the Parrot in pain, flew down, and asked for bequest of her 
goods ; the Raven came, too, as a black monk; and the Kite, as 
a friar. The Parrot expressed doubt as to the Kite's good con- 
science, though his raiment was religious like : " I saw you," she 
said, " privily pick a chicken from a hen under a dyke." " I 
grant," said the Kite, " that hen was my good friend, but I only 
took the chicken for my tithe." Let Parrot confess, and the three 
religious birds would give her worthy funeral. The Parrot longed 
for better friends to comfort her. Then said the Kite, " We 
beseech you. ere you die, declare to us some causes reasonable 
why we ben holden so abominable." Thus Lindsay introduced 
into the poem, after his plain counsels to the king, an earnest 
setting forth of the corruption of the clergy. This had come, 
he said, since Constantine in Rome divorced the Church from 
Poverty and married her to Property. The children of that 
marriage were two daughters, Riches and Sensuality, who grew 
to power and took whole rule of the spiritual state. The clergy 
who paid court to these ladies soon forgot to study, pray, and 
preach, "they grew so subject to Dame Sensual, and thought but 
pain poor people for to teach." Were it not for the preaching 
of the begging friars, all faith would be extinct among the 
seculars. When the Parrot had spoken at some length her mind 
upon such matters, she was shriven by the Kite, and, for want of 
better, made the Kite and Raven her executors, with the Magpie 
for overman. She bequeathed her green dress to the owlet, her 
eyes to the bat, her beak to the pelican, " to help to pierce her 
tender heart in twain," her voice to the cuckoo, and her eloquence 
to the goose, her bones to be burnt with those of the phoenix 
when she next renewed her life, her heart to the king, and the 
rest of her inside to her executors. Then she commended her 
spirit to the Fairy Queen. She died ; and her executors fought 
over her remains. 

In 1 531, Sir David Lindsay, of the Mount, joined officially 
as Lion King of Arms in an embassy to Charles V. It was for 
the renewal of an old treaty of Commerce between Scotland and 
the Netherlands. In 1533 he was married to a Janet Douglas. 
That was the year of the divorce of Henry VIII. from Queen 
Katherine, and the year of the birth of the Princess, afterwards 
Queen, Elizabeth. No children were born to David Lindsay. 
In 1535, he was sent with Sir John Campbell to the Emperor 



toa.d. 1535.] A SAT/RE OF THE THREE ESTATES. 2JI 

to ask in marriage one of the princesses of his house for James V. 
No marriage came of that negotiation. 

37. In the same year, 1535, Lindsay produced in the Play 
Field at Cupar the most interesting of his works, the Morality 
Play (§ 24) called A Satire of the Three Estates. This was a 
public setting forth of the condition of the country, with distinct 
and practical suggestion of the reforms most needed. Diligence 
. first entered, as messenger from King Humanity, who was at 
hand. The people might now be assured of Reformation. The 
Three Estates of the nation were warned, in the king's name, to 
appear. Spectators were invited to be patient for some hours, 
and exhorted 

" That na man tak our wordis intill disdaine, 
Althocht ye hear, be declamatioun, 
The common-weill richt pitiouslie complaiae." 

The King then entered, with a prayer that he might use his 
diadem to God's pleasure and his own great comfort. But he 
was met and enticed by Wantonness and Placebo, and by Sandie 
Solace, fresh from a visit to fair Lady Sensuality, whose charms 
he praised. _ Sensuality then entered, the king was attracted by 
her song; she was commended and brought to him. Then came 
Good Counsel, after long banishment from Scotland, meaning to 
save King Humanity, who was thus overset in the beginning of 
his reign. But next came the Vices, Flattery, Falsehood, and 
Deceit, resolved to seek the King, and to devise some subtle way 
of keeping him from the guidance of Good Counsel : 

"Wee man turne our claithis and change our stiles, 
And disagyse vs, that na man ken vs. 
Hes na man olarkis cleathing to len us ?" 

Flattery, disguised as a friar, took the name of Devotion ; Deceit 
called himself Discretion ; and Falsehood, Sapience, but being 
little wise he presently forgot his name, and confounded it with 
"thin drink" — " sypeins," the leakage from a cask. The dis- 
guised Vices met and beguiled the King. When the greybeard 
Good Counsel entered they turned him out, and agreed together 
to make haste with their own profit while the King was young. 
With aid from Wantonness and Solace, they had the King in 
attendance on a song from Sensuality, when Dame Verity entered 
with a call for the spirit of judgment to him that sitteth in judg- 
ment ; 

*' Let not the fault be left into the head 
Then sail the members reulit be at richt.** 



272 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1535.* 

Especially "the Princes of the Priests" should let their light 
shine before men, who will pay more heed to their deeds than to 
their words, and follow them in both. The Vices spying Verity, 
resolved together that she must not come to the King's presence. 
They accused her to the spiritual lords : 

" O reverent fatheris of the Spirituall Stait, 
Wee counsall yow, be wise and vigilant. 
Dame Veritie has lychtit, now of lait, 
And in hir hand beirand the New Testament." 

An Abbot advised that she be held prisoner till the third day of 
the Parliament, and then accused of heresy ; a Parson advised, 
now that the King was guided by Dame Sensuality, 

"To tak your time, I hauld it best for me, 
And go distroy all thir Lutherians, 
In speciall, yon ladie Veritie." j 

The spiritual lords then sent the Parson, with Flattery as the 
Friar, to Dame Verity. The Parson asked what right she had 
to preach, and said : 

" I dreid, without ye get ane remissioun, 
And, syne, renunce yonr new opiniones, 
The spritual stait sail put yow to perditioun 
And in the fyre will burne yow, flesche and bones." 

Verity would not recant, and told her inquisitors that if the king 
knew her they would all be defamed for their traditions. Then 
suddenly cried Flattery, the Friar : 

" Quhat buik is that, harlot, into thy hand ? . 
Out ! walloway ! this is the New Test'ment, 
In Englisch toung, and printit in England ! j 
• Herisie ! herisie ! fire ! fire ! incontinent" 

This Morality was acted at Cupar in 1535, the year before the 
martyrdom of Tyndal. In 1534 the Convocation of the English 
clergy had asked the king for an authorised translation of the 
Scriptures into English; and in 1535 Coverdale's translation was 
printed and licensed, though its introduction was delayed till 
1536, which was the year also of the appearance of the first 
copies printed in England of Tyndal's New Testament (§ 29). 
The outcry of Falsehood may have referred to the current news 
that the King of England was allowing English Bibles to be 
printed, but perhaps it was added at some time between 1535 
and the second acting of the play in 1539. So Verity was haled 
to the stocks, saying : 

" Howbeit ye put ane thousand to torment, 
Ten hundreth thowsand sail rise into thair place,"., 



K.D. I535-] A SATIRE OF THE THREE ESTATES. 273 

and praying to God for some reasonable reformation. Chastity- 
entered next, and fared no better than Truth. Neither Estates 
nor people would receive her, and after some jest by a tailor's 
wife and a shoemaker's wife, both Verity and Chastity were put 
in the stocks. Then entered a varlet to announce the coming of 
Divine Correction. The Vices resolved upon flight, but first 
quarrelled over the stealing of the King's box, which Deceit 
made off with. Divine Correction came resolved, with help of 
the Three Estates, to make Iniquity his thrall. Good Counsel 
welcomed him. Verity and Chastity were released from the 
stocks, and with these three in his company, Correction came 
near to the sleeping King. They drove from him Dame Sen- 
suality, who went to the spiritual lords, and was welcomed by 
them as their day's darling. The King then received his fit 
companions and guides, humbly embraced Correction, and hav- 
ing conditionally pardoned Solace and Placebo, so long as they 
confined themselves to innocent amusements, he proclaimed that 
there should be a Parliament of all the Three Estates for the 
redress of wrongs. 

Here ended the first part of the satire. The audience ate 
and drank, and while the actors were gone from their seats there 
was an interlude. Pauper, the poor man, came into the field, 
and, in spite of Diligence, who played prologue, climbed into 
the chair of the player King. After sundry antics, he told that 
he was from Lothian, and was going to St. Andrew's to seek law. 
He had kept his old father and mother by his labour, and then 
had a mare and three cows. When his father and mother died, 
the landlord took the mare for heriot— that was the fine of a 
beast of any kind that the tenant died possessed of, which 
became due, after the tenant's death, to his superior. The vicar 
had taken from the poor man the best cow when his father died, 
the next best when his mother died, and then, when his wife 
Meg had mourned herself to death, the vicar got the third cow ; 
while, by like custom, their umest clayis — outer clothes — went to 
the clerk. When there was nothing left, the poor man and his 
bairns must needs go beg. " But," asked Diligence, " how did 
the parson, was not he thy good friend ?" " He," said the poor 
man, "cursed me for my tithes, and still denies me sacrament at 
Easter." An English groat was all that he had left, and that was 
for a man of law. Pauper could not be made to understand that 
there was no law for him, and that his cows had gone, if not by 
law, yet by sufficient and good custom, to the vic^r — 

s 



274 A F1RS7 SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1535. 

" Ane consuetude against the Common Weill 
Sould be na law, I think, be sweit Sanet Geill !" 

Not being allowed to ask unwelcome questions about the pre- 
lates, Pauper lay down in the field. Presently there came by 
him a Pardoner, crying up relics, and abusing the New Testament 
that spoilt his trade. There followed some rough jesting at the 
Pardoners expense, and then the poor man woke from dreaming 
of his cows, blessed himself, and prayed St. Bride to send his 
kye again. Seeing the Pardoner, he looked to him for help. The 
Pardoner found that he had a groat, took it, and gave a thousand 
years of pardon for it. The poor man was not satisfied unless 
he saw what he got for his money, and the interlude closed with 
a wrestle between the Pardoner and the poor man, in the course 
of which the bag of relics was thrown into the stream that ran 
across the Play Field. 

Diligence then opened the second part of the Morality, by 
proclaiming the arrival of the Three Estates, who marched from, 
the Pavilion, walking backwards, led by their Vices. The Three 
Estates of the Scottish Parliament were the lords spiritual and 
temporal, and the burgesses, or representatives of cities and 
boroughs, who had been added as a third estate in the days of 
Robert Bruce. They greeted the King, explained that it was 
usual with them to walk backwards, took their seats, and were 
told by the King that it was his will to reform all abuses. Every 
oppressed man was summoned by Correction to give in his bill. 
Then entered, as complainant, John the Common Weal of fair 
Scotland, ragged, lame, and sad. He was sad, he said, because 
the Three Estates walked backwards, led by their several Vices, 
Spirituality by Sensuality and Covetousness, Temporality by 
Public Oppression, and the Burgesses by Falsehood and Deceit : 

, " Quhat mervell thocht the thrie estaits backwart gang, 

Quhen sic an vyle cumpanie dwels them amang, 
Quhilk has reulit this rout monie deir dayis, 
Quhilk gars John the Common Weil want his warme clais ! " 

The Vices were presently put in the stocks ; Sensuality and 
Covetousness were banished, to the great grief of the Spiritual 
Lords ; Good Counsel was seated in honour to advise the Parlia- 
ment ; while John, the Common Weal, and Pauper, the poor 
man, were set to keep the door. Good Counsel then began the 
argument of Reformation, with note of the sufferings of the 
oppressed poor. John Common Weal complained of treacherous 
border thieves, and held that the chiefs who harboured them 



A.D. I535-] ^ SATIRE OF THE THREE ESTATES. 2J$ 

ought to be hanged. He complained of idlers, strong beggars, 
fiddlers, pipers, and pardoners, of discords raised by the great 
fat friars, who laboured not and were well fed. He complained 
of judgment without mercy upon petty thieves, while a cruel 
tyrant who wronged all the world — a common, public, plain, 
oppressor — could by bribery compound with law. Correction 
bade the temporal lords put down oppression, bade the bur- 
gesses avoid deceit, and bade the spiritual lords rent land to 
men who laboured for their bread. The temporal lords and 
burgesses embraced John the Common Weal, but the spiritualty 
still stood aloof. Correction then asked John the Common Weal 
what more he had to say against the spiritual lords. There 
was much more, and he said it, Pauper the poor man heartily 
backing him with the complaint for his lost cows. All that fol- 
lowed was debated and resolved with the assent of Two Estates 
and the dissent of the Lords Spiritual : reforms as to the corpse 
present and cow, as to the money spent at Rome in bribery, as 
to pluralities. Each priest was to have but a single benefice ; the 
bishops and the clergy were to preach and teach, for what else 
were they paid in tithes ? The spiritual lords asked where 
there was any such duty enjoined on them. They were referred 
by Good Counsel to what Saint Paul wrote to Timothy : 

" 'Talc, thair, the buik: let se gif ye can spell.' 
' I never red that. Thairfoir, reid it yoursel.' " 

Good Counsel then read the passage aloud (i Timothy iii. 1, 2, 3). 
Spiritualty hinted that it had been good that Paul had never 
been born. John Common Weal thought that if King David, 
who founded so many abbeys, could look down and see the 
abominations in them, he would wish he had not narrowed his 
income threescore thousand pounds a year. King James I. 
called him a dear saint to the crown. For this suggestion 
Spiritualty held that John Common Weal deserved to be incon- 
tinently burnt. Called upon to make his confession of faith, 
John gave for it the Apostle's Creed, adding that he believed in 
Holy Church, but not in these bishops and friars : upon which 
Correction held him to be a good Christian. It was further 
resolved that no clergy should judge of temporal causes. Verity 
and Chastity then claimed that fit clergy should replace those 
who were enemies to them, and said that poor ignorant men 
understood their own crafts better than the clergy theirs ; in 
witness whereof the shoemaker and tailor were produced and 
examined in their trades. Then Diligence was sent to search 

s 2 



276 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1535 

for a good preacher. While he was gone Theft entered, and 
Mighty Oppression, who was in the stocks, contrived to slip out, 
leaving Petty Theft in his place. Diligence came back with a 
Doctor of Divinity and two Licentiates. There followed exami- 
nation of a Bishop, of an Abbot, of a Parson, of a Prioress, and 
the sermon was called for. This the Doctor preached. His 
argument was that Christ through love died to save man, and 
that God asks of us only love for love. Love, he taught, is the 
ladder with but two steps by which we may climb to heaven, the 
first step being Love of God, the second Love of our Neighbour. 
The Parson and the Abbot scoffed at this doctrine, and called 
the Doctor down out of the pulpit. When the two Licentiates 
had dwelt presently upon the poverty of Christ and the great 
wealth of his successors, Flattery, in the friar's dress, was seized 
for giving evil counsel to the Prelates. Then came the unfrock- 
ing and disclosure of the Vices, the deprivation of three perverse 
prelates, and the setting of the three wise clergy in their places. 
John the Common Weal was gorgeously clothed, and seated in 
the Parliament, before which there were read the Acts resolved 
upon. The reading thus introduced by earnest dramatic satire, 
interspersed with some rough jesting to amuse the people, was a 
reading, in fifteen metrical clauses, of what might be called Sir 
David Lindsay's draft of a Reform Bill for Scotland. Theft, 
Deceit, and Falsehood were then taken from the stocks and 
hanged, but Flattery escaped. Then entered Folly to jest, with 
a basketful of fools' caps. When he found that the King gave 
bishoprics to preachers, Folly hung his fools' caps round the 
pulpit, and preached a satirical sermon to commend them to all 
purchasers. They were commended to the merchant discon- 
tented with abundance, who torments himself for gain ; to the 
rich old widower who has children and weds a girl; , to, the clergy 
who take cures only for pelf; to the princes who shed innocent 
blood in labour merely of "ilk Christian prince to ding down 
uther." After Folly's sermon, Diligence spoke a short epilogue, 
and the play was over. 

38. In 1536, Lindsay wrote for the king two little pieces. One 
was in Answer to the King's Fly ting, a playful warning answer 
to the king's attack on his strict preaching of continence- The 
other was a Complaint and Public Confession of the King's Old 
Hound, Bagsche, who petitioned on his own behalf the king's 
new favourite, Bawte, and the other dogs, his companions. 
Bagsche had worried lambs and sheep, had attacked men 



to a.d. 1540.] SIR DAVID LINDSAY. 2J7 

savagely, every dog trembled when he was near ; but at last, for 
his misuse of power, he was cast off, and barely escaped hanging. 
Prosperous brother Bawte was admonished to take warning, and 
any strong man who enjoyed court favour might take to himself 
the auld hound's warning against, harsh use of his strength. 
Within the next three or four years Lindsay wrote also a satire 
on the long trains worn by ladies, Ane Supplicatioun against 
Side Taillis, and Kiltie's Confession, an attack on the Con- 
fessional. Its doctrine is : 

" To the great God omnipotent 
Confess thy sin, and sore repent, 
And trust in Christ, as writis Paul,. 
Who shed His blood to save thy soul ',. 
For none can thee absolve but He, 
Nor take away thy sin from thee." 

In 1536 there was an embassy to France, attended by Sir 
David Lindsay as Lion King of Arms, to ask in marriage for 
James V. a daughter of the house of Vendome. .That embassy was 
detained until the king himself arrived, when he chose for him- 
self Magdalene of France, the consumptive eldest daughter of 
King Francis. She was married to James with much banqueting. 
On the 28th of May the king and queen arrived at Holyrood. 
On the 5th of July the bride was dead. Lindsay then wrote The 
Defloration of Queen Magdalene, dwelling at large upon the 
pomps of her reception, and then passing in one stanza from the 
festal music to the music of her requiem. Within a year there 
was another bride to greet On the 10th of June, 1538, Mary, 
widow of the Duke of Longueville, and daughter of the Duke of 
Guise, landed at Fifeness. She was received with triumphs of 
Lindsay's devising. The genius of Scotland, in angelic form, 
delivered to her the keys of Scotland from a cloud above an arch. 
There were forty days of sport. Occasion came of this for 
Lindsay's short piece on The Jousting between Jaines Watson 
and John Barbour. 

In the following year, 1539, five men were burnt for heresy at 
Edinburgh ; and David Beaton, who had taken part in their 
condemnation, and had in the preceding year been made a 
cardinal, became, by the death of his uncle James, Archbishop of 
St. Andrew's. In the same year, 1539, at the Feast of Epiphany, 
the king had Lindsay's " Satire of the Three Estates " acted at 
Linlithgow, before himself and his queen, and the whole council, 
temporal and spiritual. At the end of the piece James warned 



278 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1504 

some of the bishops who were present that, if they did not take 
heed, he would send some of the proudest of them to be dealt 
with by his uncle of England. In the following year, 1540, the 
Estates, while they maintained the pope's authority, so far 
followed Lindsay's lead as to pass a friendly Act of Reformation 
for abatement of " the unhonesty and misrule of kirkmen, baith 
in wit, knowledge, and manners," as " the matter and cause that 
the kirk and kirkmen are lightlied and condemned." 

We have now followed the main currents of our literature, 
north and south, to the year 1540. Lindsay was then about fifty 
years old, Luther was fifty-seven, John Knox was thirty-five years 
old, and George Buchanan thirty-four. 

39. In the year 1540 Rabelais was living, and was forty-five 
years old. Ariostodied and Montaigne was born in 1533. Italy 
still had the strongest literary influence upon surrounding nations. 
Pastoral poetry, which old fable traced to a source in the Sicilian 
Daphnis, son of Mercury, was at this time passing from Italy 
and Spain into France. After the " Orfeo " of Poliziano and the 
" Cefalo " of Niccolo da Corregio (chap. v. § 28) pastorals multi- 
plied ; but the work that concerns us most was the Arcadia of 
Jacopo Sanazzaro, who was born at Naples in 1458, and died 
in 1 5 32. The " Arcadia " was first published complete in 1 504, and 
was in prose and verse — twelve pieces of prose, each introducing 
an eclogue. In joining a literary academy its author had trans- 
formed his name to Azio Sincere Under the name of Sincero, 
he spoke of himself with an Arcadian shepherd in two of the 
prose introductions ; under the name of Ergasto, he lamented 
the death of his mother, in the tenth and eleventh prose pieces. 
His mother died in 1490, and his "Arcadia" was then, perhaps, 
more than half written. There was no continuous narrative, 
but the prose introductions, and the accord of personal feeling 
and allusion, gave more than usual coherence to the eclogues. 

The influence of Italy on Spain was very strong at the be- 
ginning of the sixteenth century. Naples was delivered to Spain 
after the successes of Gonzalvo de Cordova and the Treaty of 
1503. In 1522 Spain was in Italy at the battle of Pavia. In 
1527 the pope was a prisoner in Spain. In 1530, Charles V. 
was in Italy, surrounded by a Spanish court. Sanazzaro himself 
was descended from a Spanish family settled in Naples. Italian 
forms of literature were more and more copied in Spain, until, in 
1526, Juan Boscan, of Barcelona, distinctly imitated the Italian 
poetry, and used Italian measures. The strength of Italian 



to a.d. 1542.] RISE OF THE MODERN PASTORAL. 279 

influence on Spanish literature dates from Boscan, who died in 
1540, and from his friend Garcilasso de la Vega, who was 
killed in 1536, at the storming of a village during Charles V.'s 
disastrous invasion of Provence. Charles executed all the 
survivors of the fifty peasants who, in defending their homes, 
killed Garcilasso. Garcilasso's works include three eclogues, 
written after 1526, equal in bulk to his other poems. In the 
first and best of them, two shepherds, Salicio (himself) and 
Nemoroso (Boscan), complain of love ; Salicio mourns a mis- 
tress who is dead, Nemoroso one who is faithless. Like Boscan, 
Garcilasso wrote also sonnets in the Italian manner, imitating 
Petrarch, but among the poets of his time he showed a chief 
delight in Sanazzaro. The growing taste for pastoral poetry, as 
well as Sanazarro's popularity, is shown by the fact that sixty- 
editions of his "Arcadia" were published in the sixteenth century. 

In France, the first eclogue of mark was produced in 1531. 
This was Clement Marofs Complaint of Louise of Savoy, a 
pastoral lament on the death of the mother of Francis I. In 
other pastorals of his the great god Pan became the God adored 
by pastors of the Church ; and he sang of the good and bad 
shepherd, and the sorrows of the flocks, in direct sympathy with 
the best aspirations of the Church reformers. Marot was living 
in 1540. He died in 1544. 

George of Montemayor, near Coimbra, a Portuguese, was 
then a young man. He wrote in his young days an imitation of the 
"Arcadia" of Sanazzaro, "Diana Enamorada." Montemayor's 
Diana was first printed at Valencia in 1542. He was himself its 
hero, under the name of Sereno ; and it gave in form of pastoral 
romance events from his own life or experience of his friends. 
Under the mountains of Leon shepherds and shepherdesses on 
the banks of the Ezla met, and told their stories in seven books 
of prose mixed with verse. The work, which had more story in 
it than Sanazzaro's " Arcadia," was left unfinished. A second 
part in eight books was published in 1564, by Alonzo Perez, to 
whom Montemayor had told his plan. Perez promised a third 
part, but lived another thirty years without producing it. 

40. From the rise of the modern pastoral let us turn now to 
the development of the romance of chivalry. Ludovico, son of 
Niccolo Ariosto, who continued with Orlando Furioso, the 
" Orlando Innamorato' 5 of Boiardo (ch. v. § 31), was born in 
1474, at Reggio, where his father was governor. He was eldest 
of ten children, in a household of moderate means. He was sent 



28o A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1504 

to Ferrara to study law, but gave his time chiefly to the study of 
the Spanish and French romances, tales chiefly of Charlemagne, 
King Arthur, and their knights. The original " Amadis of Gaul " 
(ch. v. § 28), produced by Vasco de Lobeira in or a little before 
1390, existed only in a manuscript now lost. It was translated 
out of Portuguese into Spanish between 1492 and 1504, by 
Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo, governor of Medina del Campo. 
It was first printed early in the sixteenth century, but the earliest 
known printed edition is of the year 15 19, four years after the 
printing of "Orlando Furioso." Young Ariosto, since he failed 
as a law student, was allowed to train himself for literature. He 
was but twenty when his father died, and he then devoted him- 
self with good sense and energy to the guardianship of his 
brothers and sisters. Worldly success from the pursuit of litera- 
ture could, in those days, come only by the way of patronage. 
Ariosto submitted to the patronage of Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, 
brother to the Duke of Ferrara. The life of the cardinal, from 
whom Ariosto received slender payment while he wrote his 
famous poem, was an example of the gross corruption of society 
in the Italian courts. Ariosto broke with him at last, gave him 
— and Leo X. also — a place in his satires ; and after the car- 
dinal's death had a friend in the duke. The ease and playful 
grace of Ariosto's masterpiece was the result of that great labour 
without which few masterpieces are achieved. The poet was of 
large robust body and healthy mind ; frank, genial, and a hater 
of ceremonies ; true to the sisters who depended upon him, 
moderate in all things, though tainted with the licence of his 
time and country. As an intent thinker and sturdy pedestrian, 
he found himself one day half way to Ferrara when he had but 
gone out from Carpi for a breath of morning air in dressing- 
gown and slippers ; being so far on the road, he went on to 
Ferrara. From Carpi to Ferrara is a walk of rather more than 
thirty miles. What Ariosto did he did with determination. He 
had read every attainable romance. He pondered his " Orlando" 
well before a word of it was written, rejecting Cardinal Bembo's 
advice to make of it a Latin epic. In writing he would often spend 
a day upon the polishing of a few verses written in the morning ; 
and having begun his " Orlando" at the age of twenty-nine, by 
great industry, in eleven years he was able to issue forty cantos. 
That was in 1515. Six more cantos Ariosto added to the poem 
in his lifetime, five he left to be added after his death. A re- 
polished edition of the " Orlando*' was issued by him in 1532, the 



toa.d. I533-] RISE OF THE ROMANCE OF CHIVALRY. 28 1 

year before his death. To this edition he had given with anxious 
care his last corrections. The book went to him full of mis- 
prints. "The printer," he cried, "has assassinated me!" 
Books were then as liable to misprints as men to the plague, but 
the book disease was curable, and Ariosto's poem lives. Boiardo, 
taking for his subject fabulous wars with the Saracens, repre- 
sented Paris besieged by two hosts of infidels, who menaced the 
kingdom of Charlemagne, and (Orlando Innamorato) Orlando 
enamoured of a fascinating Angelica, brought from the far East 
to produce discord among the Christians. Ariosto made An- 
gelica herself love and marry Medoro, a young squire, whereby 
she drove (Orlando Furioso) Orlando mad, until he was healed 
by Astolfo, who brought his wits back in a phial from the moon. 
Editions of Ariosto's poem appeared written in his lifetime, in 
1515, 1516, 1521, 1526, 1530, and 1532. In Italy, about the year 
1540, stanzas of Ariosto's playful octave rhyme were familiar 
among the people. Bernardo Tasso wrote that there was not 
an artisan, not a boy, girl, or old man, ignorant of the " Orlando 
Furioso ; " that the lonely traveller relieved the toil of his jour- 
ney by singing its stanzas ; and that persons of all classes might 
be heard repeating them in the streets and fields. 

Of Amadis of Gaul (ch. v. § 28), first printed in Spain in or 
before 15 19, a French translation appeared in 1540. Amadis 
itself was followed up by its translator in 1521, with an original 
romance of his own on the adventures of " Esplandian," son of 
the perfect knight, Amadis of Gaul (i.e. Wales), and the peer- 
less Oriana, who was daughter of Lisuarte, King of England. 
Of Amadis there were twelve Spanish editions within half a 
century. Esplandian was received with favour, and was fol- 
lowed in 1526 by "The History of Florisando," nephew of 
Amadis. Then came a " Lisuarte of Greece," son of Esplandian. 
The new suit was followed with an " Amadis of Greece." 

Another Spanish romance hero was Palmerin, written by a 
carpenter's daughter at Burgos, and first printed in 151 1. This 
hero was called Palmerin de Oliva, because he was found exposed 
in an osier cradle among olive trees. He married the daughter of 
the Emperor of Germany ; and in 15 16 appeared from the same 
authoress the second book of " Palmerin," telling the adventures 
of his sons Primaleonand Polendos. In 1533 followed the adven- 
tures of Palmerin's grandson, Platir. Other Spanish romances 
of chivalry competed for attention. They were a chief source of 
delight to many readers in the middle of the sixteenth century. 



282 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. (_a.d. 1300 

The romance which ranks next in merit to the original "Amadis" 
is Palmerin oj England, by Luis Hurtado, and the first part of 
that appeared in the year of the death of Henry VIII. 

41. Ariosto wrote in his youth two Italian comedies, after the 
manner of Plautus and Terence, and afterwards three more were 
produced in a theatre fitted up by him for the Duke of Ferrara. 
The rise OF the modern drama was not from a modification 
of the miracle-plays, but came, with the revival of letters, almost 
everywhere from imitation of the Latin dramatists. First, they 
were Latin imitators of the Latin. Albertino Mussato, of Padua, 
who died in 1330, produced two tragedies in such Latin as an 
Italian audience might partly understand ; one was an"Achilleis," 
the other an " Eccerinis," on a native theme, Ezzelin, tyrant of 
Padua. For the latter play his compatriots gave him a laurel 
crown. The story of Mussato's Ezzelin was told in five acts, 
each consisting of a narrative spoken in character — 1, by the 
mother of Ezzelin ; 2, by a messenger ; 3, by dialogue between 
two brothers, interrupted by a messenger; 4 and 5, each by a 
messenger. Single speakers addressed the Chorus, which occa- 
sionally asked a question, and at the close of each act lamented 
or moralised. Each of the five acts of a tragedy by Seneca was 
usually closed in this way by the chorus. Petrarch said that he 
wrote when young a comedy, called " Philologia," but kept it to 
himself. Pier Paolo Vergerio, born in Capo d'l stria, about 
1349, a philosopher, jurisconsult, and orator, who assisted at 
the Council of Constance, wrote in his youth a Latin comedy, 
named " Paulus," which is not lost, and of which the professed 
object was to correct the manners of the young. Italy, in the 
fifteenth century, had the pompous acting of mysteries, the 
Rustic Farces and Dramatic Pastoral of " Orfeo" (ch. v. § 28), 
in which Poliziano first gave dramatic action to a pastoral 
written in the language of the people, and still from time to time 
a Latin tragedy or comedy. One of these Latin comedies, the 
" Lusus Ebriorum," by Secco Polentone, was translated into 
Italian, and printed in 1472, named afresh Catinia, from a chief 
actor in the story. This seems to have been the earliest printed 
comedy in any of the modern languages of Europe. 

In i486 there were plays acted in Ferrara before its duke. 
First, there was acted a translation of the " Menaechmi * of 
Plautus ; then the pastoral " Cefalo," by Niccolo da Correggio ; 
then the " Amphitryon " of Plautus, translated into terza rima ; 
then a sacred comedy on the story of Joseph. For the same 



to a.d. 1529.] RISE OF THE MODERN DRAMA. 283 

Duke Ercole I., and in the same theatre at Ferrara, were acted 
new Italian plays by Antonio da Pistoja; one was Panfila, a 
tragedy in terza rima (first printed at Venice in 1508), also a 
comedy in five acts, and in terza rima, called Timone, by Boiardo, 
who died in 1494. In 1494, Giacomo Nardi, translator of Livy, 
produced in Florence an Italian comedy, in various metres, 
called A7nicizia. 

Pomponius Laetus in those days had taught lay youths to 
act Plautus and Terence in the houses of great men. In the 
chief towns of Italy, in the earlier years of the sixteenth century, 
cardinals and other dignitaries frequently had plays of Seneca, 
Plautus, and Terence acted before them. Tommaso Inghiramo, 
a reverend canon and professor of rhetoric, acquired the surname 
of Phaedra for his excellent acting of the part of the wife of 
Theseus, in Seneca's " Hippolytus," on a stage before the palace 
of the Cardinal Raffaelle San Giorgio. The best of the Latin 
plays written in Italy was the " Golden Shower" (Imber Aureus) 
of Antonio Tilesio, a tragedy on the story of Danae, produced in 
1529, often acted with great applause, and first printed in 1530. 
At that time Coriolano Martirano, Bishop of San Marco, in 
Calabria, was producing excellent versions into Latin of the 
"Electra" of Sophocles; of the "Prometheus Bound" of 
" ./Eschylus ; " of the " Medea," " Hippolytus," " Bacchas," 
" Phcenissae," and " Cyclops," of Euripides ; and of the 
" Plutus" and " Clouds" of Aristophanes. 

Native Italian comedy was represented in the first years of 
the sixteenth century by Ariosto. His earliest comedy was / 
Suppositi ("The Substitutes"), where master and man change 
places; and in this Ariosto himself said that he followed the 
"Eunuch" of Terence and the " Captives" of Plautus. To the 
same period of his youth belongs Ariosto's Cassaria, where the 
plot turns on a box deposited with Crisobolo, and passed by his 
son into the power of the master of a fair slave, Eulalia. The 
characters here are like those of the Latin comedy, but the plot 
is his own. These comedies were first written about 1498, in 
prose, but afterwards rewritten into unrhymed verse. His 
other comedies, Lena, Scolastica, and // Negromante (" The 
Magician"), were also in unrhymed verse; the last-named was 
sent to Leo X. in 1520, and acted in Rome. 

An Italian tragedy on the story of Sofonisba, by Galotto del 
Carretto, was acted before Isabella Marchioness of Mantua, in 
1502 ; but Trissind's So/omsda, dedicated to Leo X. in 1515, and 



234 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [ad. 1529 

printed in 1529, was the first Italian tragedy of mark. This 
also was in unrhymed verse. Giovan Giorgio Trissino, born in 
1478, of a noble and wealthy family in Vicenza, had a keen 
delight in Greek, and a genius for poetry and architecture ; he 
had also means that gave him leisure to indulge his tastes. He 
went to Rome, and wrote " Sofonisba " to employ his mind when 
he was in deep grief after the loss of his first wife. 

In the year 1540, Trissino lost his second wife. He was then 
at work on a long epic poem, Italia Liberata da i Goti (" Italy 
Freed from the Goths "), upon the production of which he spent 
twenty years. It is chiefly famous as the first attempt in modern 
literature to produce a long epic in unrhymed verse. The first 
nine books of Trissino's epic appeared at Rome in 1 547, the rest 
followed in 1548. 

Of three Comedies by Machiavelli (who was born in 1469, and 
died in 1527), one is a free version of the " Casina" of Plautus, 
another is a closer version of the " Andria " of Terence; and the 
third, Mandragola, had a plot of its own, illustrating the 
degradation of society in Florence. 

42. The degradation of political life is shown also in his 
famous treatise "Del Principe" — MachiavellVs Prince — first 
published in 1532. It was a shrewd man's embodiment of the 
political doctrines of Italian courts, written to please the house 
of Medici, and showing how a prince, whose territory was newly 
acquired, not inherited, might master not only Florence, but all 
Italy. Machiavelli was the best Italian prose writer of that 
time, and in private life of more than average worth among his 
countrymen ; but he does not seem to have meant satire when 
he wrote of Italian state policy, "A prince who would maintain 
his power should learn to adapt the morality of his actions to the 
dictates of necessity, and not to study merely what is agreeable 
to virtue." The same corruption was shown in the remorseless 
Satires of Pietro Aretino on the licentious lives of nuns and 
cardinals, and the misdeeds of princes, of whom he was called 
the Scourge. He was himself an example of the degradation he 
exposed. Pietro of Arezzo, thence called Aretino, was in 1540 
forty-eight years old, and writing comedies. He died in 1557. 
There was also Theophilus Folengo, better known as Merlin 
Cocaie, the inventor of that odd mixture of Latin with a homely 
dialect, which takes from a book of his its name of Macaronic 
Poetry. He was born in 1 491, of a noble family in Mantua, was 
baptised Girolamo, but took the name of Theophilus when he 



TOA.D.iS4o.] ITALIAN INFLUENCE. 285 

joined the Benedictines of Monte Cassino. In 1509 he became 
a regular Benedictine, afterwards left the order, roamed about for 
ten years with a noble lady, stopped work on a serious Latin poem 
and took to writing a Macaronic Work, which told in the rustic 
dialect of Mantua, whimsically twisted into burlesque Latin, the 
adventures of a burlesque hero named Baldus, with lively satire 
on the vanities of life and Church abuses. He called the parts 
of his poem " Macaronea Prima," " Macaronea Secunda," &c. — 
the dish of the people yielding to Italy the name of Maccherone for 
a booby, as the sausage gives to Germany its Hans Wurst, and we 
have Jack Pudding. There were seventeen such sections of Jack 
Pudding verses in the first edition, published in 1 521, and in 
later editions twenty-five. Folengo wrote afterwards a satirical 
" Orlandino," on the youth of Orlando, in eight cantos of Italian, as 
Limerno (anagram of Merlino) Pitocco (beggar) ; and when he 
went back into his religious order, in 1526, he wrote a medley of 
poems, songs, and tales in Latin, Italian, and the form called, 
from his "Opus Macaronicum," Macaronic. This he named the 
"Chaos of Three for One" {II Chaos del Triperwio) — namely, 
Theophilus Folengo, Merlin Cocaie, and Limerno Pitocco. He 
wrote afterwards an Italian religious poem, in ten books of 
octave rhyme, on the " Humanity of the Son of God," and died 
in 1544. 

43. A writer on English poetry, in 1589, says that in the 
latter end of Henry VIII.'s reign " sprang up a new company of 
courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder, and Henry 
Earl of Surrey were the two chieftains ; who, having travelled 
into Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and 
style of the Italian poesy, as novices newly crept out of the 
schools of Dante, Arioste, and Petrarch, they greatly polished 
our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy" — {i.e., poetry in 
the language of the people)— " from that it had been before, and 
for that cause may justly be said to be the first reformers of our 
English metre and style. 5 ' 

Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder was born in 1503, at 
Allington Castle, in Kent, son of Sir Henry Wyatt, who was 
high in the king's favour, and who. died in 1538. Thomas 
Wyatt entered St. John's College, Cambridge, at the age of 
twelve, took his Bachelor of Arts degree at fifteen, and was 
Master of Arts at seventeen. He became a gentleman of the 
king's bedchamber, and married Elizabeth, daughter of Lord 
Brook of Cobham. His eldest son, Thomas Wyatt the younger, 



286 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. i 5 ao' 

was born about 1520. In 1533, Wyatt was ewerer at the corona- 
tion of his friend, Anne Boleyn. In 1537 he was knighted. He 
was tall and handsome ; his friend Surrey praised his form as 
one where " force and beauty met." He was skilled in exercise 
of arms, spoke French, Italian, and Spanish, was apt at kindly 
repartee, played on the lute, and at the age of five-and-twenty, had 
been honoured by Leland as the most accomplished poet of his 
time. The king found pleasure in his conversation. Soon after a 
short imprisonment in the Tower during the king's pleasure, 
Sir Thomas Wyatt was sent as ambassador to the Emperor 
Charles, in Spain, and did not obtain until April, 1539, the recall 
he wished for. He had to deal with the personal questions 
between the two sovereigns arising out of the divorce of Queen 
Katherine, the position of her daughter, the Princess Mary; and 
the birth of Jane Seymour's son, Edward, afterwards King 
Edward VI., in the autumn of 1537. There was also the 
argument of the King of England's next marriage after the 
death of Jane Seymour. There was also the war between 
Charles V. and Francis I., closed by the Peace of Nice, in 1538, 
during Wyatt's tenure of office as English ambassador in Spain. 
Wyatt followed the emperor, posted to England, was wise and 
active, but too good a man for diplomatic work in which he was 
not free to be true. 

Reginald Pole went to Spain during Wyatt's embassy, 
and Wyatt's duty was to stand between him and the emperor. 
Pole's father was cousin to Henry VII., and his mother was a niece 
of Edward IV. In 1525, Reginald Pole, aged five-and-twenty, 
returned from foreign universities high in Henry VIII.'s favour, 
and enriched with pension and Church preferment. But he did 
not approve of the divorce of Katherine, Ok of King Henry's 
repudiation of the pope's authority over the Church. The king, 
who sought in vain to win him, sent him a pamphlet written by 
Dr. Sampson, Bishop of Chichester. His reply was a Latin 
treatise, addressed to the king, in four books, in Defence of 
Church Unity, published in 1536. It condemned the secession 
of England from Rome. For this he was deprived of his pension 
and preferments, and compelled to leave England. Henry 
persecuted his family, and even executed his mother. He was 
made a cardinal in December, 1536, and afterwards employed 
as papal legate. 

Sir Thomas Wyatt was a reformer, liberal and thoughtful, 
able to appreciate the sincerity of Pole, while he fulfilled his 



toa.d. 1542.] SIX THOMAS WYATT. 287 

duty by procuring for him a cool reception at the court of 
Charles. The death of Wyatt's father during the time of his 
embassy gave him reason to be urgent for a recall, that he might 
attend to his own family affairs ; but he was told that his private 
affairs were not neglected, since His Majesty had set aside for 
him the house of the Friars at Ailesford, in Kent, which 
adjoined his own estate at Allington, and was disposed to 
continue "good lord unto him." From Spain, Wyatt wrote 
earnest letters to his son, on the model of Seneca's epistles. 
Here are a few sentences from them: — " Make God and goodness 
your foundations. Make your examples of wise and honest 
men ; shoot at that mark. Be no mocker ; mocks follow them 
that delight therein. He shall be sure of shame that feeleth no 
grief in other men's shames. Have your friends in a reverence ; 
and think unkindness to be the greatest offence, and least 
punished, among men ; but so much the more to be dread, for 

God is justicer upon that alone If you will seem 

honest, be honest ; or else seem as you are." Not many months 
after his return to Allington, Wyatt's good sense and experience 
were again called for by the course of public events. The 
Emperor's journey through France to the Netherlands, against 
revolted Ghent, was to be watched for any under-currents in its 
policy. Wyatt, therefore, was appointed for four months to be 
with Charles as Ambassador Extraordinary. He went, and he 
sent home faithful reports, with acute comments and sensible 
suggestions. His recall was delayed, though again he urged for 
it ; but he was able to return to Allington by the middle of May, 
1540. In the following July came the fall of Thomas Cromwell, 
and after this Sir Thomas Wyatt, who had been one of Crom- 
well's friends, was sent in the winter 1 540-1 to the Tower, 
charged with disrespect to the king, and traitorous corre- 
spondence with Cardinal Pole. There he wrote : 

" Sighs are my food ; my drink they are my tears ; 

Clinking of fetters such music would crave : 
Stink and close air away my life wears; 

Innocency is all the hope I have. 
Rain, wind, or weather I judge by mine ears; 

Malice assaults that righteousness should have. 
Sure I am, Bryan, this wound shall heal again ; 

But yet, alas ! the scar shall still remain. " 

About June, in 1541, Wyatt was tried and acquitted. In July 
the king made some amends to him by a grant of lands in 
Lambeth, and he showed him afterwards substantial kindness. 



238 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. D. 1520 

Sir Thomas Wyatt went again to Allington, attended personally 
to the education of a nephew, wrote a rhymed Paraphrase of the 
Seven Penitential Psalms, with a prologue of his own before 
each 'of them, and wrote also, in terza rima, three noble satires, 
two imitated from Persius and Horace and one freely translated 
from Italian. The first and second were addressed to his 
friend, John Poyntz, (1.) "of the mean and sure estate, - ' — a new 
elaboration from Horace (Sat. ii. 6) of the story of the town and 
country mouse; (2.) of the courtier's life, from the Italian of 
Alamanni ; the third, to Sir Francis Bryan, entitled, " How to 
Use the Court, and Himself Therein," was a paraphrase of a 
satire of Horace (Book ii. Sat. 5), wherein, following Horace 
closely and bitterly, Wyatt applied to court life the principles of 
Macchiavelli: 

" Use virtue as it goeth nowadays 

In word alone, to make thy language sweet. 
And of thy deed yet do not as thou says, 
Else, be thou sure, thou shalt be far unmeet 
To get thy bread." 

His second satire, a free translation from Alamanni, told his 
friend why he sought to fly the press of courts, and live at 
home: 

" My Pointz, I cannot frame my tongue to feign — 

To cloke the truth for praise, without desart, 
Of them that lust all vices to retain. 

I cannot honour them that set their part 
With Venus and Bacchus all their life long ; 

Nor hold my peace of them, although I smart. 
I cannot crouch or kneel to such a wrong, 

To worship them as God on earth alone 
That are like wolves these sely lambs among. 

I cannot with my words complain, and moan, 
And suffer nought ; nor smart without complaint : 

Nor turn the word that from my mouth is gone. 
***** 
I am not he that can allow the state 

Of high Caesar, and doom Catd to die, 
That by his death did scape out of the gate 

From Csesar's hands, if Livy doth not lie. 
And would not live where liberty was lost : 

So did his heart the common weal apply." 

In these adaptations from Italian and Latin, Wyatt uncon- 
sciously was summing up his life towards its close. In the 
autumn of 1542, Henry VIII. was plotting with Charles V. war 
against Francis I. Charles sent an ambassador to England. Sir 
Thomas Wyatt was ordered to meet him at Falmouth, and bring 
him to London. Wyatt rode fast in bad weather, was seized with 



toa.d. 1542.] SIX THOMAS WYATT. 2 89 

a fever on his way, and died at Sherborne, only thirty-nine years 
old. His friend, John Leland, published Latin N<zni<z (funeral 
songs) upon his death. His friend, the Earl of Surrey, then aged 
about twenty-five, mourned his loss in a little elegy, and drew his 
portrait, flattered, of course, but true to the main features, in a 
few stanzas, of which these are three : 

" A visage stern and mild ; where both did grow 
Vice to contemn, in virtue to rejoice : 
Amid great storms whom grace assured so, 
To live upright, and smile at Fortune's choice. 

" A tongue that served in foreign realms his king ; 

Whose courteous talk to virtue did inflame 

Each noble heart ; a worthy guide to bring 

Our English youth by travail unto fame. 

" A heart where dread was never so imprest 

To hide the thought that might the truth advance ; 
In neither fortune loft nor yet represt, 

To swell in wealth or yield unto mischance." 

Wyatt's songs and sonnets, balades, rondeaux, complaints, and 
other little poems, closely and delicately imitate, with great 
variety of music, the forms fashionable in his time among 
poets of Italy and France. His sonnets, accurate in their 
structure, are chiefly translated from Petrarch, many of his 
epigrams are borrowed from the "Strambotti" (fantastic con- 
ceits) of Serafino d'Aquila, a Neapolitan poet, who died in 
1500, and whose poems were printed in 1503. Dante had 
paraphrased the penitential Psalms ; and in 1532 there appeared 
another version of them into Italian, by Luigi Alamanni, a 
•Florentine poet, born in 1495. Exiled from Italy after 
joining in a plot for the death of Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, 
Alamanni was for some years established at the court of Francis 
I., to whom he dedicated, in 1532, the volume of his Tuscan 
works — " Opere Toscane." This was a collection of sonnets, 
balades, and other amatory poems in rhyme ; eclogues after the 
manner of Theocritus, and many other poems in blank verse ; 
hymns in imitation of Pindar, the first of their kind ; the peni- 
tential Psalms ; and satires in terza rima, of which the tenth is that 
freely translated by Wyatt, who doubtless was led by imitation 
of Alamanni to the choice of the rhyme for his own three 
satires. The two longest of Wyatt's amatory odes were taken 
from two canzoni of Petrarch. With all this, there is evidence 
in Wyatt's poetry of strain for ingenuity of word and phrase, 
for the concetti or ingenious conceits which had been developed 

T 



2yO A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1524 

in Italian literature by imitators of Petrarch, and which had 
even begun to form a part of polite conversation in the chief 
Italian cities. 

44. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, born about 15 17, 
was some fourteen years younger than Sir Thomas Wyatt, the 
poet, and but a few years older than Wyatt's son. He was him- 
self the grandson of that Earl of Surrey to whom the dukedom 
of Norfolk, forfeited by his father, was given again, in 15 14, for 
his services at Flodden Field. The father of the poet inherited 
the dukedom in 1524 ; and Henry Howard, his eldest son, became 
Earl of Surrey at the age of seven. He was cupbearer to the 
king in 1526; and in 1533, when Wyatt, aged thirty, served as 
ewerer at the coronation of Anne Boleyn, the Earl of Surrey, 
aged about sixteen, carried one of the swords before the king. 
Early in 1532 he had been contracted in marriage to the Lady 
Frances Vere, daughter to John, Earl of Oxford. He was mar- 
ried to her in 1535, at the age of about eighteen. In March of 
the following year his eldest son, Thomas, was born, and Surrey 
was knighted in October. His second son, Henry, was born in 
1539. Early in 1542, Queen Catherine Howard, a cousin of 
Surrey's, whom the king married within a fortnight after his 
divorce from Anne of Cleves, was executed in the Tower; but 
on the following St. George's Day, Surrey was made a Knight of 
the Garter. In July of the same year, the Earl of Surrey was 
imprisoned in the Fleet for seeking fight with a gentleman of 
Middlesex, an offence which he admitted, and ascribed to "the 
fury of reckless youth." He was released early in August, and 
crossed the border with his father, who had command of that 
expedition against Scotland which clouded with disaster the last 
hours of the Scottish James V. 

45. Henry VIII.'s sister, Queen Margaret, for whom in her 
youth Dunbar had written " The Thistle and the Rose," died in 
1 54 1, after wild endeavours to obtain divorce from her third 
husband. In the same year died the two infant boys born of 
the marriage of James V., in 1538, with Mary of Guise (§ 38). 
James was perplexed at home. His uncle Henry was imperious. 
He demanded in vain that all religious refugees from England 
to Scotland should be delivered up to him. He proposed to- 
meet his nephew at York, went thither in state, found there no 
King of Scots, was furious, accused James of breaking faith and 
of connivance with the Irish rebels, and resolved to assert forcibly 
his claim to be master of Scotland. There was also the fact 



toa.d. I543-] HENRY HOWARD, EARL OF SURREY. 29I 

that Beaton, become a cardinal, had gone, in 1541, from Scotland 
to Rome on a secret embassy. On such grounds Henry VI I L 
declared war, and the Earl of Surrey's father was sent, with 
Surrey among his forces, to harry the Scots across the border. 
A dash of three thousand against Jedburgh failed, six hundred 
were taken prisoners. Henry sent thirty thousand men to the 
North, without caring how they were to be fed. That army did 
some mischief, but could not be kept together, and James V. 
might have retaliated upon England ; but the Scots abided by 
the policy of simple defence to which they had held since Flodden. 
Ten thousand were, nevertheless, dispatched across the border. 
On English ground they were in tumult of wrath at finding that 
an unworthy favourite of King James was their commander. 
Into the midst of the confusion thus caused a troop of English 
soldiers dashed, and the Scots army was dispersed at Solway 
Moss. The king, whose strength had long been failing, was not 
far distant, and news of this disaster came to him on the 7th of 
December, 1542, side by side with announcement of the birth of 
a daughter. He said, despondingly, of his kingdom, " It came 
with a lass, and it will go with a lass;" and died on the 14th of 
the same month, leaving that infant, a week old, Mary Queen of 
Scots. 

James V. of Scotland, with vices of a kind too easily- 
forgiven, did with rough energy seek to work out the problem of 
society, and, while cruelly satisfying his own hatreds, do some 
good to John the Common Weal (§ 36, 37). The poor man had 
access to him. The power of the great lord was severely curbed. 
James V. was called the King of the Commons ; has been credited 
with the authorship of Christis Kirk of the Green, and Peblis to 
the Play, or of " Christ's Kirk of the Green" as an imitation of the 
other poem, which might then be ascribed to James I., his pre- 
decessor. He certainly did write verse, and the original con- 
ception of two songs, which come to us only in a later Scottish 
dialect, the Jollie Beggar and the Gaberlunzie Man, has been 
ascribed to him. 

46. The Earl of Surrey, after his return from the northern 
expedition, was, in April, 1543, summoned before the Privy 
Council on a charge laid against him by the Mayor, Recorder, 
and Corporation of London, for going about the streets at mid- 
night in unseemly manner, with Thomas Wyatt the younger and 
another companion, breaking windows of the citizens with stone 
bows. He pleaded guilty, and was again sent to the Fleet.. 

T 2 



292 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1524 

There he wrote a whimsical little Satire against the Citizens of 
London, arguing that his object was to warn them of their sins, 
and, since preaching failed, 

"By unknown means it liked me 
My hidden burthen to express 
Whereby it might appear to thee 

That secret sin hath secret spite ; 
From justice' rod no fault is free, 

But that all such as work unright 
In most quiet are next ill rest : 

In secret silence of the night 
This made me with a reckless breast 
To wake thy sluggards with my bow." 

After his second penance in the Fleet, Surrey went a second 
time to the wars. In October, 1543, he joined as a volunteer 
the English force encamped before Landrecy, near Boulogne, in 
aid of the Emperor. After a month's study of the art of war, 
Surrey came home, when the army went into winter quarters. 
Then he began to build a great house, Mount Surrey, at St. 
Leonards, near Norwich. In July, 1544, he went to the wars 
again, and aided his father in the siege of Montreuil, while 
Henry VIII. in person invested and took Boulogne. The siege 
of Montreuil was then raised, and Surrey, as marshal of the 
English camp, conducted the retreat. At the end of the year he 
and the Duke of Norfolk, his father, were again in England. In 
August, 1544, the Earl of Surrey crossed the Channel again; this 
time as commander of the vanguard in an expedition for the 
defence of Boulogne. He was presently in command at Boulogne, 
and so remained till April, 1546, when he was recalled. He 
returned, spoke angrily of the Earl of Hertford (afterwards Pro- 
tector Somerset), whom the king had placed over him, and who 
was at feud with the Howards. For this Surrey underwent a 
short imprisonment in Windsor Castle, but on the 12th of De- 
cember both he and his father were arrested and sent, one by 
land the other by water, to the Tower. They were of royal 
blood, and could be ruined easily by the suggestion to King 
Henry of any shadow of suspicion that after his death they 
might aspire to the throne during the minority of his son Edward. 
Mainly upon a question* of the royal quartering in his arms, as 
he had borne them for years with assent of the heralds, the Earl 
of Surrey was condemned to death as a traitor. His death war- 
rant was nearly the last signed by Henry VIII.; signed with a 
stamp, since the dying king was himself become unable to write. 
Surrey was but thirty years old when he was beheaded on Tower 



TOA.D. 1547.] SURREY'S GERALDINE. 293 

Hill, on the 21st of January, 1547, and the king died within a 
week, leaving the Duke of Norfolk's death warrant unsigned. 

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was impetuous and lively, 
less inclined than Sir Thomas Wyatt to side with the Church 
Reformers, but liberal of mind, bold, frank, incapable of subter- 
fuge or falsehood. His Paraphrases of the first five chapters of 
Ecclesiastes, and of the 8th, 55th, 73rd, and 88th Psalms, show 
the religious side of his English character. The Paraphrases of 
the Psalms were made, as a little poem tells, when justice had 
impressed him with some error of his reckless youth, and 

"Began to work despair of liberty, 
Had not David the perfect warrior taught 
That of my fault thus pardon should be sought." 

Surrey's complaints, sonnets, and other poems in the Italian 
manner, all of love, are more various in their interest but less 
various in their music than those of Wyatt, and contain a few 
touches of mirth, as in the pleasant poem of "A Careless Man 
Scorning and Describing the Subtle Usage of Women towards 
their Lovers," which ends thus : 

" Lord ! what abuse is this ; who can such women praise, 
That for their glory do devise to use such crafty ways ? 
I, that among the rest do sit and mark the row, 
Find that in her is greater craft than is in twenty mo' ; 
Whose tender years, alas ! with wiles so well are sped, 
What will she do when hoary hairs are powdered in her head ? " 

Two of Surrey's sonnets have made it possible to identify the 
Geraldine to whom they were addressed. She was Elizabeth, 
second daughter of Gerald Fitzgerald, ninth Earl of Kildare ; a 
child whose family was attainted for revolt against the crown, 
and whose father was in the Tower when she was brought to 
Hunsdon to be cared for by her second cousin, the Princess Mary. 
This little homeless child was seven years old in the year of 
Surrey's marriage, eight years old when his first son was born. 
According to the custom of addressing sequences of love sonnets 
to anybody whom it was desired to honour, and towards whom 
there was no personal love-suit (ch. iii. § 36; ch. iv. § 11) the Earl 
of Surrey, with kind feeling towards the child, made her his 
Geraldine. When she was about fifteen (in 1543) she married, 
and became Lady Brown. She was but nineteen in the year of 
Surrey's execution, and that was in the lifetime of his wife, who 
survived him twenty years. 

Wyatt and Surrey are said to have been the introducers of 



294 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1524 

the sonnet into English literature, but this credit is due especially 
to Wyatt, not only as the elder man and earlier writer, but as the 
■one of the two who alone gave accurate models of the structure 
of that form of poem. Surrey did not take the trouble to observe 
the rule of rhyming in the octave of two quatrains and the 
sestette of two terzettes which constitute the typical Italian 
sonnet, and his rhymes do not once accord with the system 
from which Petrarch hardly more than once departed, even 
in a slight degree. The true sonnet consists of two quatrains 
and two terzettes. In the two quatrains forming the first eight 
lines there are only two rhymes, with their order fixed for the 
first quatrain, where it is abba, but not for the second. These 
quatrains open the subject. The expression of the thought for 
which the sonnet is written falls within the two terzettes, and 
here vigour of expression is less cramped by restriction in the 
rhyming ; while there are but six lines there are three rhymes, 
and they may be arranged at the discretion of the poet, energy of 
expression being at its height in the last line. Although Surrey's 
sonnets are in fourteen lines, and closely imitate Petrarch's forms 
of thought, yet as to their mechanism they are all at fault. Wyatt 
studied the form of the verse before he imitated, and the true 
sonnet was introduced into our literature by him alone. 

47. The Earl of Surrey, however, stands alone as the first 
English writer of Blank Verse. He translated two books of the 
"y£neid," the second and fourth, into ten-syllabled lines of metre 
without rhyme, and this experiment was founded upon one of the 
new fashions in Italian literature. It may have been imme- 
diately suggested to him by a translation into Italian blank 
verse of the same two books- of Virgil by Cardinal Ippolito 
de' Medici, or more probably by the poet Francesco Maria 
Molza, who allowed the cardinal to take the credit of it. Molza 
was a bright poet in Latin and Italian, who closed in 1544 a life 
shortened by dissipation. The taste for unrhymed verses, 
called versi sciolti (untied or free verses) was new even in Italy. 
In Tuscan literature, unrhymed verse existed, indeed, at the 
outset. It has been said that the prose of Boccaccio in the 
" Decameron " was largely intermixed with " versi sciolti," not 
distinguished from prose in the writing, or afterwards in the 
printing. Among the most notable of early examples was the 
Cantico del Sole (" Canticle of the Sun") by St. Francis of Assisi 
(ch. iii. § 27), which, although written as prose, admits of an 
arrangement into lines of seven and eleven syllables. The 



to A.d. 1547.] THE SONNET. BLANK VERSE. 295 

brethren were also taught to sing it by Fra Pacifico, a poet and 
musician of that time. But the Provencals being incapable of 
this form of verse, the Tuscans almost ceased to use it. At the 
beginning of the sixteenth century, it appeared in Italy with 
the new birth of the drama. The final vowel in Italian makes 
the blank verse answering to ours of ten syllables eleven syl- 
labled, with the last syllable short. Ariosto gave in his come- 
dies great lightness to his verse by making at the end of a line 
two short syllables, instead of one, trip after the last accent. 
This blank measure of his own device is said to be of endeca- 
sillibi sdruccioli (sliding hendecasyllables). Trissino used 
unrhymed lines of eleven syllables, with the last unaccented, in 
his tragedy of Sofonisba, begun about 15 15, and printed in 1529 
(§ 41). Alamanni was another active cultivator of blank verse, and 
used it freely in his Opere Toscane, published in 1532 (§ 43). All 
this was known to the Earl of Surrey, as a reader of the best 
Italian literature of his time. Trissino's attempt to extend the 
use of blank verse to the epic poem in his Italia Liberata, which 
nobody wished to imitate, could have had nothing to do with 
any writing of the Earl of Surrey's, for the first part of that poem 
was not published until some months after Surrey's execution. 
But there were Ariosto's comedies ; there was Trissino's tra- 
gedy ; there were Alamanni' s elegies ; and more particularly 
there was the version of the same two books of Virgil, in Italian 
blank verse, ascribed to the Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici. 
Boscan was introducing blank verse into Spain, among his other 
imitations of Italian fashions (§ 39), at the time when Surrey 
was first writing it in England. The first blank verse in Spain 
was Boscan's version of the story of Hero and Leander, some 
3,000 lines long, published in 1543. 

In Surrey's translation there are passages which seem to show 
that he was acquainted with Gavin Douglas's version of the 
"^Eneid" into heroic couplet, although that work was not printed 
till 1553. Nor were any of the poems of Wyatt or Surrey printed 
before the death of Henry VIII. They were handed about and 
read in written copies. The first collection of them in print was 
made, we shall find, with verse of other poets of less mark, in 1557, 

48. There can be no doubt that the first known English 
comedy, although not printed until 1566, was produced in the 
latter part of the reign of Henry VIII. Its author was 
Nicholas Udall, born in Hampshire, in 1505 or 1506. In 
1520 he was admitted a scholar of Corpus Christi College. 



296 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1534. 

Oxford. He took his degree of B.A. at Oxford, but his known 
goodwill to the Lutherans kept him from proceeding to his 
M.A. until 1534. At Oxford, Leland was among his friends; 
and in 1532, Leland and Udall jointly wrote the Pageant 
exhibited by the Mayor and Citizens of London when Anne 
Boleyn entered the City after her marriage. Udall was at 
that time a schoolmaster. In 1533 he published and dedicated 
to his boys, F lour es for Latin Sfiekynge, selected and gathered 
out of Terence, and the same translated into English. The 
selections were made from the first three comedies of Terence. 
In 1534, Udall, who was highly esteemed for his scholarship, 
was made head master of Eton School; and in 1538 appeared a 
newly-corrected edition of his " Flowers for Latin Speaking,", 
enlarged from no to 192 pages. It was the custom at Eton 
for the boys to act at Christmas some Latin stage-play, chosen 
or written for them by the master. Among the writings 
ascribed to Udall about the year 1540 were several Latin 
comedies, and a tragedy on the Papacy, written probably to be 
acted by his scholars. When it occurred to him to write for 
his boys an English comedy, wherein, as its Prologue says, 

" All scurrility we utterly refuse, 
Avoiding such mirth wherein is abuse,' 

and avowedly following Plautus and Terence, " which among 
the learned at this day bears the bell," he produced what is, as 
far as we know, the first English comedy. Its name is Ralph 
Roister Doister, and it professed to be a wholesome jest against 
vain-glory. " Roisterer " is still northern English for a swag- 
gerer, but the word came in from the old French rustre (" a 
ruffian "). The rusta?'ii were French freebooters of the eleventh 
century. Ralph Roister Doister of UdalPs play is a swaggering 
simpleton, a feeble conceited fop of the days of Henry VI 1 1., 
who is played upon and lived upon by Matthew Merrygreek, a 
needy humourist. The jest of the play was in the absurdities of 
Ralph's suit to Dame Christian Custance, " a widow with a thou- 
sand pound," already betrothed to a merchant, Gavin Goodluck, 
away at sea. The play, in lively rhyming couplets, interspersed 
with a few merry songs, was written with so good a sense of the 
reverence due to boys that it may be read by boys of the present 
day. The incidents provided good matter for merry acting, 
with an occasional burst of active fun, as in a brisk battle lost 
by Ralph and his men to Custance and her women, armed 
with broomsticks. The comedy showed also its origin in a 



toa.d. 1541.J THE FIRST ENGLISH COMEDY. 2QJ 

schoolmaster, by including a good lesson on the importance of 
right pauses in reading. A love-letter sent by Ralph to Dame 
Christian Custance was read to her, with its sense reversed by 
putting the stops in the wrong places, thus : 

" Now by these presents I do you advertise 
That I am minded to marry you in no wise. 
For your goods and substance I could be content 
To take you as ye are. If ye mind to be my wife, 
Ye shall be assured for the time of my life 
I will keep ye right well from good raiment and fare ; 
Ye shall not be kept but in sorrow and care. 
Ye shall in no wise live at your own liberty ; 
Do and say what ye lust, ye shall never please me ; 
But when ye are merry, I will be all sad ; 
When ye are sorry I will be very glad ; 
When ye seek your heart's ease I will be unkind ; 
At no time in me shall ye much gentleness find;" 

and so forth, all reversible by change of punctuation. The last- 
quoted lines seem to be a play upon a verse of Sir Thomas 

Wyatt's— 

" When ye be merry then I am glad, 
When ye be sorry then I am sad ; 
Such a grace or fortune I would I had, 
You for to please howe'er I were bestad." 

If this comedy, as there can be little doubt, was written for 
the Eton boys, its date must be during Udall's time at Eton, 
between 1534 and 1541, when the result of an inquiry into what 
was called a robbery of silver images and plate from the College 
(but the question being of images suggests another view of the 
matter) was Udall's dismissal from the mastership. He was 
then Vicar of Braintree, in Essex, and remained so until 
December, 1544, when he resigned. In 1542, Udall published 
an English translation of the third or fourth books of the 
"Apophthegms of Erasmus," with an introduction and collo- 
quial notes. He was still schoolmaster somewhere. Between 
1542 and 1545 he was translating the Paraphrase of Erasmus 
upon Luke, which he dedicated to Henry's last queen, Catherine 
Parr, by whose " procurement and charge " the other parts of 
the Paraphrase of Erasmus upon the New Testament were being 
Englished. The Princess Mary undertook and partly trans- 
lated the Paraphrase of St John's Gospel, but falling ill, left it 
to be finished by her chaplain. The first volume, containing 
the Gospels and the Acts, was published after King Henry's 
death, in January, 1548. 



290 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1348 

49. There were Masques and Interludes during the reign of 
Henry VIII. Disguisings formed part of the pleasures of a 
court even so early as the reign of Edward III., who kept 
Christmas at Guildford in 1348 with mumming in masks and 
fancy dresses. Francis I. and Henry VIII. took pleasure in 
costly entertainments ; and the more elaborate Masque, intro- 
duced from Italy very early in Henry VIII.'s reign, with charac- 
ters assumed by lords and ladies, first became an important 
feature in court entertainments. The chronicler Edward Hall 
has recorded that, at Greenwich, in 15 12, "on the day of the 
Epiphany at night, the king, with eleven others, was disguised 
after the manner of Italy, called a Mask, a thing not seen before 
in England ; they were appareled in garments long and broad, 
wrought all with gold, with visors and caps of gold. And after 
the banquet done, these masquers came in with six gentlemen 
disguised in silk, bearing staff torches, and desired the ladies to 
dance ; some were content, and some refused ; and after they 
had danced and communed together, as the fashion of the mask 
is, they took their leave, and departed." Holinshed has described 
a masque at Greenwich in Henry VIII.'s time, with mechanical 
contrivances, and action in dumb show. A castle was built in 
the hall of the palace, with towers, gates, battlements, and 
mimic preparations for a siege. It was inscribed on the front 
" Le Fortresse Dangereux." Six ladies, clothed in russet 
satin, overlaid with leaves of gold, and with gold coifs and 
caps, looked from the castle windows. The castle was so 
made that it could be moved about the hall for admiration 
by the company. Then entered the king with five knights in 
embroidered vestments, spangled and plaited with gold. They 
besieged the castle until the ladies surrendered, and came 
out to dance with them. The ladies then led the knights 
into the castle, which immediately vanished, and the company 
retired. 

In these Masques there was dumb-show and dancing, but 
no speaking. Another form of entertainment, " after banquet 
done," or between meat and the banquet or dessert, was the 
Interlude. This was satire in dialogue, ingeniously written for 
the entertainment of the company, and spoken by persons who 
assumed different characters ; but there was no working out of 
a dramatic fable. Generation after generation of Italian 
villagers had been thus entertained in rustic farces. In Spain 
the Constable de Luna, who was executed in 1453, was said by 



roA.D. 1540.] MASQUES AND INTERLUDES. 299 

his chronicler to have had a great deal of inventive faculty, and 
to have been " much given to making inventions and (entremeses) 
interludes for festivals." In France there was the fraternity of 
the Enfci7its sans Souci, formed of lively young men of good 
society, who acted jests upon the follies of their day. They 
were an offshoot from the French Festival of Fools, which 
burlesqued religion in the churches about Christmas time ; but 
passing from the Church to the world, they called Humanity 
" Folly," and their President the " Prince of Fools." Charles 
VI., about the time of the death of Chaucer, had given them 
special privilege to act their jests in public places. There 
were also the Clerks of the Bazoche ; these were the law clerks 
of the palace, whom Philip the Fair had formed in 1303 into a 
half- burlesque guild, called the Bazoche, for judgment of 
disputes between attorneys' clerks, or between them and other 
people. The Clerks of the Bazoche acted farces before the king 
on a marble table at the end of the great hall of the palace. In 
1 5 16 the Bazoche was forbidden to refer to princes and princesses 
of the court ; in 1536 all personality was forbidden under 
penalties ; and in 1538 it was required that the players of these 
entertainments should submit their manuscript to the court 
fifteen days before acting, and omit passages marked by 
the court censor, on pain of prison and corporal punishment. 
Such entertainments, of which, in France, very free use was 
made for political and social satire, were represented at Henry 
VIII.'s court by the Interludes of John Heywood. Two 
printed in 1532 were The Play of Love j or, a New and a very 
Mery Enterlude of all Matter Weathers; and A Mery Play 
between the Pardoner and the Frere, the Curate and Neybour 
Pratte. One published in 1535 was called Of Gentylnes and 
Nobylyte : a Dyaloge between the Marchaunt, the Knyght, and 
the Plowman, compiled in maner of an Enterlude, with divers 
Toys and Gestis added thereto to make Mery Pasty me and 
Disport. Of another, published without date, and called The 
Foure P.s : a very Mery Enterlude of a Palmer, a Pardoner, a 
Potecary, and a Pedlar, the jest was, that after each had 
shown his humours — and here Heywood, although firm to the 
old Church, wrote as contemptuously as Sir David Lindsay of 
the Pardoner's traffic 1 - first rank was to be adjudged by the 
Pedlar to whichever of his three companions excelled in lying, 
since that was, in the way of business, common to all. The 
Palmer won with this : 



300 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1525 

" And this I would ye should understand, 
I have seen women five hundred thousand ; 
And oft with them have some time tarried. 
Yet in all places where I have been, 
Of all the women that I have seen, 
I never saw nor knew in my conscience, 
Any one woman out of patience." 

John Heywood was born perhaps at North Mims, in Hert- 
fordshire, where afterwards he certainly had a home. He was 
opposed to Lutheranism ; and his friendship for Sir Thomas 
More having brought him into the king's favour, he retained it 
by his wit. He remained at court when Edward VI. was king, 
and under Queen Mary, for whom, when a young princess, he 
had shown a particular respect ; but on the accession of Eliza- 
beth he went abroad, and died at Mechlin, in 1565. Besides his 
Interludes, John Heywood wrote six hundred Epigrams. Italian 
influence had bred lively demand at court for ingenious quips 
and turns of speech, which Henry VIII. was clever enough to 
relish. To this reign belonged the collection of A Htmdred 1 
Merry Talcs, first printed about 1525, by John Rastell — a learned 
printer, and author too, who married a sister of Sir Thomas 
More — and the Merry Tales and Quick Answers, printed about 
1535, by Thomas Berthelet. 

50. Another writer of Interludes was John Bale, born in 
14.95, at Cove, in Suffolk, educated among the Carmelites in 
Norwich, and then at Jesus College, Cambridge. Heywood 
was not a Protestant, but Bale became one, and escaped from 
under the papacy of Henry VIII. in England, to live in 
Holland during the last six years of his reign. Henry con- 
demned with equal severity the religious heresy of Lutherans, 
and the political heresy of those who in matters of faith placed 
the pope as an authority above himself. A new edition of 
Fabyan's Chronicle (§ 8), published in 1542, was adapted to the 
times by transforming Becket's epithet of " blessed saint " into 
"traitorous bishop." The word "pope" was changed in it 
throughout to " Bishop of Rome." Everything was omitted or 
altered that tended to encourage houses of religion, penance, 
pilgrimages, or the preservation of relics, or spoke of the con- 
tempt of shrines as an offence. 

A later chronicler than Fabyan was Edward Hall, born 
in Shropshire at the end of the fifteenth century. He was in 
1 5 14 scholar of King's College, Cambridge, but removed to 
Oxford; about 15 18, Hall entered at Gray's Inn, was called to 



toa.d. 1542.] HALL'S CHRONICLE. SCHOLARSHIP. 301 

the bar, became Common Serjeant and Under Sheriff, and in 
1540 one of the judges of the Sheriff's Court. His career 
belonged entirely to the reign of Henry VIII., and he died in 

1547. His history of The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre 
Families of Lancastre and Yorke, commonly called Hall's 
Chrotiicle, ended with the year 1532. It was first published in 

1548, after its author's death, by Richard Grafton, who said 
that " Hall dying, and being in his latter time not so painful 
and studious as he ought to have been," Grafton himself under- 
took the completion of it. This was a forbidden book under 
Philip and Mary. 

51. English scholarship was best represented in the latter 
part of Henry VIII.'s reign by Roger Ascham, with whom we 
shall presently pass to later times ; and by John Cheke and 
Thomas Smith, neither of them knighted before Henry's 
death. They were born in the same year, 15 14; Cheke at 
Cambridge, Smith at Saffron Walden, in Essex. Both studied 
at Cambridge, Cheke at St. John's College, and Smith at Queen's ; 
both became famous at the University as students — and, while 
still young men, teachers — of Greek. They worked together as 
reformers of the method of pronunciation, and excited a warm 
controversy on the subject. Greek, as received into England 
from the teaching of the learned refugees (ch. v. § 25, 30), was 
pronounced after their fashion ; £ was pronounced like our v, 
<€ and a: were pronounced alike, and #, 1, v had the same 
sound. Cheke and Smith declared this to be a modern 
Greek corruption of the ancient language, and proposed to 
give each letter value. They began by partial use of their 
new system of pronunciation in the course of lectures. When 
this had provoked question, each appointed a day for the 
explanation of his views, and both won followers. Students of 
Cambridge then acted the " Plutus" of Aristophanes pronounced 
in the new manner, and, six years later, when Dr. Ratcliff tried 
the old way he was hissed. He appealed to the Chancellor of 
the University. This was Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Win- 
chester, who addressed to Cheke an admonition that conceded 
high respect to him as a scholar, but condemned the youthful 
fervour with which he was spreading heresy against the estab- 
lished form of Greek pronunciation among students of the Uni- 
versity. Gardiner then exercised his authority as Chancellor 
by issuing, in 1542, an edict settling the true faith in Greek 
vowels and diphthongs as absolutely as King Henry VIII. 



302 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1505 

settled it for his subjects in all other matters. Cheke held his 
own, and replied with a treatise, De Pronuntiatione Linguce 
Gracce, which was published afterwards in 1555. Smith wrote 
also a sensible letter on the subject, and the Chancellor's decrees 
were not obeyed. 

At the age of two -and -twenty, Cheke had published an 
English tract, called " A Remedy for Sedition, wherein are con- 
tained many things concerning the true and loyal obeisance that 
Commons owe unto their Prince and Sovereign Lord the King." 
In later days his loyalty and his fame as a scholar caused him 
to be appointed tutor to Prince Edward. 

52. Sir David Lindsay, of the Mount, after the death of 
James V., went officially to deliver back to Charles V., in the 
Netherlands, the late king's badge of the order of the Golden 
Fleece. In 1544-6 he sat in three Parliaments as member for 
Cupar. Luther died on the 18th of February, 1546. On the 
28th of May, in the same year, occurred the event moralised by 
Lindsay in his poem called " The Tragedie of the vmqtihylle " 
(whilom) " maist reverend father, David, be the mercy of God, 
Cardinal and Archibyschope of Sanct Androvs, v &c. Here 
Lindsay told in Chaucer's seven-lined stanza how, when he was 
sitting in his oratory, reading Boccaccio on the " Falls of 
Illustrious Men " (ch. v. § 13), there appeared to him 

" Ane woundit man, aboundantlie bledyng, 
With visage pail!, and with ane dedlye cheir, 
Semand ane man of two-and-fyftie yeir ; 
In rayment reid clothet full curiouslie, 
Off vellot and of saiting c 



"With feeble voice, as man opprest with pain," he declared 
himself to be the late Cardinal Beaton, and told the story of his 
life, and of his fall from the height of power. He was slain, and 
his body, salted and closed in a box, lay for seven months in a 
dunghill without Christian burial. Let all my brother prelates, 
said the ghost, amend their lives, remembering that they will be 
called to account for everything belonging to their cures : 

" Ye prelat, quhilk hes thousandis for to spende, 
Ye send ane sempyll freir for you to preche : 
It is your craft — I mak it yow to kend — 
Your selfis in your templis for to teche." 

The death of Beaton brought together Knox and Lindsay, for 
Lindsay was then among those who persuaded Knox to his first 
preaching. 



to a.d. i S4 6.] JOHN KNOX. 303 

53. John Knox was born in 1505, at Gifford, in East 
Lothian. He was educated in the Grammar School at Had- 
dington, and in 1522 matriculated in St. Andrew's University, 
which then had John Mair (§ 33) for its provost. He took 
priests' orders, but was drawn to the side of the Reformers ; and 
became the friend and follower of George Wishart, a Scottish 
schoolmaster, who, about 1536, began to preach as a Reformer. 
Wishart went to England and recanted, but, recovering more 
than his old boldness, came back to Scotland in 1543, and, 
though of gentle character, preached with intense enthusiasm. 
Thus he stirred among the people violent antagonism to the 
practices that he denounced, so that they wept over them in 
themselves, and raged at them in others. John Knox, to 
protect his beloved preacher, whose assassination had been 
once attempted, waited upon him bearing a two-handed sword. 
Flesh and blood went for little in the growing heat of spiritual 
conflict. On the 20th of November, 1541, at Geneva, Calvin's 
ecclesiastical and moral code was established. Under this 
code it was forbidden to read " Amadis of Gaul," or any 
romances. Three children were solemnly punished for stopping 
outside to eat apples after service had begun. In 1568 a child 
was beheaded for having struck her parents. A lad of sixteen 
was sentenced to death for only threatening to strike his mother. 
And this was called the " Yoke of Christ." Knox was tutor to 
the sons of the lairds of Niddrie and Ormiston. When Wishart 
was seized as a heretic, Knox desired to share his fate ; " Nay," 
said Wishart, " return to your bairns " (his pupils), " and God 
bless you. One is enough for a sacrifice." Wishart's martyr- 
dom, in March, 1545, witnessed by Beaton from his velvet 
cushions at a window of the castle of St. Andrew's, was followed 
in May, 1546, by the murder of Beaton. This had been for two 
years the subject of a conspiracy, of which both Wishart and 
King Henry VIII. had an assenting knowledge. To Wishart 
and others plot of such a murder was honest question of 
hewing Agag in pieces. Beaton's deathblow was prefaced by 
the man who dealt it with a deliberate speech, declaring it to be 
about to fall " only because thou hast been, and remainest, an 
obstinate enemy against Christ Jesus and His Gospel." The 
sixteen men who had surprised Beaton in his castle held it, and 
welcomed into it all men whose zeal for Reformed opinions 
brought them within the danger of the Scottish hierarchy. The 
chief murderers of Beaton, Henry's most vigorous political 



3©4 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.D. 1540 

antagonist in Scotland, received pensions from the King of 
England ; and the garrison — Castilians as they were called — in 
the strong castle by the sea, received also supplies of money 
and victuals from Henry VIII. In April, 1547, Knox joined the 
Castilians. Sir David Lindsay also went among them. Their 
chaplain had been worsted in argument by an orthodox dean. 
Knox came to the rescue with his pen. Then many of them 
urged Knox to preach. He had renounced his priests' orders, 
and said he had no vocation ; but it was urged on him that every 
congregation has an inherent right to call any qualified person 
to be its teacher. So Knox began his preaching. In August 
of the same year a French squadron obliged the garrison to 
capitulate, and Knox became for two years a prisoner in the 
French galleys. When on one occasion an image of the Virgin 
was brought round for the prisoners to kiss, Knox said, 
" Trouble me not. Such an idol is accursed, therefore I will 
not touch it." When it was forced on him, he threw it into the 
river, saying, " Let Our Lady now save herself. She is light 
enough ; let her swim." 

54. The Scottish Reformers of those days completed "A 
Compendious Book of Godly and Spiritual Songs y collected out of 
sundrie parts of Scripture, with sundrie of other ballates changed 
out of prophaine sangis," and set the best of the gay tunes to 
new words, breathing love of God or defiance of the pope, in 
this fashion : 

" The paip, that pagane full of pryd, 

Hee hes us blinded lang ; 
For where the blind the blind doe gyde, 

No wonder both goe wrang. 
Of all iniquitie, 

Like prince and king, hee led the ring. 
Hay trix, trim goe trix, under the greenwode tree." 

On New Year's-day, 1540, when Francis I. and Charles V. 
rode into Paris together, and Sir Thomas Wyatt (§ 43), Ambas- 
sador Extraordinary from England, was commissioned to search 
quietly into the minds of those two princes, Clement Marot 
presented to King Francis his translation of thirty of the Psalms 
of David set to light song tunes or airs from the vaudevilles. 
Marot translated twenty more ; they became even fashionable 
substitutes for songs on idler themes. Calvin adopted them — 
when set to graver strains, written specially for them by 
Guillaume Franc — for use in the churches of Geneva, and 
published them with a preface of his own, in which he com- 



TOA.D. I545-] ROGER ASCHAM. 305 

mended the fit use of Church music. In England Thomas 
Sternhold felt the new impulse, and translated during Henry 
VIII.'s reign some of the Psalms into English. Sternhold was 
born in Hampshire, and after education at Oxford, became 
groom of the robes to Henry VIII., who liked him well enough 
to bequeath him a hundred marks. He desired to do with his 
psalms in England what had been done in France by Marot, 
" thinking thereby that the courtiers would sing them instead of 
their sonnets, but did not, only some few excepted," whose 
religion we respect more than their taste. 

55. We now pass out of the reign of Henry VIII. with 
Hoger Ascham, who was born, about the year 15 15, at 
Kirkby Wiske, near Northallerton, in Yorkshire. His father, 
house steward in the family of Lord Scrope, had two daughters 
and three sons. Young Roger Ascham was educated by Sir 
Humphrey Wingfield, of whom he said afterwards, " This wor- 
shipful man hath ever loved, and used to have many children 
brought up in learning in his house, amonges whom I myself 
was one, for whom at term times he would bring down from 
London both bow and shafts. And when they should play he 
would go with them himself into the field, see them shoot, and he 
that shot fairest should have the best bow and shafts, and he 
that shot ill-favouredly should be mocked of his fellows till he 
shot better. Would to God all England had used or would use 
to lay the foundation of youth after the example of this worship- 
ful man in bringing up children in the Book and the Bow ; by 
which two things the whole commonwealth, both in peace and 
war, is chiefly valid and defended withal." Sir Humphrey 
was enforcing the spirit of the law that required all boys 
between seven and seventeen to be provided with a long-bow 
and two arrows ; every Englishman older than seventeen to 
provide himself with a bow and four arrows ; and every bowyer 
to make at least two cheap bows for every dear one. At fifteen 
Roger Ascham became a student at St. John's College, Cam- 
bridge. He took his B.A. in 1534; obtained a fellowship in his 
college; and in 1537 became a college lecturer on Greek. He 
was at home for a couple of years after 1540, during which 
time he obtained a pension of forty shillings from the Arch- 
bishop of York. It ceased at the archbishop's death, in 
1544. In that year, 1544, Ascham wrote Toxophilus, and". 
lost his parents, who both died on the same day. In 1545,. 
being then twenty-nine years old, he presented " Toxophilus '* 

U 1 



306 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1545 

to the king, at Greenwich, and was rewarded with a pension of 
ten pounds. 

" Toxophilus " was a scholar's book, designed to encourage 
among all gentlemen and yeomen of England the practice of 
archery for defence of the realm. The treatise was divided into 
two books of dialogue between Philologus and Toxophilus ; the 
first book containing general argument to commend shooting, 
the second a particular description of the art of shooting with 
the long-bow. Ascham argued for it as a worthy recreation — 
one very fit for scholars — that in peace excludes ignoble 
pastimes, and in war gives to a nation strength. Men should 
seek, he said, to excel in it, and make it a study. Then he pro- 
ceeded in the second part of his work to treat it as a study. 
The book was published in 1545, with a dedication to Henry 
VIII., and a preface, in which Ascham justified his use of 
English. To have written in another tongue would, he said, 
have better advanced his studies and his credit ; but he wished 
to be read by the gentlemen and yeomen of England. He could 
not surpass what others had done in Greek and Latin ; while 
English had usually been written by ignorant men so meanly, 
both for the matter and handling, that no man could do worse. 
Ascham was, in his preface to " Toxophilus," the first to suggest 
that English prose might be written with the same scholarly 
care that would be required for choice and ordering of words if 
one wrote Latin. "He that will write well in any tongue," said 
Ascham, " must follow this counsel of Aristotle, to speak as the 
common people do, to think as wise men do; and so should 
every man understand him. and the judgment of wise men allow 
him. Many English writers have not done so, but using 
strange words as Latin, French and Italian, do make all things 
dark and hard. Once I communed with a man which reasoned 
the English tongue to be enriched and increased thereby, 
saying, 'Who will not praise that feast where a man shall drink 
at a dinner both wine, ale, and beer ? ' ' Truly/ quod I, ' they be 
all good, every one taken by himself alone, but if you put 
malmsey and sack, red wine and white, ale and beer, and all in 
one pot, you shall make a drink neither easy to be known, nor 
yet wholesome for the body.' " The manly simplicity of 
Ascham's own English is in good accord with his right 
doctrine. His Latin was so well esteemed that in the year 
after the appearance of " Toxophilus " he succeeded Cheke as 
Public Orator, and wrote the official letters of the University. 



toa.d. I553-] REIGN OF EDWARD VI. 307 

Ascham was famous also for his penmanship, and taught 
writing to the prince whose reign we now pass into, Edward 
VI. (1547-1553), at the date of his accession, between nine and 
ten years old. The Earl of Hertford was made Protector, as 
Duke of Somerset. Under Edward VI., Ascham had his 
pension confirmed and augmented. In 1548 he became tutor 
to the Princess Elizabeth, at Cheston, but he was annoyed by 
her steward, and had therefore returned to the University 
when, in 1550, he was through Cheke's good offices appointed 
secretary to Sir Richard M orison, then going as Ambassador 
to Charles V. He reached Augsburg in October, was away 
more than a year, and published in 1553 a Report and Discourse 
written by Roger Aschatn, of the Affairs and State of Germany 
and the Emperor Charles his Court, ditring certain years while 
the said Roger was there. 

56. John Cheke (§ 51), who had assisted for the last three 
years in Edward's education, was a great scholar himself, and a 
cause of scholarship in others who earned reputation and 
looked back to him with gratitude. He was knighted by King 
Edward, and had grants of land. He became also in this reign 
a privy councillor and secretary of state. Sir John Cheke drew 
force for the real work of life out of his studies. He was 
especially familiar with Demosthenes, and said that the study 
of him taught Englishmen how to speak their minds. 

Thomas Smith (§ 51), who had been travelling among 
the Universities of France and Italy towards the close of Henry 
VIII.'s reign, and took the doctor's degree at Padua, was, after 
the accession of Edward VI., made Provost of Eton; in 1548 
he was knighted. Sir Thomas Smith became, like his friend 
Sir John Cheke, a secretary of state under Edward, and he was 
employed as an ambassador. 

57. In the first year of the new rule the Protector Somerset 
endeavoured to compel the union of North and South by 
enforcing Henry VIII.'s policy of a marriage between Edward 
of England and Mary Queen of Scots. " If we two," he wrote, 
of the two countries, " being made one by amity, be most able 
to defend us against all nations, and having the sea for wall, the 
mutual love for garrison, and God for defence, should make so 
noble and well-agreeing a monarchy that neither in peace we 
may be ashamed nor in war afraid of any worldly or foreign 
power, why should not you be as desirous of the same and have 
as much cause to rejoice at it as we ? " John Knox was in the 

U 2 



308 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1553. 

French galleys ; the old hierarchy ruled in Scotland. There 
Reformation was under foot ; in England its friends were 
supreme. Accord was impossible. There was one more shock 
of arms, and a defeat of Scots at the Battle of Pinkie. 

Of Sir David Lindsay there is little more to tell. He 
had written, probably before the accession of Edward VI., his 
Historie of Squire William Meldrum, umquhile laird of 
Cleische and Bynnis, a whimsical burlesque romance that is not 
all burlesque, of a valiant Scottish squire of Lindsay's own 
time, with a taste in it of Chaucer's Sir Thopas, or rather of the 
Italian half-mocking treatment of heroic song, and an after 
relish of strong national self-satisfaction. This is the best of 
Lindsay's lighter strains. His last work was his longest, and 
supremely grave — The Mo7iarchie : a Dialogue betwixt Ex- 
perience and a Courtier, of the Miserable Estate of the World 
— finished in 1553. The first line of its Epistle to the Reader 
called it a " lytil quair of mater miserabyll." There was, alas, 
no king to dedicate it to, but it was submitted to the rulers and 
priests, praying them to Christianise the laws, and remember 
that Scotland suffered war, famine, and pestilence for sin. The 
Word of God must be taught, and the people repent of sin, « 
before their enemies could have no might against the Christian 
banner. He divided his poem into a Prologue and Four Books. 
The Prologue, in Chaucer's stanza, told how the poet went into 
a park on a May morning, and, delighted with the beauty of 
Nature, dwelt upon the miseries of man. He invoked no pagan 
muse, for he had never slept upon Parnassus, or drunk with 
Hesiod of Helicon, the source of Eloquence. If any Muse were 
invoked it might be Rhamnusia, Goddess of Dispute ; but, he 
said : 

" I mon go seik ane muse more confortabyll, 
And sic vaine superstitioun to refuse, 
Beseikand the gret God to be my muse." 

The mount to which he betook himself was not Parnassus but 
Calvary ; his fountain was the stream that flowed, and flows 
yet through the world from wounds of Christ upon the Cross. 
In that stream bathe me, he prayed, and make me clean from 
sin — 

And grant me grace to wrytt nor dyte no thing 

Bot tyll his heych honour and loude louyng ; 

But" (i.e., without) " whose support thare may na gud be wrocht 

Tyll his plesure, gude worlds, word nor thocht." 



a-D. I553-] LINDSAY'S "MONARCHIES' 309 

After such Prologue, Lindsay told in his first book — this and the 
rest of the poem being in octosyllabic rhyme — how there came 
to him, the Courtier, walking in the park, an old man named 
Experience, of whom he asked comforting counsel. Experience 
taught that the love of God and of Christ, who died for men, 
gave comfort among the troubles that have come by sin. After 
an exclamation to the reader, on his writing in his mother 
tongue, which led to a requirement that the clergy should teach, 
and that the books necessary to the spiritual life of men 
should be translated into the language of the people, Lindsay 
made Experience tell the Courtier in the rest of Book I. how 
Adam fell, and the Flood came, through sin ; in Book II., how 
in the great monarchy of Nineveh the first war was begun " by 
cruel, prideful, covetous kings " seeking wrongfully to plunder 
one another. There were four great monarchies — the Assyrian, 
Persian, Greek, and Roman. Ninus also invented image- 
worship ; and thus Lindsay passed to long lament for the 
idolatry in Scotland of his time. Of Ninus and his burial, and 
of the miserable ends of Semiramis and Sardanapalus, Lindsay 
told in his second book. In his third book he told of the 
destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities of the plain, 
and shortly of the second, third, and fourth monarchies, with the 
miserable destruction of Jerusalem ; and lastly, of the spiritual 
and papal monarchy. Under this head appeared again the 
grief of the poor man whose three cows would be taken by 
the Church if he, his wife, and their eldest child should die, so 
that the little children would be left orphan and destitute. 
Lindsay's third book of the Monarchy ended with a description 
of the court of Rome. The fourth book, after dialogue on 
duty and on death, described Antichrist, the day of judgment, 
bliss of heaven, and the final monarchy of Christ. David 
Lindsay was a poet of the same national type as John Gower. 
He had not the artistic genius of Dunbar, as Gower had not the 
artistic genius of Chaucer ; but Gower and Lindsay had a like 
sense of God and duty, a depth of eartnestness that was itself a 
power, a practical aim, and a directness in pursuit of it, that 
caused each in didactic poetry to " write the ills he saw." The 
points of difference are manifest ; especially there was in 
Lindsay a vein of humour, which also belongs to the people 
whom he represented, but of which Gower seems to have had 
less than his share. 

Sir David Lindsay, as Lion King of Arms, held a chapter of 



3 JO A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1548 

heralds in January 1555, and that is the last record of his life. 
It is not known when he died, or where he was buried ; but it 
may be added that in that year 1555 his " Satire of the Three 
Estates " was acted again before Queen, Court, and Commons. 

58. The general pardon usual at a coronation ended at the 
coronation of Edward VI. the persecution under the Six 
Articles. A Book of Homilies, which had been suggested in the 
preceding reign to secure uniformity of preaching, was now 
executed by Archbishop Cranmer and his colleagues. Twelve 
Homilies were produced and " appointed by the king's majesty 
to be declared and read by all parsons, vicars, or curates, every 
Sunday, in their churches where they have cure." There was 
an English visitation during the Scotch war to ascertain how 
far in each parish images were removed ; pilgrimages, offerings, 
and superstitious holidays abolished ; the Lord's Prayer, and the 
Ten Commandments, and the Articles of Faith taught to the 
young ; and the great Bible, in English, made accessible in some 
convenient part of every church. Some associated the two facts 
Lhat ten thousand Scots fell at Pinkie, and that there was a 
great destruction of images in London upon the same day. 
Cranmer had chosen Erasmus's Paraphrase of the New Testa- 
ment for translation. It had been for some time in hand, and 
was now to form two folio volumes produced at the public 
expense, and set up in churches for an aid in the instruction of 
the people. Upon this work we left Nicholas Udall busy 
(§ 48). The first volume, containing the Gospels and the Acts 
of the Apostles, appeared in January, 1548. Udall, who had 
translated the Paraphrase of St. Luke's Gospel, placed the texts 
throughout that Gospel, and the others (except Mark), to show 
how they corresponded with the Paraphrase. He wrote also an 
Introduction to the Gospels, in three letters, one to King 
Edward, one to the Reader, and one to Queen Catherine 
Parr. The other volume appeared in August, 1549, with a 
preface by Miles Coverdale (§ 26, 29) and John Olde. 
Co verdale was now Almoner to Queen Catherine, and in 1551 
was made Bishop of Exeter. 

The first measure of the Parliament of 1549 was an Act for 
Uniformity of Service, which established the use of an English 
Book of 'Common Prayer (known as "The First Service Book") 
in English Churches. Richard Grafton (§ 50) was one of its two 
authorised printers, and the issue began in March, 1549. With 
some variations made in an edition of 1552, called "The Second 



to a.d. 1549. ] CHURCH RE FORM A TION. 3 1 1 

Service Book," this volume was in its main features that which 
is still used by the Church of England. In the First Book the 
service began with the Lord's Prayer. All that now stands 
before this was added in the Second Book. The reading of 
the Ten Commandments was placed in the Communion, and 
there were other occasional changes, such as that in the Burial 
Service, of prayers for the dead into thanksgivings. 

On Whit-Sunday, 1549, the Act for Uniformity of Service 
came into operation. In Devonshire the people forcibly 
opposed the disuse of the old method of religious service, which 
had become associated with their daily sense of God. Exeter 
itself was besieged. There was armed insurrection, cruelly 
suppressed. In Norfolk rebellion began in July, and under 
Robert Ket, tanner, of Wymondham, there was war against the 
system of enclosures that oppressed the poor. Sir Thomas 
More had dwelt on this evil in his " Utopia ;" Simon Fyshe had 
touched upon it in his " Supplication for the Beggars " — men 
made beggars by the religious orders (§ 22). A supplication to 
Parliament in Henry VIII.'s time showed that in Oxfordshire 
there were fewer ploughs by forty than there had been. A 
plough kept six persons ; and where those forty ploughs had fed 
240 persons there were only sheep. The disuse of tillage and 
the throwing of fields together into large pasturages was to a 
small class a source of wealth, obtained by the service of few 
shepherds, instead of many ploughmen and field-labourers. 
Old farm-servants were turned out, and their homes were 
levelled. It was said that in each of fifty thousand towns, 
villages, and hamlets, there was an average loss of one plough 
since the beginning of the reign of Henry VII. That, it was 
argued, meant three hundred thousand broken men, some driven 
to beg, others to steal and die upon the gallows. When the 
religious houses had joined lands together, and helped to create 
the suffering, they yet, by their systematic almsgiving, and by 
serving as hospitals, chance lodgings and asylums for the sick 
and destitute, allayed the pain of wounds that were in part of 
their own making. The breaking up of such houses destroyed 
their charitable organisation, and though laws were made to 
require employment of field-labour, these were evaded, and the 
people suffered on without assuagement of their griefs. This 
was what caused the poor people of Norfolk to feel that they 
were being devoured by the rich ; to pull down the enclosures 
to which they attributed their misery, gather themselves into 



312 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1548 

camp on Mousehold Heath and Mount Surrey, there holding 
rude council under an oak, which they called " The Tree of 
Reformation." Their hopeless protest ended in disaster on the 
27th of August. Upon the claim of the Devonshire men for 
restoration of the Mass, of the abbey lands, and of the law of the 
Six Articles, Nicholas Udall (§ 48) published in 1549 "An 
Answer to the Articles of the Commoners of Devonshire and 
Cornwall, declaring to the same howe they have been seduced 
by evell persons, and howe their consciences may be satysfyed 
and stayed concerning the sayd artycles, sette forth by a country- 
man of theirs, much tendering the wealth bothe of their bodyes 
and solles." Udall at this time preached actively. He translated 
in 1 55 1 Peter Martyr's tract on the Eucharist, and in the same 
year was admitted to a Prebend of Windsor. He published 
Latin letters and poems ; edited also a folio of T. Geminie's 
" Anatomy;" still preaching constantly: and in March 1553, 
was made rector of Calbourne, in the Isle of Wight. 

Thomas Sternhold (§ 54), who died in 1 549, published in 
1548 Certayne Psalms, only nineteen in number. In 1549 there 
appeared, with a dedication to Edward VI., a new edition of All 
such Psalms of David as Thomas Sternhold, late grome of the 
Kinges Majesty es robes, did in his lyfe tiine drawe into Englysshe 
metre. This contained thirty-seven Psalms by Sternhold, and 
seven by John Hopkins, a Suffolk clergyman and school- 
master, who joined in his labour. To an edition of 1 55 1, Hopkins 
added seven more psalms of his own. Hopkins and others then 
worked on with the desire to produce a complete version of the 
Psalms of David into a form suited for congregational singing. 

59. Hugh Latimer (§ 28, 29), when Edward VI. came to 
the throne, was released from the Tower, and preached at Paul's 
Cross his first sermon after an eight years' silence, on the first 
of January, 1548. A few days later the House of Commons 
proposed his restoration to the Bishopric of Worcester ; but 
this he declined. In March of the same year Latimer began to 
preach before larger audiences, from a pulpit set up in the 
king's private garden at Westminster. His extant Sermon on 
the Ploughers — the teachers and preachers of religion — was 
delivered at St. Paul's, in January, 1549. In March and April of 
the same year — on the Fridays in Lent — he preached Seven 
Sermons before Edward VI., two on " The Duty of a King," one 
on " The Unjust Judge," two on " The Lawfulness of Kings," and 
one on " The Agony in the Garden." These were followed by his 



TOA.D. IS53-] HUGH LATIMER. 3lj 

farewell sermon before Edward. Latimer seems to have been 
in Lincolnshire during the rest of the reign of Edward VI., and 
there, in the autumn of 1552, at Grimsthorpe Castle, before the 
Duchess of Suffolk, he preached his Seven Sermons on the 
Lord's Prayer, which, with another series of twenty- one 
Sermons preached in Lincolnshire, have been preserved. 
Latimer's preaching was essentially English ; homely, practical, 
and straight to its purpose. There was no speculative refine- 
ment, but a simple sense of duty to be done for love of God. 
He pointed distinctly to the wrongs he preached against. After 
three of his Lent sermons before the king, three hundred and 
seventy-three pounds retained dishonestly were restored to the 
State by certain of the king's officers. He enlivened his 
admonition with shrewd sayings, recollections of life, genial 
humour. In many respects Latimer personified the spiritual 
life of the work-a-day Englishman. In his fifth sermon on the 
Lord's Prayer, when he was arguing that the true religious 
houses had not been pulled down, he said, " I read once a story 
of a holy man, some say it was St. Anthony, which had been a 
long season in the wilderness, eating nor drinking nothing but 
bread and water ; at the length, he thought himself so holy that 
there should be nobody like unto him. Therefore, he desired of 
God to know who should be his fellow in heaven. God made 
him answer, and commanded him to go to Alexandria, there 
he should find a cobbler which should be his fellow in heaven. 
So he went thither and sought him out, and fell acquainted with 
him, and tarried with him three or four days to see his con- 
versation. In the morning his wife and he prayed together, 
then they went to their business, he in his shop, and she about 
her housewifery. At dinner-time they had bread and cheese, 
wherewith they were well content, and took it thankfully. Their 
children were well taught to fear God, and to say their Pater- 
noster, and the Creed, and the Ten Commandments, and so he 
spent his time in doing his duty truly. I warrant you he did 
not so many false stitches as cobblers do nowadays. St. 
Anthony perceiving that, came to the knowledge of himself, and 
laid away all pride and presumption. By this example you 
may learn that honest conversation and godly living is much 
regarded before God, insomuch that this poor cobbler, doing his 
duty diligently, was made St. Anthony's fellow." 

Edmund Spenser was born in 1552 or 1553. 

60. In the reign of Queen Mary (1553— 1558), soon after her 



314 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1555 

proclamation, Latimer was brought from Lincolnshire, and lodged 
on the 13th of September in the Tower. On the 14th Cranmer 
also was sent to the Tower. As Latimer passed through 
Smithfield he said that the place had long groaned for him. In 
the following March, 1554, Hugh Latimer, with Thomas 
Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Nicholas Ridley, 
Bishop of London, was tranferred to a prison at Oxford. There 
were to be public disputations between those in power and the 
accused prisoners. Latimer was baited on the 18th of April. 
Age and infirmity, a mind never practised in scholastic disputa- 
tion, and the practical fact that the dispute was a form with its 
end predetermined, caused Latimer to content himself with a 
declaration that he held fast by his faith. After trial, under a 
commission issued by Cardinal Pole, Latimer and Ridley were 
burnt at Oxford, on the 16th of October, 1555. When the 
lighted fagot was placed at the feet of Ridley, Latimer ex- 
claimed : " Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the 
man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in 
England as I trust shall never be put out." 

Miles Cover-dale (§ 26, 29, 58), made Bishop of Exeter 
under Edward VI., was deprived and imprisoned by Queen Mary 
before he went abroad ; and after many wanderings, settled at 
Geneva, where he was still active in Bible translation. 

John Fox, who in later years compiled a painful record 
of the persecutions for religion in his time, was born in 15 17, 
at Boston, in Lincolnshire. He was educated at Brazenose 
College, Oxford, and became fellow of Magdalene. He wrote 
Latin plays on Scriptural subjects before he devoted himself 
wholly to the great religious controversies of his day. Then he 
studied Hebrew, read the Greek and Latin fathers, was accused 
in- 1545 of heresy, and was expelled from college. He next 
lived with Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlcote, near Stratford-on- 
Avon, as tutor to his children ; then he came to London, and 
after the execution of the Earl of Surrey, John Fox was 
employed as tutor to his children. At the beginning of Mary's 
reign Fox was protected by the Duke of Norfolk, but he 
presently escaped to Basle, where he lived as correcter of the 
press for the printer Oporinus, and resolved to write his 
Martyrology. 

We need not dwell on the reaction against Church Reformers 
in the reign of Mary. The best thought of the country was not 
with it, and it gave nothing to English literature but the quicker 



toa.d. 155S.J REIGN OF MARY. 315 

spirit of antagonism that embittered controversy in succeeding 
years. In January, 1554, Sir Thomas Carew failed in a demon- 
stration against Queen Mary's union with Philip of Spain, son 
of the Emperor Charles V. Before the end of the month, Sir 
Thomas Wyatt the younger, son of the poet, headed insurrection 
against the proposed marriage, marched to London, and there 
yielded himself prisoner on the 7th of February. He was 
executed on the nth of April. Mary was married to Philip of 
Spain on the 25th of June. In 1555 seventy-one heretics were 
executed ; in 1556, eighty-three ; in 1557, eighty-eight; in 1558, 
forty. 

John Heywood (§ 49), who had not been banished from 
court in the reign of Edward VI., and who had shown real 
liking for Queen Mary when she was a princess, in her father's 
lifetime, remained at her court, and had her confidence. After 
her death he went abroad, and died at Mechlin in 1565. 

Nicholas Udall (§ 48, 58) also retained Maiy's good-will. 
He had spoken highly of her in a special Prologue to her part 
of the translation from Erasmus's New Testament Paraphrase, 
and he was employed, by her warrant, in directing a dramatic 
entertainment for the feast of her coronation ; also in preparing 
dialogues and interludes to be performed before her. In 1554 
or 1555, Udall was made head master of the school settled at 
Westminster by Henry VIII., in 1540. In November, 1556, 
Mary re-established the monastery, and there was an end of 
UdalFs office, but a month later there was an end also of his 
life. 

Sir Thomas Smith (§ 51, 56) under Mary was deprived 
of all his offices, but had for his learning a pension of ^100. 

Sir John Cheke (§ 51, 56), at the death of Edward VI., was 
one of those who sought to secure the succession of Lady Jane 
Grey. He was sent to the Tower, but for his learning his 
life was saved, and he was permitted to leave England. While 
abroad his estates were confiscated. He was seized by Philip 
at Brussels, and sent to England, where he escaped death by 
recantation. The queen then gave him means of life, but made 
life a torture by compelling him to sit on the bench at the 
judgment and condemnation of those heretics who did not faint 
in the trial of their faith. His age was but forty-three when he 
died, in September, 1557. 

Two books were printed by Richard Tottel in 1557, namely. 
Totter s Miscellany ; and a Hundreth Good Pointes of Husband- 



3l6 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1540 

rie, by Thomas Tusser. Tottel's Miscellany was a collection 
of verses, known in society, but never before published, by 
the Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and others. Thomas 
Tusser's poem was the first edition of a work afterwards much 
enlarged. These were new books at the accession of Elizabeth, 
and are related to the early literature of her reign. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH. 

I. On New Year's-day, 1540, when Francis I. and Charles V. 
rode into Paris together (ch. vi. § 43, 54), the Emperor was on 
his way through France to punish Ghent. The Netherlands 
passed in 1477 to Austria, by marriage of Mary of Burgundy 
with Archduke Maximilian. Charles V. was born of marriage 
between Archduke Philip, heir by right of his mother to the 
Netherlands, and Joanna, who being the second daughter of 
Ferdinand and Isabella, was, after the death of intervening per- 
sons, heir to the monarchies of Spain. Thus Charles acquired 
by inheritance both Spain, which was essentially Catholic, and 
the Netherlands, with a population kindred to our own. 

The seventeen provinces of the Netherlands differed in 
character and constitution, but they all sent deputies to a States- 
General, which had no power of taxation, and acknowledged 
appeals to a Supreme Tribunal at Mechlin. Four of these pro- 
vinces were duchies — Brabant, Limburg, Luxemburg, and 
Guelderland; seven were counties — Flanders, Holland, Zealand, 
Artois, Hainault, Namur, and Zutphen ; five were seigniories — 
Friesland, Mechlin, Utrecht, Overyssel, and Groningen ; and the 
seventeenth — Antwerp — was a margraviate. Charles was him- 
self born and bred in Flanders ; he talked Flemish and favoured 
Flemings. The Netherlanders, therefore, liked him, though 
their temper was republican, and his was a despotic rule. He 
taxed them heavily because they were more prosperous than 
their neighbours. It was revolt in Ghent against an excessive 
tax that Charles went to put down in 1 540. He did put it down 
with a strong hand, compelling the chief citizens to kneel before 
him in their shirts, with halters round their necks. 

The spirit of the Reformation spread also among these people 



TOA.D. 1558.] SPAIN, ENGLAND, AND THE NETHERLANDS. Z l 7 

of the Netherlands ; and Charles V. battled in vain against it. 
He sought to bring into Flanders the Inquisition, which had 
been re-instituted in Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1480 ; 
but the people rose and expelled the Inquisitor-General who had 
been sent to them by the pope. A modified Inquisition was 
established, with provision made in 1546 that no sentence of 
an inquisitor should be carried out until it had the sanction 
of a member of the Provincial Council. Thus in the Nether- 
lands thousands died for their faith, while the English Reformers 
were during the reign of Edward VI. gathering strength. 

In October, 1555, Charles V., aged about fifty-six, abdicated 
at Brussels in favour of his son Philip II., then twenty-eight 
years old, a small, thin, sullen man, fair-haired and blue-eyed, 
with a great mouth, a protruding lower jaw, and a digestion spoilt 
by pastry. He had been married about fifteen months before 
to Queen Mary of England ; and Sir Thomas Wyatt the younger 
had been executed for rebellious objection to the wedding (ch. 
vi. § 60). Philip received from his living father Spain, with all 
its outlying dominion, a month after the sovereignty of the 
Netherlands had been transferred to him. His dignity as head 
of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles resigned in favour of his 
brother Ferdinand. In September, 1556, Charles sailed for 
Spain, and he died in his seclusion at Yuste about two months 
before Anne Boleyn's daughter became Queen of England. 

If Charles had been in some respects a Fleming among the 
Spaniards, Philip, born and bred in Spain, was a Spaniard 
among the Flemings. His court in Brussels was almost wholly 
Spanish, his advisers were Spanish grandees ; the 'chief of 
them, Philip's pliant favourite, Ruy Gomez, afterwards Prince of 
Eboli, who usually counselled peace, and the Duke of Alva, 
counsellor of war. Philip had remained in England with Queen 
Mary after his marriage to her in July, 1554, until some weeks 
before his father's abdication. He did not return to England 
until March, 1557, when, for reasons of his own, as King of 
Spain, he urged England into war with France. Paul IV. was 
seeking, by alliance with France, to loosen the hold of Spain 
upon Italian soil. Philip, therefore, caused England, in June, 
1557, to declare war against his enemy of France, and in July, 
having gained his point, left England never to return. On the 
other side, Mary of Guise, then Regent of Scotland, was incited 
by King Henry II. of France to attack England. The Duke 
of Savoy, with the Spanish army of the Netherlands and 



318 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1558 

English reinforcements, gained in August a great victory over the 
Constable Montmorenci, at St. Ouentin, and then, through advice 
of Philip, lost the opportunity of pressing victory by an advance. 
He stayed to press siege of the town, which was not taken till 
a fortnight later. The Duke of Guise, coming from Italy, was 
made Lieutenant-General of France, assembled a fresh army, 
and by surprise took Calais and Guines from the English in 
January, 1558, thus making a happy end of English domination 
on French soil. On the 24th of the following April, Guise's 
niece, Mary Stuart, the Queen of Scots, then about sixteen 
years old, was married to Francis, the French dauphin, a youth 
of her own age ; and by a secret article of the marriage contract, 
Scotland and France were to be united under one sovereign if 
Mary died childless. When Mary of England died, on the 17th 
of November, 1558, Elizabeth was twenty-five years old, and 
the Queen of Scots was held by many in England, and by most 
in France, to have a more legitimate right to the throne. The 
new queen took for her chief counsellor Sir William Cecil, then 
aged thirty-eight, the Lord Burleigh of after years, and made 
Cecil's brother-in-law, Sir Nicholas Bacon (they married two 
daughters of Sir Anthony Coke) her Lord Keeper. Philip of 
Spain, her sister's widower, thought it good policy to offer his 
hand to Elizabeth of England, on condition that she would pro- 
fess the same ^religion he professed, and maintain it and keep 
her subjects true to it. Elizabeth dead, the English throne 
would pass to the Queen of Scots — through her to France. The 
marriage of Elizabeth, though not to Philip, was therefore 
desired t>y her people. Spain was the first power of the world, 
and France the second. England had declined during the reign 
of Mary. Her active fleet consisted of seven coast-guard 
vessels, and eight small merchant brigs and schooners altered 
for fighting, besides twenty-one vessels in harbour, of which all 
but six or seven were sloops and boats. But Spain and France 
were rival powers, and for a time Elizabeth could make the 
jealousies of one serve to protect England from the other. The 
endeavours of Spain and England to procure restitution of 
Calais were suspended for some months ; and in April, 1559, the 
belligerents, Spain helping England in negotiation, made peace 
in the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis. In the following July, 
at festivities in celebration of this peace, Henry II. of France 
was killed by an accident, and was succeeded by the eldest of 
his seven children, the young husband of Mary Queen of Scots, 



toa.d. 1559.] AT THE ACCESSION OF ELIZABETH. 3 1 9 

who was ruled by the Guises, through their niece, his wife, during 
the seventeen months of his reign. Francis and Mary called 
themselves King and Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland. 
The chief endeavour of the Guises was to subdue the Church 
Reformers, or Huguenots, as they were called, from " Eguenots," 
a French corruption of the German " Eidgenossen " (sworn 
associates). Oppression by the Guises produced organised re- 
sistance, part political, and part religious. Elizabeth in Eng- 
land had restored Cranmer's liturgy ; established in the Prayer- 
book a choice of prayers to meet differences of opinion, and 
other compromises ; dissolved the monasteries which Mary had 
refounded ; sent to the Tower, where they were well lodged and 
had no axe to fear, those bishops who refused allegiance to her 
supremacy ; and held her own, although the Protestantism of the 
English towns was represented by much smaller numbers than 
Catholicism of the rural districts. To foreign menace the young 
queen could reply with spirit that " her realm was not too poor, 
nor her people too faint-hearted, to defend their liberties at home 
and to protect their rights abroad." In December, 1560, Francis 
II. died, and the next brother, a boy in his eleventh year, be- 
came king as Charles IX. His mother, Catherine de' Medici, 
ruled in his name, at first with a desire to please all parties, and 
allay their strife. 

Soon after the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, which ended war 
between France and Spain, King Philip left the Netherlands 
under the regency of his half-sister, the Duchess Margaret of 
Parma, natural daughter of Charles V. Philip parted from the 
Netherlands in August, 1559, with a "Request" for three 
millions of gold florins ; and information that he had com- 
manded the Regent accurately and exactly to enforce every 
existing edict and decree for the extirpation of all sects and 
heresies. The Request was not assented to without an emphatic 
counter-request from each of the provinces, and a remonstrance 
from the States- General, signed by the Prince of Orange, 
Count Egmont, and others, urging the withdrawal of Spanish 
troops out of the Netherlands. Very soon after Philip had 
returned to Spain, at an auto-da-fe in October, he swore by the 
cross of his sword to give all necessary favour to the holy 
office of the Inquisition ; and to a young man, one of thirteen 
then burnt alive before him, who asked how he could look on 
and suffer such things to be done, he answered, " I would carry 
the wood to burn my own son withal, were he as wicked as you." 



320 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. i 55 3 

2. John Knox, after his imprisonment in the French 
galleys (ch. vi. § 53), had been in England from 1549 to 1554, and 
as one of Edward VI's chaplains had been associated with men 
of the English Reformation. He spent two of the five years in 
Berwick, two in Newcastle, and one in London. He found his 
first wife at Berwick, and married her before he was driven out 
of England by the persecutions under Mary. He was then in 
different places on the Continent, at Dieppe, at Frankfort, until 
1555, when, after a short visit to Scotland, he became the pastor 
of an English congregation" at Geneva. There he worked with 
Calvin, who had become supreme, and made the city what 
Knox took to be " the most perfect school of Christ that ever 
was on earth since the days of the Apostles." It was from 
Geneva, just before the accession of Elizabeth, that Knox issued, 
without his name, his First Blast of the Trumpet against the 
Mojistruous Regiment of Women. His wrath was against the 
rule of the three Marys, Mary of Guise, queen dowager and 
regent of Scotland, Mary Queen of Scots, and Queen Mary of 
England, and on behalf of " so many learned and men of grave 
judgment as this day by Jezebel are exiled." In his preface he 
said that men had offended " by error and ignorance, giving 
their suffrages, consent and help to establish women in their 
kingdoms and empires, not understanding how abominable, 
odious and detestable is all such usurped authority in the 
presence of God ; " and he ended with this sentence : " My 
purpose is thrice to blow the trumpet in the same matter, if 
God so permit : twice I intend to do it without name, but at 
the last blast to take the blame upon myself, that all others 
may be purged." After such preface he began his book, a 
small quarto, about as big as a man's hand, with the assertion 
that " to promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion 
or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to 
nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrarious to His 
revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the 
subversion of good order, of all equity and justice." Women 
are not worthy to rule. " I exempt," said Knox, " such as 
God, by singular privilege and for certain causes known only to 
Himself hath exempted from the common rank ot women, and 
do speak of women as nature and experience do this day declare 
them. Nature, I say, doth paint them further to be weak, frail, 
impatient, feeble and foolish : and experience hath declared 
them to be unconstant, variable, cruel, and lacking the spirit of 



to a.d. 1559.] KNOX ON THE RULE OF WOMEN. 32 1 

counsel and regiment." He quoted Aristotle's opinion, "that 
wheresoever women bear dominion there must needs the people 
be disordered, living and abounding in all intemperancie, given 
to pride, excess, and vanity ; and finally, in the end, that they 
must needs come to confusion and ruin." He argued for the 
subjection of woman from Scripture and the Fathers, adding, 
as he quoted Chrysostom, " Beware, Chrysostom, what thou 
sayest ; thou shalt be reputed a traitor if Englishmen hear 
thee, for they must have my sovereign lady and maitresse, and 
Scotland hath drunk also the enchantment and venom of 
Circes." Instances of exceptional women like Deborah, Knox 
argued, will no more prove the right of a woman to judge Israel, 
than the instance of Solomon will prove polygamy a right of 
man. "Moreover," he said, " I doubt not but Deborah judged 
what time Israel had declined from God : rebuking then- 
defection and exhorting them to repentance, without usurpation 
of any civil authority. And if the people gave unto her for a 
time any reverence or honour, as her godliness and happy 
counsel did well deserve, yet was it no such empire as our 
monsters claim." "Let all men," he said at the end, "be 
advertised, for the trumpet hath once blown." Knox blew no 
other blast, and would have recalled this if he could, although 
he did state in advance that the argument of his "Second Blast" 
was well to proclaim how through one woman England had been 
betrayed to Spain, and Scotland to France through another. 
That the issuing of such a book should coincide in time with 
the accession of Queen Elizabeth was unlucky for the argu- 
ment of the Reformer. Knox had cut off retreat from his position. 
He might rank Elizabeth with Deborah ; but he had refused to 
clothe even Deborah with civil authority, not doubting that she 
had " no such empire as our monsters claim." Moreover, he had 
pledged himself to two more blasts from the same trumpet ; and 
if his argument was good, the elevation of yet another woman 
to supremacy would make its enforcement only the more 
necessary. 

A reply to Knox was published at Strasburg by John 
Aylmer, in the spring of 1559, called "An Harbor owe for 
Faithful and True Subjects against the late blow7i Blast concern- 
ing the Government of Women, wherein be confuted all such 
reasons as a stranger of late made in that behalf with a brief 
Exhortation to Obedience." It ended with praise of Elizabeth's 
simplicity of dress as a princess, her disregard of money, love 



322 A FIRST SKETCH OF EXGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1558 

of books. Her first schoolmaster said to the writer that he 
learnt of her more than he taught. " ' I teach her words,' quod 
he, 'and she me things. I teach her the tongues to speak, and 
her modest and maidenly life teacheth me works to do.'" She 
had patiently borne affliction. " Let us help her who is come to- 
be our Judith and our Deborah ; help with our means, with 
hearts that will either win or die, and with obedience to God's 
lieutenant, our sovereign." England calls to her children — 
England, of whom came that servant of God, their brother, 
John Wiclif, " who begat Huss, who begat Luther, who begat 
Truth. Let us seek to requite her with thankfulness, which 
studieth to keep us in quietness." John Aylmer, the author of 
this answer to Knox, was born in 1521. He had been tutor to 
Lady Jane Grey, and made study so pleasant to her that he was 
the cause of her delight in it. In 1553 he was Archdeacon of 
Stow. In the reign of Mary he was a Protestant exile at 
Zurich. Having returned to England after the accession of 
Elizabeth, he made himself agreeable to the queen. In 1562 he 
became Archdeacon of Lincoln, and in 1576 Bishop of London. 
In that character we shall meet with him again. 

3. John Knox, who had not made himself agreeable to the 
queen, and could not obtain from her, in 1559, a passport through 
England to Scotland, was obliged to go by sea. His presence 
in Scotland had been called for, in March, 1557, by the nobles 
who favoured the Reformation. He had consulted Calvin, and 
parting from his congregation at Geneva, had come as far on his 
way home as Dieppe, when he found that his friends had lost 
courage, and no longer sought a thorough reformation. From 
Dieppe he wrote, in October, 1557, an earnest letter to the 
Lords whose faith had failed ; another to the whole nobility of 
Scotland ; others to special friends. His letters revived zeal. 
In December, 1557, the Scottish Reforming nobles met in Edin- 
burgh, and drew up an agreement known as the First Cove- 
nant. It bound them to strive even to death " to maintain, set 
forward, and establish the most blessed Word of God and His 
congregation." The Scottish Reformers, who had resolved to 
abstain from Mass, formed small congregations in private 
houses ; the word Congregation thus became common among 
them, and the Earl of Argyll and other Reforming nobles who had 
signed this covenant were now called Lords of the Congregation. 
They advised and ordained that the Missal be put aside, and 
that the Common Prayer be read in all parishes ; but as this 



toa.d. 1559.] THE CHURCH IN SCOTLAND. 323 

would not be immediately done, they added counsel that 
"doctrine, preaching, and interpretation of Scriptures be had 
and used privately in quiet houses, without great conventions of 
the people thereto, till God move the prince to grant public 
preaching by faithful and true ministers." The book of Common 
Prayer here intended was King Edward's service-book. The 
Archbishop of St. Andrews met this movement by burning for 
heresy Walter Mill, a pious parish priest, eighty-two years old, 
who said from the flames, " I trust in God that I am the last 
that shall suffer death in Scotland from this cause." He was 
the last ; last of about twenty. His death quickened reaction. 
Adherents of the Congregation multiplied. A petition was 
presented to the queen-regent for freedom of worship, and the 
sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper in the vulgar 
tongue ; freedom to all for exposition of the Scripture ; and 
amendment of the scandalous lives of the clergy. Mary of 
Guise, personally amiable, though not trustworthy, assented on 
condition that the Reformers did not preach publicly in Edin- 
burgh or Leith. In November, 1558, the Lords of the Congrega- 
tion sought to obtain right of worship in the language of the 
people from a convention of the Roman clergy, and would have 
succeeded if they had consented to retain in the services the 
Mass, with faith in purgatory and prayers for the dead. In 
November, 1558, the Estates were to meet in Edinburgh, and 
to Parliament also the Lords of the Congregation were resolved 
to carry an appeal. They sought of it suspension and modifica- 
tion of Acts against heresy, sought check upon the power of the 
spiritualty. The queen-regent, in good temper and good policy, 
spoke them fair until she had secured the aid of the Protestant 
nobles for the marriage of her daughter with the dauphin, 
which took place in April, 1558; also till she had won 
from them, in the Parliament which met in November, their 
consent to the conferring of the crown of Scotland on the dauphin 
as king-consort. That was the state of affairs in Scotland when 
Mary of England died, and Elizabeth became queen in her stead. 
But then there was a new hope for the Guises. Since 
Elizabeth had been declared illegitimate, the Queen of Scots 
was Queen also of England. In England itself there was a 
large Catholic rural population ; and the Guises governed Scot- 
land on one side of her, France on the other. A Scottish synod 
in March, 1559, repelled the petition of the Congregation ; the 
queen-regent supported the synod, and summoned Reforming 

V 2 



324 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1559 

preachers to appear at Stirling on the ioth of May. Their 
friends determined to come with them, unarmed protectors. 
The regent, alarmed, checked their approach, and caused them 
to stop at Perth, by promise to withdraw the summons. Then 
she commanded that the preachers should be declared rebels 
because they did not come to Stirling. That was the state of 
affairs in Scotland when John Knox landed at Leith. 

He went to Perth, and in the church there preached against 
idolatry. After his congregation had dispersed, a priest pre- 
pared to celebrate Mass ; this fired the magazine of zeal. All 
images and ornaments within the church were broken to pieces ; 
the monasteries of the Black and Grey Friars and the Charter- 
house were sacked. For this excess armed force was brought 
against the excited citizens. They shut their gates and issued 
letters to the queen-regent, the nobility, and "to the genera- 
tion of Antichrist, the pestilent prelates and their shavelings 
within Scotland." The Earl of Glencairn with two thousand 
men checked the queen's troops, and Perth was opened to her on 
condition that none of the inhabitants should be molested on 
account of their religion. The Lords of the Congregation 
quitted Perth next day, after entering into a second Covenant 
for mutual support and defence. The queen-regent did not 
keep faith with the citizens of Perth, and thereby lost more of 
the confidence of Scotland. Knox went into Fife. More 
churches had their images and altars broken. He went boldly 
to St. Andrew's. The archbishop left the town, Knox preached 
in the cathedral church on the driving of traffickers from the 
temple, and after his sermon the people proceeded to deface all 
churches in the town and destroy the Dominican and Francis- 
can monasteries. The queen threatened again with troops. 
The people flocked together and were formidable. The queen 
temporised. The people marched on Perth, compelled the new 
garrison to surrender, and then burnt the beautiful Abbey of 
Scone, in which from ancient time the kings of Scotland had 
been crowned. Destruction of monasteries went on. The cry 
was, " Down with the crows' nests, or the crows will build in 
them again." Finally, the Lords of the Congregation were in 
Edinburgh, whence the queen-regent had fled. They claimed 
the Reformation of Religion and expulsion of the French, who 
were said to have devoted the land to their own uses, and 
already to have set up a Monsieur d' Argyll among themselves. 
Edinburgh was surrendered upon favourable terms, and the 



TOA.D. xsfo.] JOHN KNOX. THE SCOTTISH REFORMATION. 32$ 

Lords of the Congregation went to Stirling. There they 
signed their names to a third Covenant, designed to check the 
tampering of the queen-regent with individuals. They 
pledged themselves not to treat with her separately. 

Francis and Mary having become King and Queen of 
France, French soldiers landed at Leith, also a legate from the 
pope, and three doctors from the Sorbonne. Now, therefore, the 
Lords of the Congregation looked to England, and corre- 
sponded much with Sir William Cecil. In July, 1559, John 
Knox enclosed to Cecil a letter for Queen Elizabeth, expressing 
his attachment to her and her government, though he abided, 
he said, by the general principles laid down in his " First Blast." 
Cecil, in answer, simply began his letter with the text, " There is 
neither male nor female, but we are all one in Christ," and then 
passed to other matters. Elizabeth still kept Knox at a distance. 
Correspondence was continued by the Scottish Lords. The 
Scottish movement for Church Reform and against French rule 
went on with the knowledge of Elizabeth, and with the aid of 
English money. It took presently the form of a plan for 
replacing the queen-regent by the Earl of Arran. In 
October, 1559, with open concurrence of Knox, the queen- 
regent was deprived of her office by "us the Nobility and 
Commons of the Protestants of the Church of Scotland." But 
the Reforming barons were unable to hold their ground against 
disciplined troops. They left Edinburgh, and acted each in 
his own country, looking still to England for help difficult to 
give, since Scotland and England were at peace. But Elizabeth 
did, on the ground of danger to England from a French conquest 
of Scotland, undertake by secret treaty at Berwick to assist in 
expelling the French. In April, 1560, the English besieged 
Leith, while the Lords of the Congregation signed a fourth 
Covenant, pledging themselves to pursue their object to the last 
extremity. 

The queen-regent died in the midst of these troubles. 
France and England agreed on a treaty by which soldiers were 
withdrawn on both sides. Strife was ended, and peace was 
proclaimed at the Edinburgh market cross in July, 1560. 
Nothing was said about Church Reformation, but the way was 
laid open for it. The Three Estates met on the 1st of August, 
and on the 17th adopted for the nation a Confession of Faith in 
twenty-five articles, which embodied the opinions of John Knox. 
On the 24th the Estates added to their work three Acts, 1, 



326 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1557 

annulling all previous Acts regarding censures of the Church 
or worshipping of saints ; 2, abolishing the pope's jurisdiction 
within the realm ; and, 3, making it criminal to say a Mass 
or hear a Mass. The first offence was to be punished with 
confiscation of goods, the second with banishment, the third 
with death. Edmund Spenser was at this time about seven 
years old. 

4. The sweet spirit of song rises in the early years of Eliza- 
beth's reign like the first chirping of the birds after a thunder- 
storm. TotteV s Miscellany, issued in June, 1557, as Songes 
and Sonneltes, written by the Ryght Honorable Lorde Henry 
Haward, late Earl of Surrey, and other (ch. vi. § 60), was as a 
brake from which there rose, immediately before the reign 
began, a pleasant carolling. Among the smaller song-birds 
there were two with a sustained rich note, for in this miscellany 
were the first printed collections of the poems of Sir Thomas 
Wyatt (ch. vi. § 43) and the Earl of Surrey (ch. vi. § 44, 46). 
This is our earliest poetical miscellany, if we leave out of ac- 
count the fact that pieces by several writers had been included, in 
1532, in the first collected edition of Chaucer's works. Tottel's 
first edition contained 271 poems, the second contained 280; but 
30 poems by Grimald, which appeared in the first edition, were 
omitted in the second, which appeared a few weeks later, so that 
between the two there were 310 poems in all. In 1559 there 
was a third edition of the "Miscellany ;" in 1565, the year after 
Shakespeare's birth, a fourth ; the eighth, and last of the Eliza- 
bethan time, in 1587. During the reign of Elizabeth other books 
of the same kind appeared : The Paradise of Dainty Devices, 
collected by Richard Edwardes, of Her Majesty's Chapel, then 
dead, for a printer named Disle, and published in 1576 ; A 
Gorgious Gallery of Gallant Inventions, edited by Thomas 
Proctor, in 1578, with help from Owen Rawdon ; A Handefull 
of Pleasant D elites, by Clement Robinson and divers other, in 
1584 ; The Phamix Nest, edited by R. S., of the Inner Temple, 
gentleman, in 1593 ; England's Helicon, edited by John Boden- 
ham, in 1600 ; and A Poetical Rhapsody, edited by Francis 
Davison, in 1602. The most popular of these was The Paradise 
of Dainty Devices. In the first edition of TotteV s Miscellany 
there were thirty-six poems by the Earl of Surrey, to which four 
were added in the next issue ; ninety by Sir Thomas Wyatt, to 
which six were added ; forty by Nicholas Grimald ; and ninety- 
five by unnamed authors, among whom were Thomas Church- 



TOA.D. 1559.] EARLY POETICAL MISCELLANIES. 327 

yard, Thomas Lord Vaux, Edward Somerset, John Heywood, 
and Sir Francis Bryan. Nicholas G-rimald was born about 
1 5 19, in Huntingdonshire, was educated at Christ's College, 
took his B.A. in 1540, in 1542 was incorporated at Oxford, and 
-elected a probationer fellow of Merton College, Oxford. In 
1556, Tottel published for him a translation of " Tully's Offices." 
His connection with Tottel at this time, omission of so much of 
his verse from" the second edition of the " Miscellany," and reduc- 
tion of his name in that edition to the initials N. G., make it 
possible that Grimald edited the "Miscellany." In 1558, Tottel 
issued a second edition of Grimald's translation of the " De 
Officiis." Grimald was dead in May, 1562. Two poems of his 
which were not omitted in the second edition have especial in- 
terest as the first specimens in English of original blank verse 
(ch. vi. § 47). One was a piece of one hundred and fifteen lines, 
on The Death of Zoroas, an Egyptian Astronomer, in First 
Fight that Alexander had with the Persians, beginning : 

" Now clattering arms, now raging broils of war, 
Can pass the noise of taratantars' clang " — 

(" taratantars " altered in the next edition to " dreadful trum- 
pets "). The other was a somewhat shorter piece, upon the 
Death of Cicero. 

5. In 1559, Richard Tottel printed "in Flete Strete, within 
Temple Barre, at the signe of { The Hand and Starre,' " a trans- 
lation into English verse of "the sixt tragedie of the most 
grave and prudent author, Lucius Anneus Seneca, entituled 
Troas, with divers and sundrie additions to the same, newly set 
forth in Englishe by Jasper Heywood, student in Oxforde." 
John Heywood (ch. vi. § 49) had two sons— Ellis, the elder, a 
good scholar, who joined the order of the Jesuits in 1560 ; and 
Jasper, who was born about 1535, was educated at Oxford, and, 
some months before the publication of his version of the Troas, 
being twenty-three years old, had resigned a fellowship at 
Merton College for fear of expulsion. He was elected to a 
fellowship of All Souls', but left the University, and in 1561, 
having held by his father's faith, became a Roman Catholic 
priest. He joined the Jesuits, studied theology for two years, 
and, after some time abroad, returned to England as Pro- 
vincial of the Jesuits in 158 1. He went abroad again, and died 
at Naples in 1598. Some poems of his are in the Paradise of 
Dainty Devices; and he translated from Seneca, in the first years 



328 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1558 

of Elizabeth's reign, not only the Troas, but also the T/iyestes, 
in 1 5 60, and the Hercules Fur ens, in 1 5 6 1 . Other men set to work 
on other tragedies. Alexander Neville published, in 1560, a 
translation of the (Edipus ; John Studley translated four — 
Hippolytiis, Medea, Agamemnon, and Hercules Oetceus; 
Thomas Nuce translated Octavia, and the Thebais was trans- 
lated by Thomas Newton, who, in 1581, collected the ten 
translations into a single volume, published as Seneca: his 
Tenne Tragedies, translated into Englysh. These translations 
indicate the strong influence of the Latin tragedy upon the 
minds of scholars and poets in the birthtime of our native 
drama. There is no blank verse in them. Jasper Heywood 
opened his Troas with a preface in Chaucer's stanza, but he 
wrote his dialogue chiefly in couplets of fourteen-syllabled lines. 
Thus, for example, Hecuba begins : 

" Whoso in pomp of proud estate or kingdom sets delight. 
Or who that joys in princes' court to bear the sway of might, 
He dreads the fates which from above the wavering gods down flings, 
But fast affiance fixed hath in frail and fickle things ; 
Let him in me both see the face of Fortune's flattering joy, 
And eke respect the ruthful end of thee, O ruinous Troy ! " 

Sometimes the measure of the dialogue changes to four-lined 
elegiac stanza, which is the measure also of a chorus added by 
Jasper Heywood himself to the first act : 

" O ye to whom the Lord of land and seas, 

Of life and death, hath granted here the power, 
Lay down your lofty looks, your pride appease, 
■ The crowned king fleeth not his fatal hour." 

At the opening of the second act of the " Troas," Jasper Hey- 
wood raised the sprite of Achilles, and made him speak in 
Chaucer's stanza : 

" The soil doth shake to bear my heavy foot, 
And fear'th again the sceptres of my hand, 

The poles with stroke of thunderclap ring out, 
The doubtful stars amid their course do stand, 
And fearful Phoebus hides his blazing brand ; 

The trembling lakes against their course do flyte, 

For dread and terror of Achilles' sprite." 

The other translators followed Jasper Heywood's lead. With 
some further variety in the choruses, these are the metres into 
which the poets of the first years of Elizabeth translated the 
tragedies of Seneca. 

6. In the earlier years of Elizabeth's reign the revived taste 



toa.d. 1562.] TRANSLATORS OF SENECA, VIRGIL, OVID. 329 

for classical literature not only, through Plautus and Seneca, 
became part of the early story of our drama, but showed itself 
variously in the form of bright translations from the Latin. 
Gavin Douglas's translation of the ^neid (ch. vi. § 32), finished 
in 1 5 13, was first printed in 1553. Thomas Phaer, who was 
born at Kilgarran, in Pembrokeshire, studied at Oxford and at 
Lincoln's Inn, became advocate for the marches of Wales, after- 
wards doctor of medicine at Oxford. In May, 1558, in the days of 
Philip and Mary, six months before Elizabeth's accession, there 
appeared, " The Seven First Books of the Eneidos of Virgil, 
converted in Englishe meter by Thos. Phaer, Esq., sollicitour to 
the King and Queenes Majesties, attending their honourable 
counsaile in the Marchies of Wales." He continued the work, 
and had begun the tenth book, when he died, in 1560, and was 
buried in Kilgarran Church. In 1562 there were published, 
dedicated to Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper, Phaer's Ny?ie 
First Books of the Eneidos. The translation was completed with 
less ability by Thomas Twyne, a Canterbury man, practising 
as a physician at Lewes, and published in 1573. Phaer, who 
was a fair poet, wrote also on law and medicine. His "Virgil" is 
in the same fourteen-syllabled rhyming measure which we have 
seen used in the translation of Seneca. 

The other chief translation from the Latin poets in the early 
part of Elizabeth's reign was Arthur Golding's " Ovid," also trans- 
lated into fourteen-syllabled lines. Arthur Grolding was a 
Londoner, of good family, and lived at the house of Sir William 
Cecil, in the Strand. He translated Justin's " History" in 1564, 
and " Caesar's Commentaries " in 1565, which was the year of the 
publication of " The Fyrst Fower Bookes of the Metamorphoses. 
owte of Latin into English meter, by Arthur Golding, gentleman." 
Ten years later, when Shakespeare was eleven years old, Arthur 
Golding published his complete translation of The XV. Bookes 
of P. Ovidius Naso, entytuled Meta?norphoses, dedicated to 
Robert, Earl of Leicester. This was the book through which 
men read the "Metamorphoses" in English till the time of 
Charles I. 

7. The fourteen-syllabled line is one of the favourite mea- 
sures in the completed version of " The Whole Booke of P salines 
(ch. vi. § 54), collected into English metre by T. Sternhold, L. 
Hopkins, and others, conferred with the Ebrue, with Apt Notes 
to sing them withall." This appeared in 1562, and was then 
attached for the first time to the Book of Common Prayer. 



33° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. r 5 6i. 

Among the "apt tunes" is that to which the iooth Psalm was 
sung, now known as " The Old Hundredth.' 5 It had been one 
of the tunes made by Goudimel and Le Jeune for the French 
version of the Psalms by Clement Marot. 

8. Among the " others " who translated was Thomas 
Norton, whose initials were appended to twenty-eight of the 
Psalms, and who had a hand with Thomas Sackville in the 
writing of the first English tragedy. Thomas Norton, eldest son 
of a small landed proprietor, of Sharpenhoe, in Bedfordshire, was 
born in 1532. He became a good scholar and zealous Protestant, 
served in his youth the Protector Somerset, and then, in 1555, 
entered himself as a student of the Inner Temple. In 1561 
he published a Translation of Calvin's Institutes, which went 
through five editions in his lifetime ; and it was in this year that 
Norton, aged twenty-nine, joined Sackville in the production of 
the tragedy of Gorboduc. He was translating Psalms also, for it 
was in the following year, 1562, that the completed Psalter of 
Sternhold and Hopkins appeared. Thomas Sackville was four 
years younger than Norton. He was born in 1536, atBuckhurst, 
in Sussex, and was the son of Sir Richard Sackville, whom we 
shall find befriending Roger Ascham. Thomas Sackville went 
to Oxford at the age of fifteen or sixteen , and thence to Cam- 
bridge, where he took his degree of M.A. His University repu- 
tation as a poet was referred to by Jasper Heywood, before his 
version of Seneca's "Thyestes," published in 1560 : 

"There Sackville's sonnets sweetly sauste, 
And featly fyned bee." 

Thomas Sackville married, at the age of nineteen, the daughter of 
a privy councillor, and sat in a Parliament of Philip and Mary at 
the age of twenty-one, as member for Westmoreland. In the 
first year of the reign of Elizabeth he was member for East Grin- 
stead, and took part in business of the House. When he left the 
University, Sackville had entered himself to the Inner Temple. 
Thus it was that he joined Norton, also of the Inner Temple, in 
the writing of Gorboduc for Christmas recreation of the Tem- 
plars. Great lords had for many years kept servants paid to 
provide them with amusement. Records of the Augustine 
Priory at Bicester show that, in i43i, minstrels of different lords 
visited the monastery. In a like record of another house of the 
Augustines, such entertainers were before 1461 called mimes 
and players. A MS. of the time of Henry VI. laid against 



a.-d. 1561.] SACKVILLE AND NORTON. 33 1 

those old entertainers a complaint raised also against the first 
professional actors in Elizabeth's day, that they profaned the 
lioly days. 

"Goddis halidays non observantur honeste, 
For unthrifty pleyes in eis regnant manifeste." 

From that time till the first years of Elizabeth's reign there had 
TDeen itinerant performers, acting as retainers of the nobility. In 
the north, in 1556, there were six or seven persons acting in the 
livery of Sir Francis Leek. Sir Robert Dudley, afterwards 
Earl of Leicester, had such theatrical servants, and wrote in 
April, 1559, to the Earl of Shrewsbury, Lord President of the 
North, for their licence to play in Yorkshire, they having already 
leave to play in divers other shires. Mary suppressed plays 
which contained attacks upon her Church, and gave impulse 
to the production of miracle-plays. In 1556 the "Passion of 
Christ" was acted at Greyfriars in London, before the Lord 
Mayor and Privy Council. It was repeated in 1557, and in 
the same year, on St. Olave's night, the "Life of St. Olave" 
was acted in his church in Silver Street. Elizabeth on her 
accession required the licensing of plays and interludes, with 
refusal of licence to those touching questions of religion and 
government. 

Court entertainments had been placed in 1546 under the 
management of Sir Thomas Cawarden, probably the first Master 
of the Revels ; and at Christmas there was a Lord of Misrule. 
At Christmas in 1551, Holinshed says that in the place of the 
Lord of Misrule " there was, by order of the Council, a wise 
gentleman and learned, named George Ferrers, appointed to that 
office for this year, who being of better credit and estimation 
than commonly his predecessors had been before, received all 
his commissions and warrants by the name of Master of the 
King's Pastimes." But Sir Thomas Cawarden was Master of 
the Revels — or, in official language, Magister Jocorum, Revel- 
lorum et Mascorum — until 1560, when he died, and was suc- 
ceeded by Sir Thomas Benger. Elizabeth reduced the cost of 
her amusements. Mary had paid two or three thousand a 
year in salaries to her theatrical and musical establishment; 
Elizabeth reduced this, but still had salaried interlude players, 
musicians, and a keeper of bears and mastiffs. The gentlemen 
and children of the Queen's chapel were also employed as 
^entertainers. 

At Christmas, 1561, many of the queen's council were 



33 2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. i 5 6r 

present at the festivities of the Inner Temple ; and the Lord of 
Misrule rode through London in complete harness, gilt, with a 
hundred horse and gentlemen riding gorgeously with chains of 
gold, and their horses goodly trapped. The play produced on 
this occasion was Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc ; and on 
the 1 8th of January it was presented upon a great decorated 
scaffold in the queen's hall in Westminster by the gentlemen 
of the Inner Temple, after a masque. An unauthorised edition 
of it was published in 1565, as The Tragedy of Gorboduc. 
Our first printed tragedy appeared, therefore, when Shakespeare 
was one year old. " Ralph Roister Doister," our earliest comedy, 
was first printed in 1566, when Shakespeare was two years 
old. Thus Shakespeare and the English drama came into the 
world together. On the title-page of this unauthorised edition 
of "Gorboduc" it is said that the three first acts were by Norton. 
The authorised edition did not appear until 1571, and in that 
the name of the play appeared as Ferrex and Porrex. The 
argument was taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth's " History of 
British Kings " (ch. iii. § 8), and was chosen as a fit lesson, for 
Englishmen in the first year of the reign of Elizabeth. It was 
a call to Englishmen to cease from strife among themselves, 
and knit themselves into one people, obedient to one undisputed 
rule. Each act is opened with a masque, or dumb-show ; and as 
the play was modelled on the Tragedies of Seneca, there was at 
the close of every act except the last a chorus. Except for the 
choruses, Sackville and Norton used the newly -introduced 
blank verse as the measure of their tragedy. Hitherto this 
measure had been little used by us, and never in an original 
work of any magnitude. The plot of " Gorboduc " is very simple. 
Act I. — After a dumb-show of the bundle of sticks which could 
be broken only when they were no longer bound together, 
Videna, the wife of King Gorboduc, tells Ferrex, her eldest son,, 
with " griefful plaint," that his father intends to deprive him of 
his birthright by equal division of his kingdom between both 
his sons. King Gorboduc will seek that day the consent of 
his council. Gorboduc then himself unfolds his plan to his 
council. One councillor argues at length that the king does 
wisely ; another argues at length that equal division between the 
two sons is good, but not good to be made in their father's 
lifetime ; a third, the good councillor, Eubulus argues at length 
that division of rule is bad for Gorboduc, bad for Ferrex and 
Porrex : 



TO a.d. 1565.] THE FIRST ENGLISH TRAGEDY 333 

" But worst of all for this our native land. 
Within one land one single rule is best : 
Divided reigns do make divided hearts ; 
But peace preserves the country and the prince." 

He recalls the civil wars that had been : 

'* What princes slain before their timely hour « 
What waste of towns and people in the land \ 
What treasons heap'd on murders and on spoils! 
Whose just revenge ev'n yet is scarcely ceas'd ,- 
Ruthful remembrance is yet raw in mind. 
The gods forbid the like to chance again." 

■Gorboduc having listened to his councillors, does what he meant 
to do. He assigns England north of the Humber to Porrex, 
"and the south to Ferrex. A chorus then in four stanzas points 
the moral of this portion of the story. Act II. — After a dumb- 
show of a King who refused the good wine offered by age and 
experience, and took the poison offered by one who looked plea- 
banter, there are two scenes. One shows Ferrex between two coun- 
sellors, of whom one is a parasite, the other trustworthy. The 
parasite humours wrath against father and brother ; the good 
counsellor seeks to prevent dissension. Ferrex resolves to 
prepare himself in arms against the possible devices of his 
brother, and leaves the stage in company with the bad coun- 
sellor. Porrex is then shown also between two counsellors ; one 
of whom tells him that his brother is arming against him, and 
promoting a strife which the other counsellor endeavours to 
prevent. Porrex will not give Ferrex leisure to prepare his force, 
but will at once attack him. He also leaves the stage in company 
with his bad counsellor, and the good counsellor resolves to 
haste to Gorboduc " ere this mischief come to the likely end." 
Chorus then in four stanzas deplores the rashness of youth, and 
condemns the false traitor who undermines the love of brethren. 
Act III. — After a mask of mourners clad in black, who pass 
thrice about the stage, Gorboduc is shown as he lays before his 
best and worst councillor the tidings of the strife between his 
sons, tidings brought to him promptly by the peacemaker from 
each. While he is being counselled to use his authority as a 
father, and to make his power seen, a messenger comes to tell 
that Porrex has already carried out his threat, and slain his 
brother Ferrex. The father breathes revenge against the 
traitor son, and Chorus ends the act with moralising on the 
lust of kingdoms and the cruelty of civil strife. Act IV. — After 
a masque of the three Furies, each driving before her a king and 



334 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1555. 

queen who had unnaturally slain their own children, Queen 
Videna laments for her firstborn, and breathes vengeance against 
Porrex : 

" Changeling to me thou art, and not my child, 
Nor to no wight that spark of pity knew." 

King Gorboduc then has his son Porrex brought before him by 
Eubulus. Porrex expresses deep repentance, does not ask to live, 
but shows how the bond of love had been unknit by the division 
of the kingdom. His brother, he says, had hired one of his own 
servants to poison him. Gorboduc .sends Porrex from his 
presence as an "accursed child" until he shall have determined 
how to deal with him. Then, while he laments to his council- 
lors, a woman of the queen's chamber enters in distraction, and 
tells how Porrex has been stabbed in his sleep by his mother. At 
the close of the act the meditation of the chorus harmonises as 
usual with the matter of the dumb-show that preceded it. Act V. 
— After a dumb-show of war and tumult, the Dukes of Cornwall, 
Albany, Lloegria, and Cumberland possess the stage, and we 
learn that the people have risen and slain both Gorboduc and 
his queen. The lords, therefore — Eubulus one with them — are 
armed against the people, for, says Eubulus : 

" Though kings forget to govern as they ought, 
Yet subjects must obey as they are bound." 

A long argument of Eubulus upon the best way to deal with 
" skilless rebels," is followed by the marching off of all the 
lords, except Fergus Duke of Albany, who stays to meditate the 
raising of himself to supreme rule. Fergus proceeds to his own 
kingdom to buy arms. Eubulus relates, with moralising, the 
misery and destruction of the people ; the great lords return from 

" The wide and lazy fields 
With blood and bodies spread of rebels slain ; 
The lofty trees clothed with the corpses dead, 
That, strangled with the cord, do hang thereon." 

But a messenger brings news of the advance against them all of 
Albany with twenty thousand men. They hasten to more 
conflict 

" Upon the wretched land 
Where empty place of princely governance, 
No certain stay now left of doubtless heir, 
Thus leave this guideless realm an open prey 
To endless storms and waste of civil war." 

One argues that for the welfare of their native land the crown 



toa.d. 1559.] THE MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES. 335 

be adjudged to one of their own country by common counsel of 
them all : 

" Such one, my lords, let be your chosen king, 
Such one so born within your native land : 
Such one prefer, and in no wise admit 
The heavy yoke of foreign governance. " 

The play ends with a long moralising on the situation by Eubulus, 
which includes a glance at the danger to the kingdom : 

"When, lo, unto the prince, 
Whom death or sudden hap of life bereaves, 
No certain heir remains. " 

Thus our first tragedy distinctly grew out of the life of its own 
time, and gave expression to much that lay deep in the hearts of 
Englishmen in the first years of Elizabeth's reign. The best 
poetry of the play is in the fourth act, which certainly is Sack- 
ville's ; and the fifth may well represent the youth of one who 
gave his after life to state affairs. 

9. With one other work of mark in the Elizabethan time, 
Sackville's name was associated before he turned from poetry, 
as pleasure of his youth, and gave his life to politics. This was 
the Mirror for Magistrates ; a work that expanded as the reign 
went on into a long series of poems moralising those incidents of 
English history, which warn the powerful of the unsteadiness of 
fortune by showing them as in a mirror that " who reckless rules, 
right soon may hap to rue." A printer in Queen Mary's time 
seems first to have designed a long sequence of narrated Tra- 
gedies, as all tales of the reverse from high and happy fortune 
were then called. From the Conqueror downward, a series of 
poems from English history suggested by Boccaccio's " Falls of 
Illustrious Men" (ch. v. § 13) was to moralise the past for the use 
of the present, and teach men in authority to use their power 
well. In Sackville's mind, the plan of a mere rhyming sequel 
to Lydgate's " Falls of Princes " took shape nobly, and he meant 
himself to write a sequence of the tragedies, but he wrote only 
two poems, an Induction, which was designed as general intro- 
duction to the series of his own writing, and the Complaint of 
Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. The Induction is the 
best of Sackville's poetry. It follows the old forms, and is an 
allegory in Chaucer's stanza. Opening, not with a spring morning, 
but with winter night and its images of gloom and desolation, 
the poet represents himself abroad, mourning the death and 
ruin of all summer glory, when he meets a woebegone woman 



33^ A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1555 

clad in black, who is allegorically painted as Sorrow herself. Her 
home is among the Furies in the infernal lake. 

" Whence come I am, the dreary destiny 
And luckless lot for to bemoam of those 
Whom fortune, in this maze of misery, 

Of wretched chance, most woeful mirrors chose 
That, when thou seest how lightly they did lose 
Their pomp, their power, and that they thought most sure, 
Thou may'st soon deem no earthly joys may dure 

By Sorrow the poet was to be taken 

" First to the grisly lake, 
And thence unto the blissful place of rest, 

Where thou shalt see, and hear, the plaint they make 
That whilom here bare swing among the best. " 

The descent of Avernus and the allegorical figures within the 
porch and jaws of hell — Remorse of Conscience, Dread, Revenge, 
Misery, Care, Sleep, Old Age, Malady, Famine, War, Deadly 
Debate, Death — are described with dignity and energy of imagi- 
nation. In reading Sackville's Induction we find ourselves, in- 
deed, very far on the way from Stephen Hawes (ch. vi. § 7) to 
Spenser. The poet, and Sorrow his guide, were ferried across 
Acheron, passed Cerberus, and reached the horror of the realm 
of Pluto. At the cry of Sorrow the rout of unhappy shades 
gathered about them ; and first Henry Stafford, Duke of Bucking- 
ham, when he could speak for grief, began his plaint, bade 
Sackville mark well his fall, 

"And paint it forth, that all estates may know ; 
Have they the warning, and be mine the woe." 

Sackville wrote in the series no other Tragedy than this, perhaps 
because his way of life drew him from literature, perhaps because 
he was too good a poet to be satisfied with this manner of work. 
His complaint of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, abounds 
-in poetry of thought and musical expression, but the essential dif- 
ference between a history and a poem makes itself felt. The unity 
of the piece as a poem is marred by faithful adherence to historical 
detail, and Sackville no doubt felt that he must either illustrate 
the good doctrine of Aristotle in his poetics, and write poems 
that were not exactly histories, or he must write histories that 
were not exactly poems. The very excellence, also, and intensity 
of his Induction struck a note which the sequence of tragedies, 
unless they were true poems, would not sustain. 

Sackville left, therefore, to Baldwin and his friends the 



toa.d. 1563.] THE MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES. 337 

working out of the printer's first idea. The work had been 
undertaken by William Baldwin, with aid chiefly from George 
Ferrers. In his hands the " Mirror for Magistrates " meant 
simply a long English sequel to Boccaccio, as versified in Lyd- 
gate's " Fall of Princes." It was a series of metrical biographies, 
begun and part printed in 1555, but stopped by the intervention 
of Stephen Gardiner, who was then Lord Chancellor, and who 
died in November of that year. After the accession of Elizabeth, 
a licence was obtained, in 1559, and in that year the " Mirror 
for Magistrates" was first issued. It had a prose introduction, 
showing how it was agreed that Baldwin should take the place 
of Boccaccio, that to him the wretched princes should complain, 
and how certain friends " took upon themselves every man for 
his part to be sundry personages." Then they opened books 
of chronicles, and " Maister Ferrers (after he had found where 
Bochas left, which was about the end of King Edward the 
Third's reign) said thus : — ' I marvel what Bochas meaneth, to 
forget among his miserable princes such as were of our own 
nation. . . . Bochas, being an Italian, minded most the 
Roman and Italian story, or else, perhaps, he wanted the know- 
ledge of ours. It were, therefore, a goodly and notable matter 
to search and discourse our whole story from the first beginning 
of the inhabiting of the isle. But seeing the printer's mind is 
to have us follow where Lydgate left, we will leave that great 
labour to other that may intend it, and (as one being bold 
first to break the ice) I will begin at the time of Richard the 
Second, a time as unfortunate as the ruler therein.' " Ferrers 
began, therefore, with the fall of Robert Tresilian, Chief Justice 
of England, in Chaucer's stanza, with the lines lengthened from 
ten syllables to twelve. There are some other measures, but the 
greater part of "The Mirror of Magistrates" is in Chaucer's 
stanza, with prose talk by the company between the tragedies. 
The work, as published in 1559, contained nineteen tragedies; 
beginning with " Tresilian" and ending with " Edward IV." The 
greater number of these were written by Baldwin ; Ferrers wrote 
three ; and one, on Owen Glendower, was written by Phaer, the 
translator of Virgil. In 1563 another edition appeared, in which 
eight tragedies were added, one being Sackville's " Complaint 
of Buckingham," with the " Induction " placed before it, and 
another, the story of Jane Shore, by Thomas Churchyard. 

William Baldwin, chief editor of " The Mirror for Magis- 
trates," was an ecclesiastic, whose father had worked in a printing- 

w 



338 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1559 

office. He graduated at Oxford, about 1532 was a schoolmaster. 
He wrote a metrical version of Solomon's Song, and was ap- 
pointed in 1552 to set forth a play before the king. 

George Ferrers was born at St. Albans, educated at 
Oxford, then student of Lincoln's Inn. He was in Parliament 
under Henry VIII., was patronised by Thomas Cromwell, im- 
prisoned in 1542. He translated Magna Charta and some other 
statutes from French into Latin and English, was of the suite 
of the Protector Somerset, and is said to have compiled the part 
of Grafton's Chronicle which tells the history of Mary's reign. 
He composed interludes for the court ; in 1553 he was the 
king's Lord of Misrule at Greenwich for the twelve days of 
Christmas (§ 8) ; he wrote other rhyme than that in the " Mirror 
for Magistrates;" and he died in 1579. 

In 1574, John Higgins published The First Part of the 
Mirror for Magistrates, containing sixteen legends of his own, 
for the period from Brut to the birth of Christ. He opened his 
work with a general Induction in Chaucer's stanza, which was 
suggested to him by Sackville's. John Higgins was a clergyman 
and schoolmaster at Winsham, in Somersetshire, who wrote some 
scholastic books, and was alive in 1602, when he joined in a 
theological controversy. Editions of the " First Part " and of 
the "Last Part" of the "Mirror of Magistrates" were in demand 
till 1578, when there appeared a Second Part of the Mirror for 
Magistrates, containing twelve legends by Thomas Blenerhasset, 
and filling up in the wide scheme the period from Caesar's In- 
vasion to the Norman Conquest. 

An edition of the " Mirror for Magistrates," in 1587, united the 
work of Baldwin and Higgins, adding chiefly new legends by 
John Higgins, but also a legend of Wolsey by Thomas Church- 
yard. This was the most complete form attained by the work 
during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. It was popular through- 
out the reign, and one of the sources from which dramatists, 
when they arose, drew plots for plays. 

Thomas Sackville was knighted in 1567, the year after his 
father's death, and made a baron as Lord Buckhurst. He rose 
in the state, and after the death of Lord Burghley, in 1599, 
succeeded him as High Treasurer of England. Early in the 
next reign, in 1604, Sackville was made Earl of Dorset, and in 
1 608, being then seventy-two years old, he died while sitting at 
the Council Table. 

10. Thomas Churchyard, born at Shrewsbury about 1520, 



toa.d. 1579.] FERRERS. HIGGINS. THOMAS CHURCHYARD. 339 

and a soldier in his earlier years, was not only the author of two 
of the better class of tragedies in "The Mirror for Magistrates" 
— " Jane Shore " and " Wolsey " — but a busy poet, whose literary 
activity began with Elizabeth's reign, and continued to its close. 
He died in 1604, after an unprosperous life of dependence upon 
patrons, and had these lines for epitaph : 

" Poverty and poetry his tomb doth inclose ; 
Wherefore, good neighbours, be merry in prose. " 

His Davie Vicar's Dream, published in 1563, produced from 
Thomas Camel a metrical " Rejoinder to Churchyard," and led 
to a controversy of wits. Among Churchyard's numerous publi- 
cations were, in 1575, " The First Part of Churchyard 's Chips, 
containing Twelve Labours — not Herculean," a collection of 
twelve pieces; in 1578, Praise and Report of Frobisher* s Voyage, 
a Description of the Wars in Flanders, a translation of the Three 
First Books of Ovid de Tristibus, and a description of his own 
devices for the entertainment of the queen in Norwich in that 
year. In 1579 he published A Welcome Home to Frobisherj the 
Services of Sir William Drury, Lord Justice of Ireland; and a 
piece on the Miserie of Flaunders, Calamitie of France, Mis- 
fortune of Portugal, Unquietness of Ireland, Troubles of Scot- 
land, and the Blessed State of England. The chief of many 
works by Churchyard after 1579 was his patriotic poem on 
Welsh worthies, The Worthiness of Wales, published in 1587, 
with a dedication to the queen. 

11. We will take the year 1579 as a dividing line between the 
earlier and latter part of Elizabeth's reign. The whole reign 
covered a period of forty-four years four months and a week. In 
1579 a child born at Elizabeth's accession came of age ; she had 
then reigned twenty-one years, and those who had grown up under 
the influences of her reign formed the new generation of English- 
men. Then the Elizabethan time bore fruit abundantly. In 
1579, Spenser produced his first published work ; the drama had 
just sprung into independent life ; and young John Lyly pub- 
lished the "Euphues" which gave its name to an external fashion 
of Elizabethan literature. Before 1579, while the number of 
works of genius was yet small, both history and literature show 
how England was still gathering the force that after 1579 found 
its own various ways of intense expression. 

12. John Bale was sixty-three years old, John Fox forty-one, ; 
John Jewel thirty-six, at the accession of Elizabeth. John Bale 

w 2 



340 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1558- 

(ch. vi. § 50) had printed at Ipswich, in 1548, and presented to 
Edward VI., the first edition of his (Latin) " Summary of the 
Illustrious Writers of Great Britain." In 1552, Edward VI. made 
him Bishop of Ossory ; and he afterwards painted his difficulties 
with a flock of antagonist faith to his own, in a book called The 
Vocatio7i ofjolm Bale to the Bishopric of Ossory in Ireland; his 
Persecutions in the same, and his Final Deliverance. After the 
accession of Mary, Bale escaped to Switzerland, but he came to 
England upon the accession of Elizabeth, obtained in 1560 a 
prebend in Canterbury Cathedral, and died in 1563. The com- 
pleted edition of John Bale's account of English Writers — Scrip- 
torum Illustrium Majoris Brytamiice Catalogus — expanded from 
five centuries to fourteen, was published in folio by Oporinus, at 
Basle, in 1557 and 1559. It is our first literary history, inaccu- 
rate and warped by the controversial heat of the time, but im- 
portant as an aid to study of our early literature. 

13. John Fox (ch. vi. § 60) had in the reign of Mary 
worked as corrector of the press for Oporinus, of Basle, to whom 
he introduced himself by presentation of the first sketch of his 
history of the Church, warped also by the heat of conflict, and 
first suggested to him by Lady Jane Grey. At this he proceeded 
to work, writing it then in Latin. The first sketch was published 
in octavo in 1554. John Aylmer (§ 2), and more particularly 
Edmund Grindal, also exiles, aided Fox with information re- 
ceived out of England concerning the martyrs for their faith. 
At the accession of Elizabeth, Fox was in Basle with a wife and 
two children, poor, but with a more settled employment than he 
could afford immediately to leave. His friend Grindal went 
back to England, but Fox remained another year at Basle, and 
for a time suspended, as Grindal advised, the production of his 
enlarged history of troubles in the Church, because new matter 
in abundance would now surely come to light. This enlarged 
book appeared, in its first Latin form, in folio, from the press of 
Oporinus, in August, 1559, and containing some facts that were 
omitted in the translations. In the following October, John Fox 
had returned to London, where he was housed by Aldgate at 
Christchurch, the manor-place of his old pupil the Duke of 
Norfolk. From Aldgate he went every Monday to the printing- 
office of John Day, whence early in 1563 appeared in folio the 
first edition of his work in English as Acts and Monu7nents of 
these latter and fierillous Dayes, touching matters of the Chtirch, 
wherein are comprehended and described the great Persecutions 



to a.d. 1563.] JOHN FOX. 341 

■and horrible Troubles that have been wrought and practised by 
the Romishe Prelates, especially e in this Realme of England and 
Scotlande,from the Yeare of our Lorde a Thousande unto the 
Tyme now present. Gathered and collected according to the true 
Copies and Wrytinges certiftcatorie, as wel of the Parties the?n- 
selves that suffered, as also out of the Bishops' 1 Registers which 
were the doers thereof by John Foxe. To a right student the 
value of such a book is rather increased than lessened by the 
inevitable bias of a writer who recorded incidents that had for 
him a deep, real, present interest, and who had his own part in 
the passion of the controversy he describes. It vividly repre- 
sents one aspect of the strong life of the sixteenth century. The 
book, dedicated to the queen, was ordered to be set up in parish 
churches for the use of all the people, except in times of Divine 
service. From the Duke of Norfolk's, Fox went to live near 
John Day, for whom he worked as author, translator, and 
editor. John Day, a Suffolk man, had been busy in Edward 
VI.'s time as a printer of Bibles. Under Mary he was at one 
time a prisoner, at one time an exile. Under Elizabeth he had 
a printing-office, growing in size, against the city wall by Alders- 
gate, and shops for the sale of his books in several parts of 
London. Letters to Fox are extant addressed to him as " dwel- 
ling with Master Day, the printer, at Aldersgate;" and also to 
" Master John Fox, at his house in Grubbe Street." In Grub 
Street, then, we have, during the early years of Elizabeth, John 
Fox, the martyrologist, housed in a quality not unlike that of 
the bookseller's hack, though he and his bookseller and printer 
were actually fellow-workers with a common aim, and that the 
noblest, whereby they were to earn bread in service of their 
country. Captain Pen had already taken precedence of Captain 
Sword. Fox held a prebend at Salisbury, although he was 
opposed to the compromise with old forms in the ecclesiastical 
system of the Church, and refused to subscribe to anything but the 
Greek Testament. He preached at Paul's Cross and elsewhere ; 
but his most important work was that done with John Day. 

John Day, the printer, was the only man of his calling who 
liad types in the First English (or Anglo-Saxon) characters. 
One incident of the English Reformation was a revived study of 
First English, because that was a way to evidence of the 
antiquity of the Reformed Church. Sermons and writings of its 
first clergy would show that the Church of the Reformation was 
in agreement with the Church of England in its earliest state, 



342 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1558 

before corruption had crept in. Fox, therefore, studied First 
English, and one use made by him of Day's types was to pro- 
duce, in 1 57 1, dedicated to the queen, an edition of the Saxon 
Gospels. John Fox died in 1587. 

14. John Jewel, born in Devonshire in 1522, had been 
tutor and preacher in his University of Oxford, and rector of 
Sunning well, near Oxford. He bent under persecution after 
the accession of Mary, and subscribed to the Church of Rome ; 
but was distrusted and went abroad. He returned to England 
at the accession of Elizabeth, and stood forward as one of the 
sixteen Protestants appointed to dispute before the queen with 
sixteen Catholics. He was in 1559 one of the commissioners 
for the extirpation of Catholicism in the West of England, and 
a few months later was made Bishop of Salisbury. His Latin 
Apology for the English Church — Apologia Ecclesitz Anglicana 
— published in 1562, was- accepted as a representative book 
of its time, and was in the same year translated into English 
by Lady Anna, the wife of Sir Nicholas Bacon. John Jewel 
died in 1 571, at the age of fifty, having broken his health by 
reducing hours of sleep to the interval between midnight and 
four in the morning. 

15. The chief promoter of Fox's edition of the Saxon Gospels 
was Archbishop Parker. Matthew Parker, born in 1504, at 
Norwich, was the son of a merchant. At the age of twelve he 
lost his father, but he was educated carefully by his mother, 
who sent him to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. There he 
obtained a fellowship in 1527. In 1533 he preached his first 
sermon before the University, and obtained the good-will of 
Cranmer, who brought him to court. Anne Boleyn made him 
her chaplain, and tutor to her child Elizabeth. In 1537 he was 
made chaplain to Henry VIII., and then D.D. In 1541 he 
got a prebend in Ely, and soon afterwards a rectory in Essex. 
In 1544 he was Master of Corpus Christi College, and he 
held that office for nine years. In 1545 he was made Vice- 
Chancellor of the University, and rector of Landbeach, in 
Cambridgeshire. At the accession of Edward VI. Matthew 
Parker married. In 1552, King Edward gave him a prebend at 
Lincoln, having already made him his chaplain. During his 
exile, in the reign of Mary, Parker translated the Psalms into 
English verse, for comfort to himself like that of David, for 
whom in a time of trouble, as Parker says in his metrical 
preface : 



toa.d. 1563.] JEWEL. PARKER. THE GENEVA BIBLE. 343 



" With golden stringes such h 

His harpe so sweete did wrest, 
That he reliev'd his phrenesie 
When wicked sprites possest." 

This version of the Psalter, finished in 1557, was printed about 
1560 by John Day. Parker published also, "against a civilian 
naming himself Thomas Martin, Doctor of the Civil Laws, 
going about to disprove the said marriages lawful/' A 
Defence of Priestes Marriages, written by a learned man who 
died in the reign of Philip and Mary; with addition of his 
own " History of Priests' Marriages from the Conquest to 
Edward VI.'s Reign," which contains several quotations from 
First English. Upon her accession, Queen Elizabeth entrusted 
to Matthew Parker the revision of Edward VI.'s Service Book, 
and made him Archbishop of Canterbury in the place of 
Reginald Pole (ch vi. § 43), whose religious zeal had been in 
accord with the endeavours to suppress Protestant heresies, 
who had been made archbishop on the day after the burning 
of Cranmer, and who died a day after Queen Mary. For some 
time Matthew- Parker objected to the appointment of himself, 
and it was not completed until 1559. He was zealous in the 
conflict of his time, learned in Church antiquities, and firm in 
support of the ecclesiastical system in the English Church. 

There were produced early in the reign of Elizabeth two 
English versions of the Bible, which remained during the 
rest of her life commonly in use. These were the Geneva 
Bible, which appeared in 1560, and the Bishops' Bible, which 
appeared in 1568. The Geneva Bible was produced by the 
English congregation at Geneva during the reign of Mary, 
chiefly at the cost of John Bodley, the father of Sir Thomas 
Bodley. In 1557 the New Testament, translated by William 
Whittingham, Calvin's brother-in-law, was first published. It 
was translated from the Greek text as published by Erasmus, 
and revised from manuscripts collected by Genevan scholars. 
Calvin prefixed to it an " Epistle declaring that Christ is the 
End of the Law." Whittingham, then, with the aid of fellow- 
exiles, Gilby, Sampson, and others, turned to the Hebrew text, 
and instead of coming to England after the death of Mary, 
these labourers remained at Geneva to complete their work. 
Hebrew scholarship had advanced, and the Geneva Bible, 
completed in 1560, four years before the birth of Shakespeare, 
was as faithful as its translators could make it. Various 



344 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1558 

readings were given in the margin, and there were notes on 
points not only of history and geography but also of doctrine, 
which distinctly bound this version to the religious school of 
Calvin. In the Geneva Bible appeared, for the first time, as a plan 
to secure facility of reference, the now familiar division of the 
text into verses. This was the household Bible of those whom 
we may call — using the phrase in a broad sense — the Eliza- 
bethan Puritans. In the dedication of it to Queen Elizabeth, 
the zeal of the Genevan Reformers was not less harsh than 
that from which they had suffered themselves in the reign of 
Mary. Elizabeth was reminded how the noble Josias " put to 
death the false prophets and sorcerers, to perform the words of 
the law of God. . . Yea, and in the days of King Asa, it was 
enacted that whosoever would not seek the Lord God of 
Israel should be slain, whether he were small or great, man or 
woman." 

The zeal of Elizabeth was not so fierce. Her supremacy 
had been assured in civil and ecclesiastical matters, and 
uniformity in religion had been established by law. All persons 
in the Church, all graduates in the Universities, and all persons 
holding office of the crown, were required to take the oath of 
supremacy. A clergyman who did not use The Book of Common 
Prayer, or who spoke against it, was fined for the first offence 
a year's value of his living, and was liable also to six months' 
imprisonment. For the second offence his living was forfeited ; 
and a third offence subjected him to imprisonment for life. 
The book had been prepared from a comparison of the first 
and second Service Books of Edward. Its introduction 
had been opposed, but when introduced there were, of 9,400 
clergymen then in England, only 189 who became Noncon- 
formists, and gave up their livings. Among the laity deprecia- 
tion of the Book of Common Prayer was also liable to heavy 
punishment ; and there was a fine of a shilling upon all persons 
who did not attend their parish church or some recognised 
place of worship on Sunday unless reasonable cause for 
absence could be shown. There was established also a High 
Court of Commissioners appointed under the Great Seal of 
England, to determine upon questions of " error, heresy, or 
schism." Roman Catholics were thus liable to punishment if 
they disparaged the services of the Reformed Church, and to 
fine if they stayed away from them ; while the Puritans who 
objected to the retained forms of Catholicism in the English 



toa.d. 1564.] THE HIGH COURT OF COMMISSION. 345 

Church might be compelled by the High Court of Commission 
to accept whatever doctrine or practice the commissioners 
declared to be sanctioned by Parliament, by a general Council, 
or by the canonical Scriptures. Any three of the forty-four 
members of this Court might inquire concerning heretical 
opinions, seditious books, &c, contrary to the Acts of Supremacy 
and Uniformity ; any three, a bishop being one, might try 
■cases of wilful absence from church, and punish offenders by 
church censures or fines, or might try a clergyman on matters 
of doctrine. The commissioners might summon any one upon 
suspicion, and put him to his oath. Elizabeth had also, like 
the Tudors before her, the sovereign's own court of Star 
Chamber. Once this had been useful in overruling feudal 
power when it thwarted the due course of justice, but it had 
become a convenient instrument of personal rule. Trouble- 
some members of Parliament and jurors could be imprisoned 
by it or fined ; it undertook censorship of the press, and in 
Elizabeth's time prohibited the circulation of Roman Catholic 
works. This machinery was worked with various degrees of 
energy. John Fox, as we have seen, was Nonconformist, and 
though honoured by the queen, and free, of course, from 
persecution, he was left in poverty until Cecil contrived that 
he should have, on his own terms, a prebend in Salisbury 
Cathedral. Sampson, one of the translators of the Geneva 
Bible, refused the bishopric of Norwich because he would not 
take the prescribed oaths, but he was made at Oxford Dean of 
Christchurch ; and Humphrey, another of the early Puritans, 
•was at the same time made President of Magdalene College. 
Different degrees of objection to Church ceremonial produced 
also a diversity of practice, which was made in 1564 the subject 
of special inquiry by the High Court of Commission. Thus 
the clergy were said to officiate " some with a square cap, some 
with a round cap, some with a button cap, some with a hat." 
Such inquiry led to the deprival and imprisonment of Sampson 
and Humphrey. The London clergy were called before the 
Commissioners, commanded thenceforth " that strictly ye keep 
the unity of apparel," and summoned singly to conform or lose 
their .livings. Of ninety-eight London clergymen sixty-one 
subscribed, and thirty-seven were suspended for three months 
with threat of deprivation if they did not within that time 
conform. The objection of those whom Archbishop Parker 
called " the precise brethren " was to the creation by human 



346 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1561 

authority of laws as part of their religion which were not 
derived from the authority of the Bible, the one source of law 
in matters of religion, but from the ceremonial of a church 
which had assigned a superstitious value to its clothes. Each 
clergyman with cure of souls was then required to swear 
obedience to all the queen's injunctions ; to all letters from 
Lords of the Privy Council ; to all articles and injunctions 
from the metropolitan ; to all articles and mandates from his 
bishop, archdeacon, and other ecclesiastical officers. Miles 
Coverdale, as a Nonconformist, had been neglected in the 
first years of Elizabeth, until Edmund Grindal, then Bishop of 
London, obtained for him in 1562 the London parish of St. 
Magnus, without oaths required. He was now, at the age of 
eighty, obliged to give up his living, and was until his death, in 
1567, a preacher unattached. 

Archbishop Parker was thoroughly sincere in carrying out 
this policy. There was a wide-spread reverence for the old 
forms of the Church in rural England ; many scholars and 
students of the past shared in the reverential feeling, and 
wished to secure essentials of reform with least possible disturb- 
ance of forms and customs that had been blended with the 
worship of God by their forefathers. Respect for the past was 
natural to Matthew Parker. In his household all servants 
when they had nothing else to do were required to bind books,, 
to copy or paint from manuscripts, or engrave on copper. He 
took pains to collect manuscripts scattered at the destruction 
of the monasteries, especially the most ancient of those that 
related to our own Church. He caused four old historians to be 
edited, Matthew Paris, Matthew of Westminster, Thomas 
Walsingham, and Asserts " Life of Alfred." In 1566 he issued 
yElfric's Homily on the Lord's Supper, to be read to the people 
at Easter, before sacrament. The tendency of all his labour is 
indicated by his own work, a folio printed in Latin, in 1572 — 
De Antiquitate Britannicce E celestes, &c. — on the antiquity of 
the Church of Britain and privileges of the Church of Canter- 
bury, with its seventy archbishops. Parker represented honestly, 
and maintained in the manner of the time, the principle of 
authority within the Church. His friend Queen Elizabeth liked 
Puritans rather less than Catholics, because their opposition to 
authority in many of its forms implied, if it spread and took 
other shape, a possible abridgment of the power of the crown. 

For the Geneva Bible, John Bodley obtained in 1561 a patent, 



TOA.D. i 5 68.] MATTHEW PARKER. THE BISHOPS' BIBLE. 347 

giving exclusive right to print that version for seven years. In 
1566, a revised edition being ready, an extension of the licence 
was applied for, and permitted for twelve years longer, on con- 
dition that no impression should pass without the direction, con- 
sent, and advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop 
of London. John Bodley would not consent to that ; and the 
Geneva Bible was printed abroad for English use until the death 
of Archbishop Parker. Parker, meanwhile, produced, with 
conscientious care, a version which was to supersede in churches 
Cranmer's Bible (ch. vi. § 29). About 1564, in the year of 
Shakespeare's birth, he distributed the work of translation 
among fifteen learned men, most of them bishops, urged on 
them to do their work " in such perfection that the adversaries 
can have no occasion to quarrel with it," and published the 
result in 1568. This translation, from the number of bishops 
who took part in it, and from the fact that it became, for Eliza- 
beth's reign, the authorised version for church use, was known 
as The Bishops' Bible. It put aside, for example, Tyndal's 
word " congregation," against which More had contended, and 
which had remained in Cranmer's Bible, giving the word 
"Church," that Tyndal had avoided (ch. vi. § 22). But ten- 
dencies of thought are indicated by the fact that of eighty-five 
editions of the English Bible published in Elizabeth's reign, sixty 
were of the Geneva version. 

16. On the way from the monastic chronicle to later forms of 
history, we have now come to a form of chronicle in which the 
design of Robert of Gloucester (ch. iii. § 38) is carried out with 
simple directness. The Latin monastic chronicle (ch. iii. § 3) 
was to enable studious brethren to connect their lives with the 
great life of the world, and the history and interests of the 
abbey itself usually in this chronicle lay at the heart of all the 
business of the world. But now we have in our own tongue 
abstracts and chronicles of past events at the heart of which 
there lies only the desire that Englishmen should know what it 
concerns them to know of the life of their own country. There 
is no attempt at a minute tracing of cause and effect — that was 
to follow ; no rhyming to recommend the story to the ears of an 
uneducated people — that had gone before. In the stir of life at 
the beginning of the sixteenth century, there was not only a desire 
but a need simply to know what had been done in the past. 

Richard Grafton, who completed Hall's Chronicle, (ch. 
vi. § 50) produced, therefore, in 1563, An Abridgment; and in 



34 8 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1557 

1565 A Manual of the Chronicles of England, from the Creation 
to the date of publication ; and in 1568 and 1569, in two folios, 
A Chronicle at large a?id meere History of the Affayres of 
Englande and Kinges of the same. 

John Stow, born in Cornhill about 1525, was a tailor's 
son, and for a few years himself a tailor. But the life of the 
time stirred in him an enthusiasm for the study of English his- 
tory and antiquities. He produced, in 1561, A Summary of 
English Chronicles, and gave time and labour in travel about the 
country to produce for posterity a larger record ; but he would 
have given up the delight and chief use of his life, to go 
back to tailoring for need of bread, if he had not been 
encouraged by occasional help from Archbishop Parker. His 
history first appeared in 1580, a quarto of more than 1,200 
pages, as Annates, or a Generate Chronicle of England from 
Brute unto this presoit yeare of Christ, 1580. 

Ralph Holinshed had produced, with help of John 
Hooker, Richard Stanihurst, Boteville, Harrison, and others, 
his Chronicle three years before, in 1577, when Shakespeare was 
thirteen years old. Prefixed to it was a "Description of Britaine," 
valuable as an account of the condition of the country at that 
time. It was in two folio volumes, with many woodcuts. The 
second edition, which contained some passages that displeased 
the queen and required cancelling, appeared in 1586 and 1587, 
when Shakespeare's age was about twenty-three. It was chiefly 
in Hall and Holinshed that Shakespeare read the history of 
England. Of Holinshed himself little more is known than that 
he came of a respectable family at Bosley, in Cheshire, and that 
he was, in the latter part of his life, steward to a Thomas Burdet, 
of Bromcote, Warwickshire. 

When the Chronicles of Holinshed and Stow appeared, in 
1577 and 1580, William Camden had been appointed second 
master of Westminster School, and was at work on his Bri- 
tannia. Camden was a Londoner, born in 155 1, or about two 
years older than Spenser. He was educated at Christ's Hospital 
and St. Paul's School, entered as a servitor at Magdalene College, 
Oxford, whence he removed to Broadgate Hall (now Pembroke 
College), and then to Christchurch. He graduated in 1573, and 
in 1575 became second master at Westminster School, where he 
spent all leisure in the studies by which he served his country in 
the latter part of Elizabeth's reign, and in the reign of her 
successor. 



toa.d. 1580.] HISTORIANS. TUSSER'S " HUSBANDRIES 349 

To this record of the cultivation of English history by men of 
the people — a poor scholar, a gentleman's steward, a tailor, at a 
time, too, when there was another tailor, John Speed, gathering 
enthusiasm for such studies — we may add note of the service 
done to literature by George Bannatyne. He was the 
seventh child of a family of twenty-three, born in 1545, and bred 
to trade. In 1568 he was a young man of twenty-three, at home 
because it was a time of pestilence, when work was stopped. 
He amused himself in his forced leisure by copying all the 
pieces of good Scottish poetry he could meet with. His col- 
lection was so well taken care of that it has come down to our 
own time, a MS. of 800 closely- written pages, now in the library 
of the Faculty of Advocates, at Edinburgh. 

17. We return to the poets, and take poetry on the side nearest 
to trade — with still a chief regard for the material well-being of 
England— in Thomas Tusser, whose Hundreth Good Poi7ites 
of Husba?idrie, the first form of a larger book, appeared in 1557, 
the year before Elizabeth's accession (ch. vi. § 60). Thomas 
Tusser was born about 1515, at Rivenhall, in Essex, was first a 
chorister at St. Paul's, and then was placed at Eton under Udall 
(ch. vi. § 48, 58, 60), of whom he says : 

" From Paul's I went, to Eton sent, 
To learn straightways the Latin phrase, 
Where fifty-three stripes given to me 
At once I had. 

For fault but small, or none at all, 
It came to pass thus beat I was : 
See, Udall, see, the mercy oi thee 
To me, poor lad." 

Tusser went from Eton to Cambridge, was fourteen years at 
Court under the patronage of Lord Paget, then took a farm in 
Suffolk, and rhymed about farming. He first broke out in 1557 
with his " Hundred Good Points," but his crop of rhyming 
maxims had increased fivefold by the year 1573, when Richard 
Tottel published Tusser's Five Hundreth Points of good Hus- 
bandry, giving the round of the year's husbandry month by 
month, in a book of 98 pages, six and a half quatrains to a page. 
Tusser's strength may have been in high farming, it was not in 
high poetry. Nevertheless, there is a musical sententiousness 
in his terse rhymes, and an air of business about them; his 
Pegasus tugged over the clods with his shoulder well up to the 
collar, and the maxims were in a form likely to ensure for them 
wide currency among the people. While less practical poets 



35° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. r A .D. 1562 

might bid their readers go idly a Maying with Maid Marian, 
Tusser advised otherwise : 

" In May get a weed-hook, a crotch, and a glove, 
And weed out such weeds as the corn doth not love. 
For weeding of winter corn now it is best, 
But June is the better for weeding the rest." 

Thomas Tusser died in 1580. 

18. George Turbervile was about fifteen years younger 
than Tusser. He was born at Whitchurch, in Dorsetshire, edu- 
cated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, became secretary 
to Sir Thomas Randolph, ambassador at the Court of Russia, and 
lived into the latter part of Elizabeth's reign. He published, in 
1567, two translations — one of The Heroical Epistles of Ovid, 
six of them translated into blank verse, and the others into four- 
lined stanzas ; the other of the Latin Eclogues of Mantuan, an 
Italian poet, who had died in 1516. In 1570 there appeared a 
volume of his own poems as Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs, and 
Sonets j with a Discourse of the friendly Affections of Tynietes 
to Pindar a his Ladie. Turbervile takes a pleasant place among 
the elder Elizabethan poets. He wrote also books of Falconrie 
and Hunting, and made versions from the Italian, notably ten 
Tragical Tales translated by Turbervile, in Time of his 
Troubles, out of sundrie Italians, with the Argument and 
V Envoy e to each Tale, published in 1576. 

From Italy, with French intervention, the story of "Romeo 
and Juliet " first came into English verse in 1562, two years before 
Shakespeare's birth, as The Tragicall History e of Romeus and 
Juliet, writtenfirst in Italian by Bandell, and now in English by 
Ar. Br., that is, Arthur Brooke. Arthur Brooke took his 
poem from a French variation on the story by Bandello, himself 
altering and adding. In 1576, " Romeo and Juliet " appeared 
again in English, this time in prose, as the twenty-fifth novel of 
the second volume of The Palace of Pleasure, a collection of tales 
from the Italian, by William Paynter. Shakespeare after- 
wards founded his play on the tale as told by Arthur Brooke. 
Thus Ar. Br. wrote : 

" 'Art thou,' quoth he, 'a man ? Thy shape saith so thou art ; 
Thy crying and thy weeping eyes denote a woman's hart : 
For manly reason is quite from of thy mind outchased, 
And in her stead affections lewd and fancies highly placed ; 
So that I stoode in doute this howre at the least, 
If thou a man or woman wert, or els a brutish beast.' " 



Which became in Shakespeare's verse : 



TOA.D. 1576.] TURBERVILE. TALES FROM THE ITALIAN. 35 1 

" Art thou a man ? Thy form cries out thou art : 
Thy tears are womanish ; thy wild acts denote 
Th' unreasonable fury of a beast " 

William Paynter, Clerk of the Office of Arms within the Tower 
of London, produced in 1566 the first volume of the " Palace of 
Pleasure," containing sixty novels translated from Boccaccio's 
" Decameron." In the following year he published, in a second 
volume, thirty-four more novels, partly taken from Bandello, 
whose tales first appeared at Lucca, in 1554. There were nine 
volumes of them, and it indicated the corruption of Italian life 
that some of the most licentious were inscribed to ladies of good 
fame. 

19. Roger Ascham (ch. vi. § 55) made this in " The 
Schoolmaster," one ground of his argument against the " man- 
ners and doctrine our Englishmen fetch out of Italy." Ascham, 
although a Protestant, had escaped persecution in the reign of 
Mary ; his pension had been renewed, and in May, 1554, he had 
been appointed Latin secretary to the queen, with a salary of 
forty marks. In that year also he gave up his fellowship, and 
married Margaret Howe. By Queen Elizabeth, Roger Ascham, 
who had been one of her teachers in Greek, was still continued 
in his pension, and retained in his post of Latin Secretary. In 
1560 the queen gave him the prebend of Wetwang, in York 
Minster. The archbishop had given it to another, and Ascham 
did not get his dues without a lawsuit. In 1563, Ascham, as 
one in the queen's service, was dining with Sir William Cecil, 
when the conversation turned to the subject of education, from 
news of the running away of some boys from Eton, where there 
was much beating. Ascham argued that young children were 
sooner allured by love than driven by beating to obtain good 
learning. Sir Richard Sackville, father of Thomas Sackville 
(§ 8), said nothing at the dinner-table, but he afterwards drew 
Ascham aside, agreed with his opinions, lamented his own past 
loss by a harsh schoolmaster, and said, Ascham tells us in the 
preface to his book, " ' Seeing it is but in vain to lament things 
past, and also wisdom to look to things to come, surely, God 
willing, if God lend me life, I will make this, my mishap, some 
occasion of good hap to little Robert Sackville, my son's son. 
For whose bringing up I would gladly, if it so please you, use 
specially your good advice. I hear say you have a son much 
of his age (Ascham had three little sons) ; we will deal thus 
together. Point you out a schoolmaster who by your order 



35 2 . A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1563 

shall teach my son and yours, and for all the rest I will provide,, 
yea, though they three do cost me a couple of hundred pounds 
by year : and besides you shall find me as fast a friend to you 
and yours as perchance any you have.' Which promise the 
worthy gentleman surely kept with me until his dying day." 
The conversation went into particulars, and in the course of it 
Sir Richard drew from Ascham what he thought of the common 
going of Englishmen into Italy. All ended with a request that 
Ascham would " put in some order of writing the chief points 
of this our talk, concerning the right order of teaching and 
honesty of living, for the good bringing up of children and 
young men." That was the origin of Ascham's book called 
The Schoolmaster. Ascham wrote in Latin against the mass, 
and upon other subjects connected with religious controversy. 
His delicate health failed more and more. He became unable 
to work between dinner and bed-time, was troubled with sleep- 
lessness, sought rest by the motion of a cradle, and ended his pure 
life as a scholar in 1568, at the age of fifty-three. His " School- 
master" was left complete, and published in 1570 by his widow, 
with a dedication to Sir William Cecil. Beseeching him, she 
said, to take on him " the defence of the book, to avaunce the 
good that may come of it by your allowance and furtherance to 
publike use and benefite, and to accept the thankefull recognition 
of me and my poore children, trustyng of the continuance of 
your good memorie of M. Ascham and his, and dayly com- 
mendyng the prosperous estate of you and yours to God, whom 
you serve, and whose you are,, I rest to trouble you. Your 
humble Margaret Ascham." The treatise is in two parts, one 
dealing with general principles, the other technical, as in " Tox- 
ophilus ; " the first book teaching the bringing up of youth, the 
second book teaching the ready way to the Latin tongue. Great 
stress is laid in Ascham's " Schoolmaster " on gentleness in teach- 
ing. As to the true notes of the best wit in a child, Ascham will 
take, he says, "the very judgment of him that was counted the best 
teacher and wisest man that learning maketh mention of, and 
that is Socrates in Plato, who expresseth orderly these seven 
plain notes to choose a good wit in a child for learning." He 
was to be (1) Euphues ; (2) of good memory ; (3) attached to 
learning ; (4) prepared for labour and pains ; (5) glad to learn 
of another ; (6) free in questioning ; and (7) happy in well- 
earned applause. The first of these qualities, Ascham describes 
at especial length ; and the embodiment of the description, in 



toa.d. i57o.] ascham's " schoolmaster:* 353 

a character wanting some of the other qualities, is, as we shall 
presently see, John Lyly's hero Euphues, described in a tale 
which has for subordinate title, "The Anatomy of Wit." 
Ascham's " Schoolmaster " was first published by his widow in 
the year 1570. The first part of Lyly's " Euphues" appeared in 
1579 ; the other part, " Euphues and his England," in 1580. 

" Evcpv^s," the Schoolmaster said, " is he that is apt by good- 
ness of wit, and appliable by readiness of will, to learning, 
having all other qualities of the mind and parts of the body 
that must another day serve learning, not troubled, mangled, 
and halved, but sound, whole, full, and able to do their office : 
as a tongue not stammering, or over hardly drawing forth words, 
but plain and ready to deliver the meaning of the mind ; a voice 
not soft, weak, piping, womanish, but audible, strong, and man- 
like ; a countenance not werish and crabbed, but fair and 
comely ; a personage not wretched and deformed, but tall and 
goodly : for surely a comely countenance, with a goodly 
stature, giveth credit to learning and authority to the person ; 
otherwise, commonly, either open contempt or privy disfavour 
doth hurt or hinder both person and learning. And even as 
a fair stone requireth to be set in the finest gold, with the best 
workmanship, or else it loseth much of the grace and price, 
even so excellency in learning, and namely divinity, joined with 
a comely personage, is a marvellous jewel in the world. And 
how can a comely body be better employed than to serve the 
greatest exercise of God's greatest gift, and that is learning? 
But commonly the fairest bodies are bestowed on the foulest 
purposes. I would it were not so ; and with examples herein I 
will not meddle ; yet I wish that those should both mend it 
and meddle with it which have most occasion to look to it, as 
good and wise fathers should do," &c. 

In illustration of the force of gentleness in teaching, Ascham 
cited in "The Schoolmaster" his finding of Lady Jane Grey, 
when he called on her at Broadgate, in Leicestershire, before 
his going into Germany, reading Plato's Phaedo in Greek, " and 
that with as much delight as some gentlemen would read a 
merry tale in Boccaccio." He asked her how that was ; and 
she said it was because God had given her severe parents and a 
gentle schoolmaster. At home she was so continually under 
punishment and censure that she longed for the time when she 
must go to Mr. Aylmer (§ 2) "who teacheth me so gently, so 
pleasantly, with such fair allurements to learning, that I think 



354 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1570 

all the time nothing whiles I am with him. And when I am 
called from him I fall on weeping, because whatsoever I do 
else but learning is full of grief, trouble, fear, and whole mis- 
liking unto me." For Italy, said Ascham, the best that it could 
teach of the joining of learning with comely exercises was to 
be found in the "Courtier" {Cortegiano) of Count Baldassar 
Castiglione (the original published in 1516), "which book, 
advisedly read and diligently followed but one year at home in 
England, would do a young gentleman more good, I wis, than 
three years travel abroad spent in Italy." " And I marvel," 
adds Ascham, "that this book is no more read in the court 
than it is, seeing it is so well translated into English by a 
worthy gentleman, Sir Thomas Hoby" (translation published 
1 561). Italy, said Ascham, is not what it was wont to be. 
"Virtue once made that country mistress over all the world. 
Vice now maketh that country slave to them that before were 
glad to serve it. . . . If a gentleman must needs travel into 
Italy, he shall do well to look to the life of the wisest traveller 
that ever travelled thither, set out by the wisest writer that ever 
spake with tongue, God's doctrine only excepted, and that is 
Ulysses in Homer." The " Schoolmaster " observed that 
Ulysses " is not commended so much nor so oft in Homer, 
because he was TroKvTpoiros, that is, skilful in men's manners and 
fashions, as because he was ttoKv/xtjtis, that is, wise in all purposes 
and ware in all places." Against Circe's enchantment Homer's 
remedy was the herb Moly, "with the black root and white 
flower, sour at the first but sweet in the end, which Hesiodus 
termeth the study of virtue." This was of all things most 
contrary to what Ascham called " the precepts of fond books 
of late translated out of Italian into English, sold in every shop 
in London. . . . Ten sermons at Paul's Cross do not so 
much good for moving men to true doctrine as one of these 
books do harm with enticing men to ill living." 

Let our young men, then, go to Italy under the keep and 
guard of one "who by his wisdom and honesty, by his example and 
authority, may be able to keep them safe and sound in the fear 
of God, in Christ's true religion, in good order and honesty of 
living." Ascham quoted to his countrymen the Italian proverb 
that "an Italianate Englishman is an incarnate devil." The 
readiest way, he said, to entangle the mind with false doctrine 
is first to entice the will to wanton living. Ascham dwelt on 
the outcome of a sensual life in the contempt by Italians alike 



toa.d. 1579.] AOGER ASCHAM. JOHN LYLY. 355 

of the pope and of Luther ; " they allow neither side : they 
like none but only themselves. The mark they shoot at, the 
end they look for, the heaven they desire, is only their own 
present pleasure and private profit ; whereby they plainly 
declare of whose school, of what religion they be : that is 
Epicures in living, and &9eoi." (atheists, the word was now 
being Anglicised) "in doctrine. This last word is no more 
unknown now to plain Englishmen than the person was unknown 
sometime in England, until some Englishmen took pains to 
fetch that devilish opinion out of Italy." 

20. Roger Ascham's " Schoolmaster " produced both name 
and substance of the " Euphues " of young John Lyly. 
Lyly was born in the Weald of Kent, about 1553; became a 
student of Magdalene College, Oxford, in 1569; took his degree 
of B.A. in 1573, and of M.A. in 1575; and was incorporated as 
M.A. of Cambridge in 1579. It was in the spring of the year 
1579 that he published Euphues j or, the Anatomy of Wit. This 
earnest book, written at the age of five-and-twenty, made 
Lyly's reputation as a wit. It evidently was suggested by the 
reading of Ascham's " Schoolmaster." From citation of the 
anatomy of a teachable child's wit, as set forth by Socrates, and 
from Euphues, the first of the discriminated qualities, it obtained, 
as we have just seen, both its titles. Its form is that of an 
Italian story, its style a very skilful elaboration of that humour 
for conceits and verbal antitheses which had been coming in 
from Italy and was developing itself into an outward fashion of 
our literature. In form and style, therefore, it sought to win a 
welcome from those fashionable people upon whose minds there 
was most need to enforce its substance. In substance it was 
the argument of Ascham's "Schoolmaster" repeated: corruption 
of English life by the much going of our young men to Italy ; 
the right development of the young mind by education on just 
principles, to a worthy life and a true faith in God. 

21. It was not by right of their literature alone that the Italians 
of the sixteenth century, claiming the first rank in civilisation, 
spoke of the outer nations, after the old Roman fashion, as 
barbarians. Jerome Cardan, describing to his countrymen 
his visit to the court of Edward VI., said of the English that 
" in dress they are like the Italians, for they are glad to boast 
themselves nearly allied to them, and therefore study to imitate 
as much as possible their manner and their clothes. Certain 
it is that all the barbarians of Europe love the Italians more 

x 2 



35^ A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1579. 

than any race among themselves." He hinted that "perhaps 
these people do not know our wickedness." 

The prevalence of a poetic element in the Italian cha- 
iacter was of itself dangerous to foreigners of colder blood 
who went to Italy for inspiration. In that land of song, at the 
beginning of the sixteenth century, there was still to be heard 
the complaint made by Petrarch generations earlier, that the 
very tailors and shoemakers stitched rhymes and cobbled 
verse. Commentators upon Petrarch issued forth out of the 
printing-offices by dozens at a time, and were to be heard by 
thousands discoursing in society. His words were picked over 
for allegories, and his book of verse, weighted with fanciful 
interpretations, was disgraced into a pattern-book for all 
tailors of rhyme, a Follet for the literary milliner who set the 
fashion after which the luxury of idleness should be attired. Thus 
Petrarch unwittingly became a father of conceits. When, after 
the death of Leo X., the Florentine academicians, sorely punished 
for political conspiracy, were forced to confine their energies 
to literature, verbal haggling over Petrarch was their chief 
delight. Great poets were arising. The romantic epic, the 
pastoral, the satire, even the drama, were all dropping their first- 
fruits upon the rich Italian soil; but ready rhetoric, of sentiment 
determined to be clever and not caring to be true, still yielded 
the husks eaten by the mob alike of the palace and the street. 

But upon the fashion of speech at Elizabeth's court there 
were other influences of which we have not yet taken account. 
Some of its peculiarities, together with the very name that 
gave the term of Euphuism to its affectations, are to be traced 
to the Platonists, who were strong in the days of Henry VIII. 
But Platonism also came to us from Italy. It was in Florence 
that the refugee Greeks, after the fall of Constantinople, were 
first welcomed as revealers of Plato and Aristotle (ch. v. § 25). In 
Italy Plato, in France Aristotle, was preferred. Neoplatonists 
had given interests to the Rabbinical doctrine of the Cabbala, 
then received by many a good Christian scholar. It was joined 
to principles of an occult philosophy, partly derived from the 
same source, but enriched from teaching of the Arabs ; and it 
was confirmed by marvellous recitals in the " Natural History" 
of Pliny. " The mysteries of Nature," one of her students then 
said, "can no otherwise than by experience and conjecture be 
inquired into by us." Until the asserted experience of ancient 
naturalists had been disproved by the experience of later times, 



a.d. 1579.J SOURCES OF EUPHUISM. 357 

it was not very unreasonable to assume that the science of the 
ancients equalled their philosophy and poetry. To deny virtues 
assigned to certain stones, plants, animals, or stars, simply 
because they were wonderful, certainly would not have been 
wise. Even in the magical doctrines then widely accepted 
there was reasoning entitled to respect. Their basis, it may be 
observed, was so far from being diabolical, that they set out 
with a demand for purity of life, and for a high spiritual adora- 
tion of the source of all the harmony they laboured to find in 
the wonders of creation. It is to be remembered, therefore, that 
those marvellous properties of things, honestly credited and freely 
used in the fashioning of ornaments of speech, had not for the 
reader of their own time that inherent absurdity which now 
attaches to them. It is very difficult indeed now to read in the 
old sense the kind of writing in which Lyly was master, " talk- 
ing," as Drayton said, 

" Of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies* 
p. Playing with words and idle similies." 

we must not forget that before the idlers went to Italy our 
scholars as well as our poets had been there. In Italy, Colet, 
Linacre, Grocyn, Lily, and Latimer, had learnt their Greek. 
Even after Elizabeth's day, Platonism survived to the time of 
the Commonwealth, in Henry More, who wrote Platonic songs 
of the Soul's Life and Immortality, and dedicated to his friend 
Cudworth a defence of the Threefold Cabbala. But Henry 
More's spiritual conceits have no concord with courtly affecta- 
tions. " If," he says, " by thoughts rudely scattered in my verse 
I may lend men light till the dead night be gone," 

" It is enough I meant no trimmer frame, 
Nor by nice needlework to seek a name." 

To that taste for " nice needlework " Camden objected in 
" our sparkful youth," ready to " laugh at their great-grand- 
fathers' English, who had more care to do well than to speak 
minion-like." 

22. In the dedication of his Euphues to Lord de la Warre, Lyly 
suggests that there may be found in it " more speeches which 
for gravity will mislike the foolish than unseemly terms which 
for vanity may offend the wise." He anticipates some little 
disfavour from the " fine wits of the day ; " and his allusions to 
" the dainty ear of the curious sifter," to the use of " superfluous 
eloquence," to the search after " those who sift the finest meal 



35 8 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1579. 

and bear the whitest mouths," sufficiently show that his own 
manner was formed on an existing fashion. " It is a world," he 
says, " to see how Englishmen desire to hear finer speech than 
their language will allow, to eat finer bread than is made of 
wheat, or wear finer cloth than is made of wool ; but I let pass 
their fineness, which can no way excuse my folly." But Lyly 
being a master of the style he had adopted, his ingenious 
English was taken as the type of successful writing in the 
fashionable manner, and from the title of his novel, the name of 
" Euphuism " was derived for the quaint writing, rich in conceit, 
alliteration, and antithesis, which remained in favour during the 
rest of the period of Italian influence on English literature. 

Lyly's novel itself was in design most serious. He repre- 
sented Euphues as a young gentleman of Athens, who corre- 
sponded in his readiness of wit and perfectness of body to the 
quality called Euphues by Plato. He went to Italy, to Naples, 
" a place of more pleasure than profit, and yet of more profit 
than piety, the very walls and windows whereof showed it rather 
to be the tabernacle of Venus than the temple of Vesta. . . 
a court more meet for an atheist than one of Athens." There he 
showed so pregnant a wit that Eubulus, an old gentleman of the 
place, was impelled to warn him at length against the dangers of 
the city in words ending with the solemn admonition, " Serve 
God, love God, fear God, and God will so bless thee as either 
heart can wish or thy friends desire." Young Euphues disdained 
counsel of age, and bought experience in his own way. He 
found a friend in a young and wealthy town-born gentleman, 
named Philautus. 'Euphues and Philautus " used not only one 
board but one bed, one book (if so be it they thought not one 
too many)." Philautus was supplanted by Euphues in the light 
love of Lu cilia, daughter of Don Ferardo, one of the chief 
governors of the city. This parted the friends ; until Euphues 
was in his turn cast off for one Curio, a gentleman of little 
wealth and less wit. Then Euphues lamented his rejection of 
the fatherly counsel of Eubulus, and his spending of life in the 
laps of ladies, of his lands in maintenance of bravery, and of 
his wit in the vanities of idle sonnets. The greatest wickedness, 
he found, is drawn out of the greatest wit, if it be abused by 
will, or entangled with the world, or inveigled by woman. He 
would endeavour himself to amend all that is past, and be a 
mirror of godliness thereafter, rather choosing to die in his study 
amidst his books than to court it in Italy in the company of 



a.d. 1579.] LYLY'S "EUPHUES." 359 

ladies. The story was here at an end, although the volume was 
not and Lyly's idler readers, who had caught at his bait of a 
fashionably conceited tale, might now begin to feel the hook with 
which he angled. Philautus and Euphues renewed their friend- 
ship ; and Euphues, having returned to Athens, sent to his friend 
in Naples "a cooling card for Philautus and all fond lovers." 
Then followed a letter " to the grave matrons and honest maidens 
of Italy," in the spirit of one who, as Euphues wrote, " may 
love the clear conduit water, though he loathe the muddy ditch. 
Ulysses, though he detested Calypso, with her sugared voice, yet 
he embraced Penelope, with her rude distaff." It should no 
more, said Lyly, grieve the true woman to hear censure of 
woman's folly " than the mint master to see the coiner hanged." 
Increasing in earnestness, the book then gave, under the heading 
of " Euphues and his Ephebus " (Ephebus meaning a youth come 
to man's estate, which was for boys in Athens the age of seven- 
teen), a systematic essay upon education, sound as Ascham's in 
its doctrine ; dealing with the management of children from their 
birth, and advancing to the ideal of a university. Rising still in 
earnestness, as he showed his Euphues growing in wisdom, Lyly 
made a letter to the gentlemen scholars of Athens preface to a 
dialogue between Euphues and Atheos, which was an argument 
against the infidelity that had crept in from Italy. It is as 
earnest as if Latimer himself had preached it to the courtiers of 
King Edward. Euphues appeals solemnly to Scripture and the 
voice within ourselves. In citation from the sacred text consist 
almost his only illustrations ; in this he abounds. Whole pages 
contain nothing but the words of Scripture. At a time when 
fanciful and mythological adornment was so common to litera- 
ture that the very Bible Lyly read — the new Bishops' Bible (§ 15) 
— contained woodcut initials upon subjects drawn from Ovid's 
" Metamorphoses," and opened the Epistle to the Hebrews with 
a sketch of Leda and the Swan, Lyly does not once mingle false 
ornament with reasoning on sacred things. He refers to the 
ancients only at the outset of his argument, to show that 
the heathen had acknowledged a creator : mentions Plato 
but to say that he recognised one whom we may call God 
omnipotent, glorious, immortal, unto whose similitude we that 
creep here on earth have our souls framed ; and Aristotle, only 
to tell how, when he could not find out by the secrecy of 
nature the cause of the ebbing and the flowing of the sea, he 
cried, with a loud voice, " O Thing of Things, have mercy upon 



360 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 155* 

me ! " In twenty black-letter pages there are but three illustra- 
tions drawn from supposed properties of things. The single 
anecdote from profane history may here be quoted from a dis- 
course that introduces nearly all the texts incorporated in our 
Liturgy : — " I have read of Themistocles, which having offended 
Philip, the King of Macedonia, and could no way appease his 
anger, meeting his young son Alexander, took him in his arms, 
and met Philip in the face. Philip, seeing the smiling countenance 
of the child, was well pleased with Themistocles. Even so, if 
through thy manifold sins and heinous offences thou provoke 
the heavy displeasure of thy God, insomuch as thou shalt 
tremble for horror, take his only-begotten and well-beloved Son 
Jesus in thine arms, and then He neither can nor will be angry 
with thee. If thou have denied thy God, yet if thou go out with 
Peter and weep bitterly, God will not deny thee. Though with 
the prodigal son thou wallow in thine own wilfulness, yet if thou 
return again sorrowful thou shalt be received. If thou be a 
grievous offender, yet if thou come unto Christ with the woman 
in Luke, and wash His feet with thy tears, thou shalt obtain 
remission." 

The first part of Euphues — Euphues; or, the Anatomy of Wit T 
published in 1579; — is a complete work. The second part — 
Euphues and his E?igland, published in 1580 — was apparently 
designed to mitigate some of the severity of the first, which had 
given offence at Oxford, and indirectly deprecate, in courtly 
fashion, a too ruinous interpretation of the author's meaning. 
In the first part Lyly satisfied his conscience ; in the second 
part, but still without dishonesty, he satisfied the court. He had 
ended the first part with an intimation that Euphues was about 
to visit England, and promised, within one summer, a report of 
what he saw. In his second part, therefore, Euphues, bringing 
Philautus with him, lands at Dover, after telling a long moral 
story on the sea. The two strangers pass through Canterbury, 
and are entertained in a roadside house by a retired courtier. 
This personage keeps bees and philosophises over them ; from 
him we hear the lengthy story of his love, enriched with numerous 
conceited conversations. In London the travellers lodge with a 
merchant, and are admitted to the intimacy of a lady named 
Camilla, who is courted and who finally is married, though she 
be below his rank, by noble Surius. With Camilla and the 
ladies who are her friends, the strangers converse much in 
courtly fashion. Philautus of course falls in love with her, and 



toa.d. I579-] EDMUND SPENSER. 36 1 

worries her with letters ; but he is at last led by Flavia, a prudent 
matron, to the possession of a wife in the young lady Violet. 
Every Englishwoman is fair, wise, and good. Nothing is wrong 
in England ; or whatever is wrong, Lyly satirises with exagge- 
rated praise. The story is full of covert satire, and contains 
much evidence of religious earnestness. It is designedly en- 
riched with love-tales, letters between lovers, and ingenious 
examples of those fanciful conflicts of wit in argument upon 
some courtly theme, to which fine ladies and gentlemen of 
Elizabeth's court formally sat down as children now sit down 
to a round game of forfeits. Having saved to the last a pane- 
gyric upon Queen Elizabeth, which blends an ounce of flattery 
with certainly a pound of solid praise in its regard for her as 
the mainstay of the Protestant faith, Euphues retires to Athens, 
where, he says, " Gentlemen, Euphues is musing in the bottom 
of the mountain Silixedra, Philautus is married in the Isle of 
England : two friends parted, the one living in the delights of his 
new wife, the other in contemplation of his old griefs." 

After a few more words, Lyly parted from his readers by 
committing them to the Almighty. 

23. Such were the times wherein Spenser and Shakespeare 
grew to their full powers : Spenser representing England with 
its religious sense of duty combative, bitterly combative, in all 
the struggle of the time ; Shakespeare enabled by that English 
earnestness to speak through highest poetry the highest truth, to 
shape in immortal forms the very spirit which we lose too often 
while we fight to make it ours. 

Edmund Spenser was born in or about the year 1552. 
He belonged to a branch of the family of the Spencers of 
Althorpe, Northamptonshire, and, though born in London, his 
home as a boy was in the North of England, probably upon the 
Yorkshire border of Lancashire. In 1569 he entered Pembroke 
College, Cambridge, as a "feizar. In the same year there was 
published a book devised by S. John van der Noodt, a refugee 
from Brabant, called, A Theatre wherein be represented as well 
the Miseries and Calamities that follow the Voluptuous World- 
li?igs, as also the great Joys and Pleasures which the Faithful do 
enjoy. An Argument both Profitable and Delectable to all that 
sincerely love the Word of God. The book opened with six pieces, 
which were the first six of the Visions of Petrarch translated by 
Spenser, and they were followed by some translations which, with 
later change from blank verse into rhyme, may be identified 



362 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1576 

among Spenser's Visions of Be Hay. Spenser's participation 
as a youth in such a work as Van der Noodt's, agrees with what 
we learn of him in later years. Spenser graduated as B.A. in 
1573, and as M.A. in 1576. 

24. In that year, when Spenser's age was about four- and 
twenty, a friend and fellow-student of his at Pembroke Hall, 
Gabriel Harvey, was lecturing on rhetoric at Cambridge. 
The introductory lecture of Harvey's course in 1577, apparently 
his second course, was published under the name of Ciceronianus ; 
and his two first lectures of the course for 1578 were also pub- 
lished, under the name of Rhetor. He had then advanced from 
a close following of Bembo and other Italians, who exalted above 
all things the Ciceronian style, and had received an impulse to 
the appreciation of individuality in other authors, from the 
reading of Jean Sambuc's " Ciceronianus." He had learnt, 
within that year, to look for the whole man in a writer as the 
source of style, and, still exalting Cicero, to attend first to the 
life and power of the man, and not to the mere surface polish 
of his language. " Let every man," he said, " learn to be, not a 
Roman, but himself." Gabriel Harvey then, the friend of 
Spenser and of Sidney, was no pedant. He was the eldest of 
four sons of a prosperous rope-maker at Saffron Walden. Two 
other brothers, Richard and John, followed him after a long 
interval to Cambridge ; Richard, the elder, coming to Pembroke 
Hall as a boy of fourteen, in 1575, and finding in his brother 
Gabriel a guide and tutor. 

An obscure book of Gabriel Harvey's enables us to under- 
stand the way of Spenser's introduction into life. In July, 1578, 
Queen Elizabeth visited Audley End, the great house in the 
neighbourhood of Saffron Walden. Cambridge being close by, 
the University paid homage to the queen on that occasion. 
Gabriel Harvey, being a Saffron Walden man, made much of 
the event. When the great scholar, Sir Thomas Smith, who 
was of Saffron Walden and a kinsman, (ch. vi. § 51, 56), who 
had become a Secretary of State under Elizabeth and Chancellor 
of the Order of the Garter, and had written a Latin book upon 
England — De Republicd Anglorum—d\ed, in 1579, Harvey wrote 
his lament called Smithus. A series of Latin poems celebrating 
notabilities of the queen's visit to Saffron Walden was written by 
Gabriel Harvey, and published under the name of Gratula- 
tiones Waldenses ("Walden Gratulations"). Two were upon 
words spoken by the queen concerning Gabriel himself. He 



toa.d. 1579.] EDMUND SPENSER. GABRIEL HARVEY. 363 

pressed forward with his homage, and the Queen said, " Who is 
this ? Is it Leicester's man that we were speaking of?" Being 
told that it was, she said, " I'll not deny you my hand, Harvey." 
Again, as the subject of another set of verses, "Tell me," the 
queen said to Leicester, "Is it settled that you send this man to 
Italy and France ? " " It is," said he. " That's well," she 
replied, " for already he has an Italian face, and the look of a 
man ; I should hardly have taken him for an Englishman " 
— like an Italian for the dusky hue which Thomas Nash after- 
wards compared to rancid bacon. Here, then, we learn that 
Harvey was in Leicester's service, and about to be sent abroad 
by him. But Harvey just after this time wrote to his friend 
Spenser, who had left college upon taking his M.A. degree, and 
who seems to have been living as a tutor in the North of England, 
bidding him leave " those hills were harbrough nis," 

" And to the dales resort, where shepherds rich 
And fruitful flocks bene everywhere to see." 

The common friend of Harvey and Spenser who wrote the 
original gloss on this passage says,, "This is no poetical 
fiction, but unfeignedly spoken of the poet self, who for special 
occasion of private affairs (as I have been partly of himself 
informed) and for his more preferment, removing out of the 
north parts came into the south as Hobbinol " (that is the 
name given in "The Shepherds' Calendar" to Gabriel Harvey) 
"advised him privately." Now, the advancement was by intro- 
duction to the Earl of Leicester, by whom, either in place of 
Harvey, or as well as Harvey, Spenser was sent abroad. In 
October, 1579, there were addressed to Gabriel Harvey some 
affectionate hexameters .by Edmund Spenser, then on the point 
of travelling into France. " Dispatched by my lord, I go 
thither," Spenser said, in the postscript dated from Leicester 
House " as sent by him and maintained (most what) of him ; 
and there am to employ my time, my mind, to his honour's 
service." Clearly, then, the introduction to Leicester, which 
determined the whole future of Spenser's life, he had obtained 
from his friend Harvey. As " Leicester's man/' Harvey had 
become acquainted with Philip Sidney, Leicester's nephew. 
Likeness in age and love of literature had developed between 
them a friendship in which Spenser now was joined. It was 
in the year 1579, when he was in Leicester's service and Sidney's 
society, a frequent guest at Penshurst, and a young man with a 



364 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1554 

career opening before him, that Spenser, aged twenty-seven, 
published his first book, The Shepherds' Calendar. 

25. Philip Sidney was born at Penshurst, in November, 
1554, eldest child of Sir Henry Sidney, who was at the time of 
his son's birth twenty-five years old, and had been knighted 
four years before, in company with Sir William Cecil. His 
mother had been Lady Mary Dudley; she was daughter to the 
Duke of Northumberland and sister to Sir Robert Dudley, who, 
in 1564, was created Earl of Leicester. The next child of the 
household was a daughter, Mary, one year younger than Philip, 
his companion in childhood and the only sister who lived to 
become a woman. At the accession of Elizabeth, Sir Henry 
Sidney was Lord Justice of Ireland ; he then served as Lord 
President of Wales, and in October, 1565, still acting as 
President of Wales by deputy, he was appointed Lord Deputy 
of Ireland. There " O'Neil the Great, cousin to St. Patrick, 
friend to the Queen of England, and enemy to all the world 
besides," seizing the occasion given in 1560 by the attempt of 
the Earl of Sussex to enforce Protestantism on the Irish 
Catholics, had made himself master of the north and west. 
Sir Henry battled bravely and generously with the real diffi- 
culties of his position, while his credit at court in London was 
being impaired by complaints that arose from selfish jealousies 
of the Earls of Ormond and Desmond in the south. As Lord 
President of Wales and the Marches of the same, namely, the 
four counties of Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, and Shrop- 
shire, having his court at Ludlow Castle, Sir Henry Sidney 
had sent his son Philip, a grave, studious boy, to Shrewsbury 
school. In 1568 he went to Oxford, where Christchurch was 
his college. Sir Henry Sidney was during his son's Oxford 
days Lord Deputy of Ireland, and sometimes at home in 
Ludlow as Lord President. Sidney remained three years at 
Oxford, where one of his chief friends was a student of his own 
age, who had been his schoolfellow at Shrewsbury, Fulke 
Greville. Greville, who was of an old Warwickshire family, 
afterwards became an ornament of Elizabeth's court, and lived 
into the time of Charles I., being throughout his life the influ- 
ential friend of many poets and scholars. He was knighted 
by Elizabeth in 1591, and was raised to the peerage, as Lord 
Brooke, in 1627. In 1571, during a time of plague, Philip 
Sidney left Oxford, in his seventeenth year, without having 
taken a degree. In the same year his father, who had prayed for 



to a. D. 1572.] PHILIP SIDNEY. 365 

recall from Ireland if he could not be more firmly supported in 
his office, obtained leave of absence. His post in Ireland was 
then given to another ; and the queen, who had the year before 
raised Sir William Cecil to the peerage, as Lord Burghley, 
offered a peerage also to Sir Henry Sidney. But Sidney was 
three thousand pounds the poorer for his Irish duties, and 
declined an honour he had not means to sustain. He remained 
Lord President of Wales ; and his son Philip, after leaving 
Oxford, was for a time probably with his uncle Leicester at 
court. In May, 1572, Philip Sidney went with the embassy of 
the Earl of Lincoln to treat on the question of Elizabeth's 
marriage to the Duke of Alen<jon. He went commended by 
Iris uncle's letters to the friendship of Francis Walsingham, 
English Ambassador in Paris. He did not return with Lord 
Lincoln, but remaining in Paris, he was there on the 24th of 
August, sheltered in Walsingham's house, during the time of 
the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. 

26. Twelve years before, when Charles IX., ten or eleven 
years old, became king, his mother, Catherine de' Medici, had 
begun rule for him with a policy of conciliation. But the strife 
of souls was too intense to endure compromise. In March, 
1562,' it sprang into civil war at the Massacre of Vassy. The 
Huguenots rose to arms, under the Prince of Conde as head of 
the Protestant league. Philip of Spain aided the Catholics 
with troops and money. Elizabeth of England aided the 
French Protestants with troops, who garrisoned Havre, Rouen, 
and Dieppe. The King of Navarre having received a mortal 
wound at the siege of Rouen, the Duke of Guise became sole 
head of the French Catholic party. H^is assassination left open 
the way to a peace, by the Edict of Amboise, in March 1563, 
which was needed for the safety of the throne. In the following 
year Catherine was visited by her daughter Elizabeth, whom, in 
1560, Philip of Spain, aged thirty-four, had married, her age 
^being then fifteen, and she betrothed to his son Don Carlos. 
With Elizabeth came Philip's counsellor of war, the Duke of 
Alva. Between Catherine and Alva there was at that time 
much private discourse, of which one phrase was overheard by 
young Henry of Beam. The Duke of Alva was exhorting 
Catherine to get rid of a few leaders of the Huguenots, and 
said, " One head of salmon is worth ten thousand heads of frogs." 
Still Catherine kept peace. In December, 1565, a new pope, 
Pius V., became head of the Catholic Church, austere, devout, 



365 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1563 

inflexible in a resolve to support Christendom against the 
Turks armed in the Mediterranean, and to put forth all his 
might against the heretics. New prisons had to be built in 
Rome, and Italian men of genius who thought too freely were 
among his victims. In the summer of 1567 the Duke of Alva 
was allowed to march an army through France to the Nether- 
lands, where the spirit of independence had been gaining 
strength. 

In March, 1563, the nobles of the Netherlands, guided 
chiefly by William, Prince of Orange, who had for supporters 
the Counts Egmont and Horn, had formed themselves into a 
league against the government of Cardinal Granvella, who was 
forced to retire in March, 1564. Meanwhile, Calvinism had 
spread in the Low Countries, and the regent Margaret, who 
inclined towards the nobles, was urged by Philip to strong 
measures. In October, 1565, Philip wrote a letter requiring 
that the edicts against heresy should be enforced as heretofore. 
The Prince of Orange and the nobles obtained from the regent 
its immediate publication, and a storm of feeling was excited 
that caused Margaret to ask leave to resign. Flemings began 
to emigrate by thousands into England, where they set up 
looms. On the nth of November, Francois Dujon, called 
Francis Junius, preached at Brussels before the Flemish 
nobles. This Junius was an ardent scholar, who had been 
studying at Geneva, when his father was slain by a fanatic 
crowd while he was inquiring into a massacre of Huguenots 
within their place of worship at Issoudun. Francis Junius 
forswore France, lived for a time at Geneva by giving lessons 
in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and had then been called to 
the Netherlands as pastor of the Huguenot congregation which 
met secretly at Antwerp. After the sermon of Junius some 
Flemish nobles formed a distinct league against oppressions of 
the government, and Philip van Marnix, Lord of Mont Saint 
Aldegonde, a young man of twenty-seven, who had been trained 
at Geneva, where he was the friend of Calvin, drew up what 
was known as the "Act of Compromise." This Act, in January 
1566, set forth the mind of the league by denouncing the 
Inquisition as illegal and iniquitous, and binding the subscribers 
to defend one another in a resistance that was not against 
allegiance to the king. The league was formed without the 
knowledge of the Prince of Orange, and discountenanced by 
him; but he at the same time, as Governor of Holland and 



to a.d. 1568.] THE CONTEST IN THE NETHERLANDS. 307 

Zealand, resisted the king's letter. The strong feeling and 
strong action of the native population produced what was called 
a "moderation" of the law against heresy — hanging was put for 
burning. Then missionaries preached to crowds of the people 
in woods, plains, villages, and suburbs of towns ; and this was the 
state of things in the Netherlands in the first year of the papacy 
of Pius V. Philip made some illusory concessions while he 
levied troops ; contests arose in the Netherlands between 
royalist troops and insurgent people ; but presently the King of 
Spain was again master, Holland being last to yield. Mean- 
while there was continued passage of Protestant Netherlander 
into England, quickened by dread of the approach of Alva with 
a Spanish force. Alva was urged by Pope Pius V., as he passed 
near Geneva, to " clean out that nest of devils and apostates,' 1 
but he marched steadily on, and entered Brussels with his 
Spaniards on the 22nd of August, 1567. This was when 
Edmund Spenser was a boy of fifteen, in his northern home, 
when England was filled with the reports of persecution in the 
Netherlands from refugee Flemings, who were bringing into 
England industry of the loom and wealth of commerce, with 
new impulse to the love of liberty ; and when one of the refugees, 
John van der Noodt, was presently to cause the young poet to 
write his first lines for the printer in a declaration of the miseries 
and calamities that follow worldlings, and the joys and pleasures 
which the faithful do enjoy. 

Joys of the faithful, — although Alva garrisoned the towns of 
the Netherlands with a licentious Spanish soldiery, seized 
Egmont and Horn, prohibited emigration, organised the Council 
of Tumults, known as the " Council of Blood." Margaret retired \ 
Alva succeeded to her powers as regent and governor-general. 
On the 16th of February, 1568, a sentence of the Inquisition 
condemned all the inhabitants of the Netherlands to death, 
except a few specially named. In a letter to Philip, Alva 
reckoned at 800 heads the executions to take place after Pas- 
sion-week. Money was raised by confiscation. In the summer 
of that year, 1568, the Prince of Orange published his justifica- 
tion against condemnation passed upon him, repudiated the 
Council of Tumults, and declared that he had become a Pro- 
testant. By sentence of the Council of Tumults, the Counts 
Egmont and Horn were executed on the 5th of June. The 
Duke of Alva took two " heads of salmon." Alva's troops had 
then a victorious campaign against armed opposition, and their 



3&B A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1552 

leader praised himself for having trampled down heresy and 
rebellion. 

News like this from the Netherlands stirred the blood of the 
French Huguenots, and, at the close of the year 1567 a second 
civil war began. In 1568 there was a pause ; but early in the 
spring of 1569 war was resumed, and then young Walter Raleigh 
came to share in the struggle as one of a company of English 
volunteers. 

27. "Walter Raleigh was of the same age as Spenser, born 
in 1552, at the manor-house of Hayes Barton, about a mile from 
Budleigh, in Devonshire. In 1566 he was sent to Oriel College, 
Oxford, where he remained three years ; and at the age of seven- 
teen he left college without a degree to join as a volunteer the 
Protestants in France. His mother was third wife of Walter 
Raleigh, of Hayes Barton. Her maiden name was Champernon, 
and by a former marriage with Otho Gilbert, of Greenway, she 
had three sons, of whom one became famous as Sir Humphrey 
Gilbert, the great navigator. Her relative, Henry Champernon, 
raised a troop of a hundred mounted Englishmen to aid the 
Huguenots in France ; and Walter Raleigh, who had gone before 
his cousin in 1569, shared the defeats of the Huguenots at Jarnac 
and Moncontour, shared their successes of 1570, had interest in 
the treaty of August, 1570, which conceded much to the Re- 
formers, and which was protested against by Pius V. and Philip 
II. In the spring of 1571 a Synod of the Reformed Church was 
held, by the king's permission, at Rochelle. Admiral Coligny 
was welcomed at court, and the king even prepared an expedi- 
tion in aid of the persecuted Reformers in the Netherlands. 
The expedition was begun. The king seemed ready to take 
Coligny's advice, and declare war with Spain, against the counsel 
of his mother. On the 18th of August, 1572, Henry 'of Navarre 
was married to Marguerite of Valois. The 24th was St. Bar- 
tholomew's-day, the day of the concerted massacre of Huguenots 
in Paris and the provinces of France, which happened at the 
time when Philip Sidney was in Paris. 

28. No peace was secured ; Rochelle revolted, and Raleigh 
remained to fight awhile in France, while Philip Sidney 
travelled on alone to Strasburg and Frankfort. In Frankfort he 
lodged at a printer's ; and the youth of eighteen drew to himself 
the friendship of a French Huguenot of fifty-five, Hubert 
Languet, who had once been a Professor of Civil Law in Padua, 
but who went from Paris to Frankfort as secret minister of the 



toa.d. I575-] WALTER RALEIGH. GEORGE GASCOIGNE. 369 

Elector of Saxony. Languet saw in the grave young English- 
man, who had high birth, genius, and manly feeling, who was 
possible heir of his uncle Leicester, possibly the future minister 
of England, hope of his cause in Europe. The elder Re- 
former, therefore, loved the youth, counselled him, and watched 
over him with fatherly solicitude, of which his extant Latin 
letters (first published in 1632) bear witness. Sidney wrote of 
him afterwards in the " Arcadia : " 

" The song I sang old Languet had me taught — 
Languet, the shepherd best swift Ister knew, 
For clerkly reed, and hating what is naught, 

For faithful heart, clean hands, and mouth as true. 
With his sweet skill my skilless youth he drew 
To have a feeling taste of Him that sits 
Beyond the heaven — far more beyond our wits." 

With Languet, Philip Sidney went, in 1573, from Frankfort to 
Vienna ; thence, after an excursion into Hungary, he went on 
to Italy, having for one of his companions Lewis Bryskett, 
afterwards a friend of Spenser's. After eight weeks in Italy, 
with Venice for head-quarters, and giving six weeks to Padua, 
but urged by the anxious Languet not to visit Rome, he re- 
turned through Germany, and was back in England by June, 
1575. In July he was with the court, and shared The Princely 
Pleasztres at the Court at Kenilworth, as they were called by 
George Gascoigne when he next year published an account of 
them. 

29. George Gascoigne, son and heir of Sir John Gas- 
coigne, was born about the year 1536, perhaps in Westmore- 
land, educated at Cambridge, admitted to Gray's Inn in 1555, 
and called as an Ancient of his Inn in 1557. At the accession 
of Elizabeth, George Gascoigne was an ardent youth of about 
twenty-two, disinherited by his father, caring more for literature 
than for common law. In 1566 there were represented at Gray's 
Inn two plays of his preparing, both translations. One, called 
The Supposes, was a prose translation of Ariosto's comedy, " Gli 
Suppositi" (ch. vi. § 41) ; the other was Jocasta, an adaptation 
from the " Phsenissas " of Euripides, This, the first acted 
version of a Greek play, was, like "Gorboduc," written in blank 
verse, and with a dumb-show before every act. In 1572, Gas- 
coigne published A Hundreth Simdrie Ploures botind tip in one 
small Poesie. He had then Lord Grey of Wilton, a strict Cal- 
vinist, for patron, and was, at the time of publication, a captain 

Y 



37° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1572 

in the Netherlands under William of Orange, who, in July of 
that year, was declared by the deputies of eight cities Stadt- 
holder of Holland. Brabant and Flanders were in that year 
cruelly subdued to Spain, but in Holland the revolt was main- 
tained steadfastly. Haarlem stood a siege of more than eight 
months, with three hundred women among its defenders. When 
the town was at last brought to surrender, after solemn assurance 
that none should be punished except those who, in the opinion 
of the citizens themselves, deserved it, two or three thousand of 
the inhabitants were treacherously slaughtered, and three 
hundred were drowned in the lake, tied by twos back to back. 
In December of that year, 1573, the Duke of Alva was, by his 
own wish, recalled, and boasted on his way home that he had 
caused 18,600 Netherlander to be executed. Gascoigne's ad- 
ventures in the Netherlands were over, and he was living at 
Walthamstow in 1574, when he described " The Princely Plea- 
sures at Kenilworth," began his satire called " The Steele Glass," 
and prefixed verses of commendation to a book of Turbervile's. 
In 1576, George Gascoigne published The Steele Glas and The 
Complaint of Philojnene, besides A Delicate Diet for Daintie- 
mouthde Droonkards, and in October, 1577, he died. The 
" Complaint of Philomene " is, in form of elegy, the fable of 
" The Nightingale." "The Steel Glass " is a clever satire, which 
upholds with religious earnestness a manly and true life. Satire, 
who has Plain Dealing for father, Simplicity for mother, and 
Poesy for sister, complains here that his sister has been married 
to Vain Delight, and that every man will have a glass " to see 
himself, yet so he seeth him not." 

" That age is dead and vanished long ago 
Which thought that steel both trusty was and true, 
And needed not a foil of contraries, 
But showed all things as they were in deed. 
Instead whereof our curious years can find 
The christal glass which glimseth brave and bright, 
And shows the thing much better than it is, 
Beguiled with foils of sundry subtle sights, 
So that they seem, but covet not to be." 

Gascoigne's Satire therefore resolves to hold up the faithful 
glass of burnished steel, and from it show true images of men. 
The poem is in about 1,100 lines of blank verse, and is the first 
example in our language of a poem of any length, and not 
dramatic, written in that measure. It is also the only example 
before Milton's " Paradise Lost " of an English poem of any 



toa.d. 1578.] GEORGE GASCOIGNE. PHILIP SIDNEY. yjl 

length in blank verse, except an insignificant work by W. 
Vallans, published in 1590, as "The Tale of the Two Swans, 
wherein is comprehended the original and increase of the River 
Lea, commonly called Ware River ; together wkh the Antiqui- 
ties of sundrie Places and Towns seated upon the same." 

30. Philip Sidney (§ 25), at the close of 1575, was living in 
London with his mother. Need of his father's good service 
in Ireland had been felt, and Sir Henry Sidney had left London 
in August, again to labour in Ireland as Lord Deputy. In 1577, 
though but twenty-two years old, Sidney was sent as ambassador 
to the new Emperor of Germany, Rudolph II., with formal 
letters upon his accession, and with private instructions to do 
what he could towards the promotion of a Protestant League 
among the princes of the Continent. Hubert Languet was active 
about him. He came home through the Netherlands, to convey 
to William of Orange Queen Elizabeth's congratulations on the 
birth of his first child; and he saw on the way Don John of 
Austria, that illegitimate son of Charles V. of whom, when he 
had in 1571 triumphed over the Turks in the Gulf of Lepanto, 
Pope Pius V. said, " There was a man sent from God, and his 
name was John." When Sidney spoke with him, Don John had 
been sent from the King of Spain, and had just entered Brussels 
as Governor- General of the Provinces of the Netherlands. 

Sidney found when he came home, in June, 1577, his sister, 
Mary, married. At the age of twenty she had become in the 
preceding February the third wife of Henry Herbert, Earl of 
Pembroke, a quiet and good man of forty. Sidney was now in 
favour at court. In April, 1578, when the queen visited Leicester, 
at Wanstead, he contrived for her pleasure a little occasional 
masque called Tlie Lady of May, after this fashion. A masquer, 
dressed like an honest countrywoman, appeared before the queen 
as she was walking with her train in Wanstead gardens, and com- 
plained of a daughter who was troubled with two suitors. Then 
six shepherds came out of the wood with the Lady of May, " hauling 
and pulling to which side they should draw her." An old shep- 
herd in absurd words, complained that a woman of a minsical 
countenance had disannulled the brainpain of two of their featiest 
young men ; but produced Master Rombus, the schoolmaster, 
who could better, " disnounce the whole foundation of the matter.'' 
Master Rombus " disnounced " pedantry and dog- Latin, in a 
style very like that afterwards used by Shakespeare's Holofernes, 
in " Love's Labour's Lost." The May Lady stopped him, and left 



37 2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1578" 

it to the queen to decide, after hearing their contest in song, 
which of the shepherds was to be preferred. Then came the 
rural songs. When the queen was to give judgment, an old 
shepherd and a forester intervened with argument in comic 
prose whether the estate of shepherds or of foresters were the more 
worshipful. Rombus, the schoolmaster, interposed again with 
his pedantry, and was about to judge for the queen, when the 
May Lady again stopped him. The queen gave what judgment 
she thought best, the masquers all struck up their music, the one 
who was declared victor by Her Majesty expressed his joy in 
song, and the May Lady spoke a little epilogue. 

In July, 1578, Philip Sidney was one of the men of mark who 
followed Queen Elizabeth to Audley End, and received honours 
of verse from Gabriel Harvey in the " Walden Gratulations." 
But Sidney was weary of idleness at court. His friend, Fulke 
Greville, returning from a foreign mission, received on his way 
from William of Orange a message for Elizabeth, craving leave 
of her freely to speak his knowledge and opinion of a fellow- 
servant of his who lived unemployed under her. He had had 
much experience, had seen various times and things and persons, 
but he protested that Her Majesty had in Mr. Philip Sidney one 
of the ripest and greatest statesman that he knew of in all Europe. 
If Her Majesty would but try the young man, the prince would 
stake his own credit upon the issue of his friend's employment 
about any business, either with the allies or with the enemies of 
England. And this was said, not without reason, by William the 
Silent of a young man of four-and-twenty, who seems to have 
been the type of what was noblest in the youth of England 
during times that could produce a Shakespeare. 

31. This was said of Sidney at the time when Edmund 
Spenser came to London, and after he had been abroad on 
Leicester's errand, and finished his " Shepheardes Calender" 
where he had Sidney for companion. The little book was 
published anonymously, with a dedication to the noble and 
virtuous gentleman, most worthy of all titles, both of learning 
and chivalry, Master Philip Sidney. The Shepheardes Calender: 
conteyning Twelve JEglogues proportionable to the Twelve 
Monethes, and dedicated to Philip Sidney, was introduced by 
" E. K." — Edward Kirke, an old college friend of Spenser's and 
Harvey's — with a letter to Gabriel Harvey, in which " the new 
poet" was said to have begun with, eclogues, "following the 
example of the best and most ancient poets, which devised this 



-TOA.D. 1579- ] SPENSER'S "SHEPHEARDES CALENDER." 373 

kind of writing, being so base for the matter and homely for the 
manner, at the first to try their abilities," and to have other works 
by him sleeping in silence, "as his 'Dreams.' his 'Legends,' his 
* Court of Cupid,' and sundry others." " E. K." added a post- 
script, urging Gabriel Harvey to give to the world also his own 
" gallant English verses." A " glosse," of small value, was added 
by " E. K." to each eclogue. 

In his "Shepheardes Calender," Spenser derived from Skelton 
the name of Colin Clout, which he applied to himself also in later 
poetry. The Colin Clout of Skelton (ch. vi. § 23) was a homely 
Englishman, who felt that many wrongs were waiting to be 
righted, and especially condemned luxury and self-seeking of the 
higher clergy. Spenser was of one mind with Skelton upon this, 
and took his side at once in the Church controversies of the time, 
although in doing so he boldly placed himself beside one who was 
at that time under the Queen's displeasure. In the seventh 
eclogue, Thomalin sees the elevation of Morrell, whose herd is 
astray among rank bushes, and refuses to go up the hill to him. 
Morrell sings in the praise of holy hills, but Thomalin replies : 

" To kerke the narre, from God more farre, 
Has bene an old-sayd sawe, 
And he that strives to touch a starre 
Oft stombles at a strawe. 
•' Alsoone may shepheard clymbe to skye 
That leades in lowly dales 
As goteherd prowd that, sitting hye, 
Upon the mountaine sayles." 

Thomalin then enforces the lesson of humility with teaching 
derived from old Algrind : 

" Such one he was (as I have heard 

Old Algrind often sayne), 
That whilome was the first shepheard 

And lived with little gayne ; 
And meeke he was, as meeke mought be, 

Simple as simple sheepe ; 
Humble, and like in eche degree 

The flocke which he did keepe. 

Like one (sayd Algrind) Moses was 
That sawe hys Maker's face." 

Those old true shepherds loved their flocks, and simple was their 
weed, but now 

" They bene yclad in purple and pall, 
So hath theyr God them blist; 
They reigne and rulen over all, 
And lord it as they list." 



374 A FIRST SKETCH OI ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1576 

A shepherd who has been to Rome saw their misusage. Their 
sheep have crusts and they the bread. 

" They han the fleece and eke the flesh, 

(O seely sheepe the while !) 
The come is theyres, let others thresh, 

Their handes they may not file. 
They han great stores and thriftye stockes, 

Great freendes and feeble foes ; 
What neede hem caren for their flocks 

Their boyes can looke tc those. " 

Morrell replies to all this with a suggestion that harm may 
come of meddling, and that in blaming the wealth of shepherds 
Thomalin meddles more than he shall have thanks for. But 
say, Morrell asks, who is that Algrind whom you so often name? 
The reply figured to every reader of that day Archbishop Grindal, 
then under the Queen's heavy displeasure for acts heartily ap- 
proved by Spenser. In this eclogue Spenser, indeed, simply 
transferred the syllables of the names of Elmer or Aylmer, in 1579 
Bishop of London, and GrindaL then Archbishop of Canterbury. 

32. John Aylmer, the gentle tutor of Lady Jane Grey (§ 19), 
and the author of the reply to Knox's "First Blast of the 
Trumpet " (§ 2), had been made Bishop of London in 1576. He 
upheld Elizabeth's own policy, and was as zealous against those 
who were now becoming known for Puritans or Precisians as 
against the Catholics. In 1578 the Stationers' Company, of 
which Richard Tottel was then master, had by suit to the Lord 
Treasurer, got out of Newgate a young bookseller whom Bishop 
Aylmer had imprisoned for reprinting a book that objected ta 
the management of the Church by its bishops. In 1579, at the 
time when the " Shepheardes Calender " appeared, Aylmer had 
brought before the High Court of Commission, Mr. Welden, 
a gentlemen of Cookham, in Berkshire, who strongly objected 
to a minister sent by the Bishop of London in place of one who 
had been ejected as a Puritan. Mr. Welden had said of Bishop 
Aylmer, to his poursuivant sent down to Cookham, " What was 
he before but a private man ? But he must be lorded, ' An, it 
please your lordship ' at every word, and that there was never 
bishop so vilely esteemed as he was, and that he was as ill 
thought of as ever was Bonner." Aylmer urged that he could 
not remain in his see if the High Court of Commission did 
not support him, and was doing this at the very time when 
Spen^- looked up at him and asked, " Is not thilke same a 
goteherde prowd?" But ' Spenser, in this his first book, not 



toa.d. 1579.] JOHN AYLMER. EDMUND GRIN DAL. 375 

merely contemned Aylmer ; he declared his reverence for 
Grindal. 

33. Edmund Grindal, born in 1519, had been in 1550 
chaplain to Ridley. In 1553 he fled from Mary to Strasburg. In 
1558 he was one of those who drew up the new Liturgy. In 1559 
he was made Master of Pembroke Hall, Spenser's own college, 
and Bishop of London. In 1 570 he became Archbishop of York, 
and in 1575 Archbishop of Canterbury. He used his influence 
in the Church to increase the number and efficiency of those 
whom he looked upon as faithful preachers, and he refused 
livings to those whom he did not find learned and able. The 
particular cause of his unpopularity at court was his encourage- 
ment of what were called " prophesyings " for the higher educa- 
cation of the clergy in the duties of their office. The word 
" prophesying " was used with the sense of interpretation of the 
Scriptures given to it in St. Paul's epistles. Such meetings of 
the clergy, for the purpose of interpreting difficult passages, or 
considering how to explain clearly and rightly passages that 
might raise question among their flocks, had sprung up in several 
parts of England, especially Northamptonshire, when Grindal 
used his influence to encourage them. The custom was that the 
ministers within a precinct met on a week-day in some principal 
town, where there was some ancient grave minister that was 
president, and an auditory admitted of gentlemen or other per- 
sons of leisure. Then even- minister successively, beginning at 
the youngest, did handle one and the same part of Scripture, 
spending severally some quarter of an hour or better, and in the 
whole some two hours. And so the exercise being begun and 
concluded with prayer, and the president giving a text for the 
next meeting, the assembly* was dissolved. Archbishop Grindal 
thought these meetings serviceable, and believed that the mis- 
management accidental to them might be readily avoided. 
Queen Elizabeth held that they encouraged novelty, caused 
people to ramble in their fancy, and neglect their affairs. She 
told Grindal that there was too much discussing and explaining ; 
it would put an end to unity of opinion. She would have no 
more prophesyings ; as for preachers, there were by far too many, 
three or four in a county would suffice; and the authorised 
Homilies were to be read instead of original sermons. That 
was the only way to keep the people of one mind (ch. vi. § 58). 
The First Book of Homilies, issued in 1547, was adopted by Eliza- 
beth in 1559, and enlarged with a Second Book in 1563. Grindal 



37^ A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1579. 

replied in a letter loyal to the queen, but loyal also to his con- 
science. He argued to her from Scripture that the Gospel should 
be plentifully preached ; met the objections to the prophesyings ; 
declared that Scripture and experience showed them to be profi- 
table ; and said, " I am forced, with all humility, and yet plainly, 
to profess that I cannot with a safe conscience, and without the 
offence of the majesty of God, give my assent to the suppressing 
of the said exercises ; much less can I send out my injunction 
for the utter and universal subversion of the same. I say with 
St. Paul, ' I have no power to destroy, but to only edify ; ' and 
with the same apostle, ' I can do nothing against the truth, but 
for the truth.' If it be your Majesty's pleasure, for this or any 
other cause, to remove me out of this place, I will, with all 
humility, yield thereunto, and render again to your Majesty that 
I received of the same. . . . Bear with me, I beseech you, 
Madam, if I choose rather to offend your earthly majesty, than 
to offend the heavenly majesty of God." In June, 1577, Grindal 
was, for this persistence in what he believed to be his highest 
duty, by order of the Privy Council confined to his house and 
sequestered for six months. Lord Burghley instructed him how 
he was to make formal submission to the queen. He did not 
make it. There was question of depriving him, but for that he 
was too popular with a large section of the clergy and the people. 
Nevertheless, he remained under sequestration, and these were 
the relative positions of Morrell and of the wise Algrind, when 
Spenser's ' k Shepheardes Calender " appeared. At a Convocation 
in the following year, 1580, the archbishop being still under 
sequestration, Aylmer presided. Some of the clergy were un- 
willing to proceed to business without the archbishop, but a 
petition was sent to the queen, also a letter signed by twelve 
bishops, both without effect. Grindal at this time was becoming 
blind. At last, it has been said, being really blind, more with 
grief than age, he was willing to put off his clothes before he 
went to bed, and in his lifetime to resign his place to Dr. 
Whitgift, who refused such acceptance thereof. And the queen, 
commiserating his condition, was graciously pleased to say that 
as she had made him so he should die, an archbishop ; as he 
did, July 6th, 1583. 

34. In his reference through pastoral forms to the great ques- 
tions that concerned the flocks and shepherds of the Church, 
especially in the fifth and seventh eclogues, Spenser followed 
the example of Clement Marot (ch. vi. § 39) ; indeed, the study 



a.d. 1579.] SPENSER'S "SHEPHEARDES CALENDER." 377 

of Marot led Spenser to shape two of his eclogues, the 
eleventh and twelfth, distinctly upon eclogues by the poet of 
France and the French Reformers. Spenser's eleventh eclogue, 
between Colin and Thenot, was a free version of Marot's lament 
between Colin and Thenot for Louise of Savoy, whom Spenser 
transformed into Dido, changing also her son, Francis I., into 
"the great shepherd, Lobbin." Spenser's twelfth eclogue was a 
paraphrase of Marot's upon the course of his own life, called his 
" Eclogue to the King under the names of Pan and Robin." 
Spenser's sincerity in speaking his mind upon Church matters, 
without regard to interest at court, gave value to his poetical 
homage to the queen in the fourth eclogue. The element of love 
was necessary in a set of pastorals, and cruel Rosalind inspired 
the song in the first and sixth eclogues. " E. K." tells us that 
there had been a real Rosalind. Very likely; Spenser's age was 
twenty-seven. But if there had been no love fancy within his 
experience it would still have been in the poem, since in poetry 
this must needs be one ingredient of a Shepheardes Calender. 
In his English, Spenser here and everywhere set his face against 
all affectation of his time, whether it were the pedantry which 
Sidney ridiculed in Master Rombus (§ 30), or the dainty alliteration 
and antithesis, with ingenuity of simile, for which the taste came 
in from Italy, and wherein Lyly's " Euphues" (§ 22), published in 
the same year as the " Shepheardes Calender," showed mastery. 
Spenser used homely English, and looked back to Chaucer as his 
chief. Homage was paid by the new poet to Chaucer, under the 
pastoral name of Tityrus, in the second, the sixth, and the twelfth 
eclogues ; in the second eclogue also there was place found for an 
attempt at story-telling in Chaucer's manner. The rustic English 
of the shepherds assumed a few forms which had become obsolete 
at court, and which, simple as they were, "E. K." in his " Gloss " 
interpreted ; but here, and in later poetry of Spenser's, much of 
the antique air came from the poet's use of his own north-country 
English, that still retained, as our rustic English even at this day 
retains, what townspeople regard as obsolete words and forms of 
inflection. But there was a direct strengthening of Spenser's 
genius by study of Chaucer. The laboriously small literature of 
Italy, which then set the fashion in England, Spenser disdained; 
and there was something combative in his upholding of Chaucer, 
and his use of the simplest one and two-syllabled English words 
at a time when the new energies of thought were busy, among 
other things, with the invention of new words derived from 



3/8 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.t>. 1579. 

Greek and Latin. Ten years after 1579, George Puttenham, in 
writing upon English Poesie, cited among new words thus intro- 
duced, placation, assubtiling, numerosity, facundity, implete, 
words which did not take root in the language ; and others which 
did — method and methodical, prolix, compendious, function, 
impression, indignity, penetrate, delineation, dimension, com- 
patible, egregious, audacious. Increasing wealth of thought 
required enlargement of the language. Word -coining of the 
Elizabethan time was not all affectation, although at court there 
was much good breath wasted in that way. Spenser disliked 
it, and opposed it by his practice to the last. Chaucer it was, 
says Colin Clout, " Who taught me, homely, as I can, to make." 
The god of shepherds, Tityrus, is dead — 

" And all hys passing skil with him is fledde, 
The fame whereof doth dayly greater growe; 
But if on me some little drops would flowe 
Of that the spring was in his learned hedde — " 

Such was the first aspiration of the poet who was to make for 
himself a name often to be coupled with Chaucer's, and like his, 
a name " the fame whereof doth daily daily greater grow." 

35. But if Spenser was out of sympathy with the small writers 
of Italy, he took delight in Ariosto (ch. vi. § 40), and there was 
one great poet then living and suffering in Italy, Torquato Tasso, 
with whom he came to feel the fellowship of noble minds. Tasso 
was born in 1544, ten or eleven years after the death of Ariosto. 
He was eight or nine years older than Spenser, and his influence 
on Spenser's, later work was that of one great living poet upon 
another who was some years younger than himself. Tasso died 
in 1595, Spenser in 1599. Torquato Tasso was a poet's son, a 
child with a passion for learning and rare depths of devotional 
feeling ; a youth studying with his father the best writers of his 
own country, for, said the father wisely, men should not so study 
as to become like citizens abroad and strangers at home. In the 
year of Elizabeth's accession Torquato Tasso was fourteen, and 
his father, Bernardo, published a poem on the romance of Amadis 
of Gaul, the " Amadigi." At seventeen Torquato published his 
"Rinaldo;" the son's fame at once rivalled the father's, and 
thenceforth he made poetry his work in life. In 1579, when 
Spenser's " Shepheardes Calender," and Lyly's " Euphues " ap- 
peared, Tasso had written at the court of Ferrara courtly poetry, 
and earned repute in Italy, especially by a pastoral drama called 
Aminta, published in 1573. He had been long engaged on his 



a.d. 1579.] EDMUND SPENSER. NORTH'S PLUTARCH. 379 

great poem, which was written but not yet published. For some 
years also the taint of melancholy madness in his nature had made 
itself known, and in that year, 1 579, Tasso was treated by the Duke 
of Ferrara as a confirmed lunatic, in a hospital for madmen. 
Those were dark ages in our social history, so far as concerned the 
treatment of insanity. When Tasso could utter his distress, 
" Alas, alas," he wrote, " I had determined to write two epic 
poems on noble subjects, four tragedies of which I had formed 
the plan, and much in prose, to be eternally remembered of me 
in the world." But what was thirst for immortality when in 
his misery 'he said he sought no higher happiness than freedom 
to slake that animal thirst by which he was tormented? He 
yearned, he said, if not for liberty, the right of man, at least for 
the brute's right, " to quench freely in the streams and fountains 
that thirst with which, it soothes me to repeat it, I am burnt up.^ 

In 1579 there had lately appeared in France a poem called 
" La Sepmaine, ou Creation du Monde," by Guillawne de Saluste 
du Bart as, a French Huguenot noble, who was born in the same 
year as Tasso, and was educated as a soldier. His religious poem 
on the " Divine Week of the Creation" abounded in those over- 
strained conceits which the example of Italy had introduced into 
the polite language of surrounding countries. For this reason, 
and for its religious spirit, " La Sepmaine" (Semaine) became so 
famous that it went through thirty editions in six years, and was 
translated into Latin, Italian, German, and English ; generally 
more than once into each language. The name of " Saluste of 
France " became coupled with that of " Tuscan Arioste," and 
remained great until the passing away of the form of taste it 
satisfied. But we shall find in the days of his currency an 
English minor poet seeking immortality as the translator of 
Du Bartas. 

36. In 1579, when Shakespeare was fifteen years old, and 
Francis Bacon was nineteen, Sir Thomas North published 
his translation of Plutarch's Lives. This was not from the 
original Greek, but from the delightful Plutarch in thirteen 
volumes (six for the Lives and seven for the Morals), published 
in and after 1567 by Jacques Amyot, who was in those days the 
prince of French translators. Amyot lived to within a year of 
fourscore, and died in 1593. Sir Thomas North was himself an 
active member of the English band of translators produced by the 
revival of letters. Among his other translations was, in 1570, one 
from the Italian version of a famous Arabian fable book called 



3S0 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1561 

"Calilah i Dumnah," as "The Morale Philosophic of Doni." 
But he is here named because it was chiefly in North's Plutarch, 
published in 1579, that Shakespeare, as a playwright, learnt his 
history of Rome. 

37. William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-on-Avon, 
in April, 1 564 ; perhaps on the 23rd of April, for he was baptised on 
the 26th. There is a tradition that he died on his birthday, and 
he died on the 23rd of April, 1616. His father was John Shake- 
speare, a glover in Henley Street, and probably the son of Richard 
Shakespeare, farmer, at Snitterfield. John Shakespeare was 
living in Henley Street in 1552. In 1556 — the year of the birth 
of Anne Hathaway, the poet's future wife — John Shakespeare 
was sued in the bailiff's court, and described as a glover. In 
that year also the copyholds of a house in Greenhill Street, and 
of another in Henley Street, were assigned to him. In 1557 
John Shakespeare married Mary, the youngest daughter of 
Robert Arden, of Wilmcote, "husbandman." Her father had 
died a month before the marriage, leaving to Mary by his will 
a small property at Wilmcote, called Ashbies, of about fifty-four 
acres, with two houses, and interest in other land at Wilmcote ; 
also two tenements at Snitterfield, and £6 13s. 4d. in cash. That 
was Mary Arden's fortune, and it helped John Shakespeare for 
some years. In 1558 the first child of the marriage was born, a 
girl, Joan, who died. In 1562 another child was born, a girl, 
Margaret, who died. In 1564 another child was born, and that 
was William Shakespeare. His father was not then in want. 
The plague was in Stratford in 1564, and John Shakespeare 
made a fair donation for relief of the poor. In 1566 a second 
son, Gilbert, was born. In 1569 a daughter was born, who lived 
to be married ; she was christened by the name of the first 
daughter, who had died, Joan. In 1 570, John Shakespeare rented 
Ington Meadow, a farm oi fourteen acres. The meadow-land 
would feed sheep ; sheep are shorn for wool, and eaten for mutton: 
hence John Shakespeare, glover, in Henley Street, has also been 
called farmer, butcher, and dealer in wool. He could not live 
by gloves alone, the large coarse gloves used in country work, 
which are still in chief demand at Stratford. In 15/1 another 
girl was born, Anne. In 1573 another boy was born, Richard. 
In 1575 John Shakespeare bought the two freehold houses in 
Henley Street, with garden and orchard. 

In 1576, as we shall see presently, the first theatres were 
built, and one of them was the Blackfriars. In that year William 



toa.d. IS79-] WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. FRANCIS BACON. 38 1 

Shakespeare was a boy of twelve, the eldest of five children, in a 
household from which prosperity was on the point of departing. 

In 1577, John Shakespeare, as an alderman of Stratford, was 
excused half his payment towards furnishing pike and bill men, 
that is to say, half his police rate. Other aldermen paid 6s. 8d. 
he only 3s. 4d. In the following year, 1578, John Shakespeare 
and his wife (John Shakespeare was then, in a deed, styled 
" yeoman ' ; ) were obliged to mortgage the little property at 
Ashbies for ^40, to Edmund Lambert. Money was raised also 
by selling for £4. to Robert Webbe immediate interest in the 
tenements at Snitterfield. At this time John Shakespeare was 
defaulter also in the levy for armour and defensive weapons ; and 
while he was thus troubled for want of money, he lost his 
younger daughter Anne, a child of about eight years old. So 
matters stood with the Shakespeares in 1579, when William was 
fifteen years old, and the number of the children was reduced 
to four — three boys and a girl. It is likely that William 
Shakespeare had been taught in the Stratford Grammar School ; 
it could not well be otherwise, but there is no direct evidence of 
the fact. There is direct evidence of the poverty of his home 
in 1579, and afterwards, till he himself repaired its fortunes. 

38. Francis Bacon, three years and three months older 
than William Shakespeare, was the son of Queen Elizabeth's Lord 
Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and was born in London, at York 
House, in the Strand, on the 22nd of January, 1561. Sir William 
Cecil, afterwards Lord Burghley, and Sir Nicholas Bacon, 
married two daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke (§ 1). The sister, 
Anne, married by Sir Nicholas, was his second wife. She was 
an educated woman, with strong religious feeling, who took 
strong interest in the reformation of the Church, and inclined to 
the Puritan side in later questions of its internal policy. It was 
she who translated Jewel's "Apology" into English (§ 14). Sir 
Nicholas Bacon had by his former wife, six children, and by his 
second wife two, Anthony and Francis ; Anthony two years older 
than Francis, who was thus the youngest of eight in a household 
living sometimes in London, at York House, sometimes at 
Gorhambuf]fc near St. Albans. In April, 1573, when Anthony 
was fourteen and Francis twelve, the two boys were entered as 
fellow-commoners at Trinity College, Cambridge. Of Francis 
Bacon's career at college, ending in his sixteenth year, we have 
only two notes. They are from Dr. Rawley, his chaplain of after 
days. One is that Queen Elizabeth " delighted much then to 



3§2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1562 

confer with him, and to prove him with questions ; unto which 
he delivered himself with that gravity and maturity above his 
years, that Her Majesty would often term him ' the young Lord 
Keeper.' Being asked by the queen how old he was, he answered 
with much discretion, being then but a boy, l That he was two 
years younger than Her Majesty's happy reign ;' with which 
answer the queen was much taken." The other record is this : 
* l Whilst he was commorant in the University, about sixteen 
years of age (as his lordship hath been pleased to impart unto 
■ myself), he first fell into the dislike of the philosophy of Aristotle ; 
not for the worthlessness of the author, to whom he would 
ascribe all high attributes, but for the unfruitfulness of the way ; 
being a philosophy (as his lordship used to say) only strong for 
disputations and contentions, but barren of the production of 
works for the benefit of the life of man ; in which mind he con- 
tinued to his dying day." 

In September, 1576, Sir Amyas Paulet went to Paris to 
succeed Dr. Dale as English Ambassador. Francis Bacon, who 
was to be trained for diplomatic life, entered at Lincoln's Inn, 
and proceeded to France, where he was one of the suite of Sir 
Amyas. Those were in France the first days of the League. 
Charles IX. had died less than two months after the Massacre 
of St. Bartholomew. His brother, the Duke of Anjou, licentious 
and effeminate, had become king, as Henry III. In February ? 

1575, the Huguenots, under the Prince of Conde, signed a league 
with the liberal Catholics, under the Marshal de Damville. The 
Duke of Alencon also joined the insurgents in the south ; and in 

1576, Henry of Navarre, afterwards to be Henry IV., escaped 
from the surveillance of Catherine, and joined the conflict. Full 
concession to the Reformers was extorted, and obtained in May, 
1576. This roused the Catholics, who, seeing what had been 
done by the strength of one league, resolved on a combination 
of their own ; and Henry, the young Duke of Guise, who was 
now leader of the Catholics, organised, by means of the association, 
of the clergy and Jesuits throughout the country, a great Catholic 
League, which in a few months enrolled thirty thousand members. 
This was a confederation to maintain the Church in its old form, 
the king's authority, and that of the head of the league, by 
whose ambition the king's authority was threatened. This league 
was just formed, when Francis Bacon, a youth of sixteen, was 
first in Paris with Sir Amyas Paulet. He was in the summer 
and autumn of 1577 with Sir Amyas in the French court at 



toa.d. 1579- J RISE OF THE DRAMA. 383 

Poitiers. After a little more than two years of this training in 
France to diplomatic life, there came a cloud over the prospects 
of Bacon in the year 1579. In the February of that year his 
father died, after a few days' illness, before completing the pro- 
vision he had meant to make for the younger son by his second 
marriage. Francis Bacon, then eighteen years old, came to 
London at the end of March, with commendations to the 
queen from Sir Amyas Paulet, and settled down at Gray's Inn 
to study of the law as a profession. 

In 1579, then, we have Spenser, aged about twenty-seven, 
publishing his first book, The Shepheardes Calender; Lyly, aged 
twenty-five or twenty-six, publishing Euphues; Bacon, aged 
eighteen, thrown on his own resources by his father's death, is 
beginning study of law as the profession by which he must live ; 
and Shakespeare, aged fifteen, is eldest of a family of young 
children in a household that begins to feel the pinch of poverty. 

39. In January, 1562, as we have seen (§ 8) " Gorboduc," 
our first tragedy, was presented before Queen Elizabeth by 
the gentlemen of the Inner Temple. A fortnight later, the 
queen saw a play on the subject of Julius Caesar. Companies 
formed for the entertainment of great lords, acted as servants 
of this or that lord, for their own profit and the public enter- 
tainment, in inn yards (§ 8). In 1 563 the plague destroyed in Lon- 
don 21,530. Archbishop Grindal advised Sir William Cecil to 
inhibit all plays for a year, and, he said, if it were for ever it were 
not amiss. In the summer of 1564, Queen Elizabeth visited Cam- 
bridge, and was entertained with Udall's (ch. vi. § 48, 58, 60) play 
of Ezechias in English. In the following Christmas what is 
called a tragedy, perhaps Damoti and Pithias, by Richard 
Edwards, a musician and writer of interludes, was acted before 
Her Majesty by the children of the Chapel Royal, Richard 
Edwards being then their master. For its happy end and its 
intermixture of farcical matter, as in the shaving of Grim the 
Collier by the court lackeys, that rhyming play is a comedy, but 
it includes a tyrant and a hangman. Edwards was born in 
Somersetshire, and was a student at Corpus Christi College, 
Oxford, before he became attached to the court. That to the 
court he looked for his advancement we may infer from the 
form of his father's blessing, .given in a poem of his in the 
" Paradise of Dainty Devices : " 

" My son, God guide thy way, and shield thee from mischance, 
And make thy just deserts in court thy poor estate advance." 



384 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1561 

In 1 561, Elizabeth made him a gentlemen of the Royal Chapel, 
and master of the singing boys. He was in very high repute 
for his comedies and interludes. On the 3rd of September, 
1566, Edwards's Palamon and Arcyte was acted before Eliza- 
beth, in the hall of Christ Church, Oxford. At the begin- 
ning of the play part of the stage fell in ; three persons were 
killed and five hurt; but the play was acted and the queen 
enjoyed it, giving eight guineas to one of the young actors who 
pleased her much. Dr. James Calfhill's Latin play of Progne, 
acted two days later, was less successful. It was in the same 
year that Gascoigne's Supposes and Jocasta (§ 29), from Ariosto 
and Euripides, were played during the revels at Gray's Inn. 

At court it was the business of the Master of the Revels to 
have plays rehearsed before him, and to choose the best. In 
the course of 1571 the plays acted before the queen were Lady 
Barbara, by Sir Robert Lane's men ; Iphigenia, by the children 
of Paul's ; Ajax and Ulysses, by the children of Windsor ; Nar- 
cissus, by the Children of the Chapel ; Cloridon and Radiamanta, 
by Sir Robert Lane's men ; Paris and Vienna, by the Children 
of Westminster. 

In 1572 it was enacted that all fencers, bear-wards, common 
players in interludes, and minstrels not belonging to any baron 
of this realm, or to any other honourable personage of greater 
degree, should be treated as rogues and vagabonds if they had 
not the licence of at least two justices of the peace. This 
requirement was renewed twenty-five years later. 

40. In May, 1574, the Earl of Leicester procured, as special 
privilege for his own servants, James Burbadge, John Perkyn, 
John Lanham, William Johnson, and Robert Wylson, the first 
royal patent " to use, exercise, and occupy the art and faculty of 
playing Comedies, Tragedies, Interludes, Stage Plays and such 
other like as they have already used and studied, or hereafter 
shall use and study, as well for the recreation of our loving 
subjects as for our solace and pleasure when we shall think 
good to see them," within the City of London and its Liberties, 
or in any other city, without let ; " provided that the said 
Comedies, Tragedies, Interludes, and Stage Plays be by the 
Master of the Revels (for the time being) before seen and 
allowed ; and that the same be not published or shown in the 
time of Common Prayer, or in the time of great and common 
Plague in our City of London." The city authorities opposed 
the concession of this patent; but in July, 1574, a letter was 



toa.d. 1575.] THE THEATRE IN THE INN YARD. 38 ^ 

written from the Privy Council requiring the Lord Mayor " to 
admit the comedy players within the City of London, and to 
be otherwise favourably used." In 1575 the Common Council 
framed regulations that were in effect prohibitory ; for they 
required not only that a licence should be obtained from the 
Lord Mayor for every exhibition, but also that half the players' 
profits should be given up for charitable uses. 

As yet no theatre had been built. Actors produced their 
entertainments upon scaffolds set up for the purpose in con- 
venient places. In a town there was no place more convenient 
than the inn yard, as the inn yard used to be when there was 
much travelling by coach and on horseback. The large inner 
square of the building, entered by an archway, had, at least on 
the first floor, often on other floors, a gallery round it, into 
which rooms opened. The stage built against one side of the 
yard had close above it a piece of gallery which could be, and 
was, curtained off with it for use. It would serve for a window 
or a balcony, from which a king or a fair lady looked down ; 
it would serve for the battlements of a castle, from which an 
attacking force could be defied ; it would serve for the top of 
his palace, from which David observed Bathsheba. In the 
unenclosed part of the gallery above, on each side of the 
curtains, was the music. The trumpet sounded thrice, and at 
the third sound of the trumpet the curtain before the stage 
was drawn to either side, thus framing it in drapery. Upon 
the stage there was no scenery. A bed, or a table and chair, 
might be produced if necessary, or a god might be let down 
in a chair if the arrangement of galleries and windows in the 
place of performance made it easy to do that ; but the play 
itself was the whole entertainment. The players did their 
best in dressing and in acting ; the poet did his best to enter- 
tain the people and provide the players with effective parts. 
What scenery the poet wanted he could always paint for 
himself in words. A large part of the audience stood on the 
ground in the open yard — groundlings of the original pit, for 
whom at first there were no seats provided. The galleries sur- 
rounding the old inn yard were the first circles of boxes, and 
the rooms of the inn, which could be taken for solace of the 
more luxurious, were the first private boxes. After theatres had 
been built, those boxes were for some time called "rooms." 
The acting was at first on holidays, because on working days, 
when most people were about their business, only the few idlers 

z 



3^6 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1576. 

could afford to give attention to the play ; for there was no 
acting after dark. The play was always over in time to enable 
playgoers to get back home before sunset. Following the old 
usage, in accordance with opinion of the Roman Catholic 
Church that after hours of service sports lawful on other 
days were lawful on Sundays, the afternoon of Sunday 
was at first a recognised time for such entertainments, but 
this was strongly opposed by the Puritans. The Corpora- 
tion of London, Puritan in its tendency, battled against the 
players, and supported its case with various arguments : as, 
desecration of Sabbath and saints' days ; bringing of young 
people together under conditions that would favour the forming 
of unmeet contracts ; temptations from the inns ; chance of 
seditious matter in the plays ; idle waste of money : that, if 
superfluous, should be given to the poor ; hurt of people by 
the fall of scaffolding, and by the weapons and gunpowder used 
in the performances ; chance of diffusing plague, by bringing 
people together in great crowds. In December, 1575, the 
authorities of the City of London prohibited altogether the 
acting of plays within their jurisdiction as ungodly, and made 
humble suit for like prohibition in all places near the city. 
The queen's players then petitioned the Privy Council against 
the procedure of the Corporation of London, and of the justices 
of Middlesex, who also had opposed them. The city argued 
in reply to the players " how unseemly it is for youth to run 
straight from prayer to plays, from God's service to the devil's.'' 
Among other of its suggestions, one was that since the death- 
rate, in absence of plague, was forty or fifty a week, acting of 
plays in London should be forbidden wherever the death-rate 
exceeded fifty. The population of London was then about 
150,000. 

In 1576 the city desired that the players should act only in 
private houses, or if elsewhere, then only on condition that the 
death-rate had for twenty days been under fifty ; that they should 
never act on the Sabbath, nor on holy-days till after evening prayer, 
and always early enough to allow the spectators to return home 
before dark ; also, that none but the queen's players should be thus 
licensed, and that not only the number of these, but their names, 
should be specified. If they infringed these regulations there 
was to be an end of toleration. Hostility of the Common Council 
at last drove the actors into parts of London that were not within 
its jurisdiction ; and in this year, 1376, James Burbadge bought 



a.d. 1576. j THE FIRST THEATRES. 387 

and prepared a place for acting in the precinct of the dissolved 
monastery in the liberty of Blackfriars. There the Blackfriars 
Theatre was built, in spite of local opposition. In these contests 
the Earl of Leicester was, among men in power, the most active 
supporter of the players. In the same year, 1576, two other 
theatres were built beyond the jurisdiction of the Mayor and 
Corporation. These were outside the walls, in the fresh air of 
Shoreditch. The Londoner who passed out through the town 
walls at Bishop's Gate had before him a suburban street of good 
houses and gardens, running between the clear green space of 
the Spital Field and the open Finsbury Field, in which were 
three windmills. That line between fields of Bishopsgate Street 
Without the town gate, continuing the line of Bishopsgate Within, 
led to the pleasant country houses of Shoreditch, and these were 
good houses, chiefly in favour with foreign merchants resident in 
London. In Shoreditch, beyond the walls, but with a well- 
inhabited town road — Bishopsgate Street Without — leading 
through the fields to it, were built The Theatre and The 
Curtain. These were the other two of the three theatres which, 
in 1576, first gave a home of its own to the English drama. 
William Shakespeare was at Stratford then, aged twelve. 

41. Among the first writers and actors in these first theatres 
was Stephen G-OSSon, a young Oxford graduate, born in Kent 
in 1555, who studied at Christ Church. After taking his B.A. 
degree, he came to London in 1576, aged twenty-one, attached 
himself at once to the new theatres, and wrote plays, which are 
now lost — Catiline's Conspiracies j Captain Mario, a Comedy; 
Praise at Parting, a Moral. Meanwhile the opposition of the 
Puritans continued. A sermon at Paul's Cross, preached by 
T. Wilcocks, on Sunday, Nov. 3, 1577, in a time of plague, 
exhorted the people to " look but upon the common plays in 
London, and see the multitude that flocketh to them and followeth 
them : behold the sumptuous theatre houses, a continual monu- 
ment of London's prodigality and folly. But I understand," said 
the preacher, " they are now forbidden because of the plague. I 
like the policy well, if it hold still ; for a disease is but botched 
or patched up that is not cured in the cause, and the cause of 
plagues is sin, if you look to it well ; and the cause of sin are 
plays : therefore the cause of plagues are plays/' Mention is 
made of the Theatre and Curtain by name in the Rev. John 
Northbrooke's Treatise wherein Diceing, Daunting, vaine Plays 
or Enter -hides, with Idle Pastimes, dr>c, commonly used on the 

z 2 



3oo A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1576 

Sabbath-day are reproned by the authoritie of the Worde of God 
and auncie7it writers. Made Dialogue wise. This was entered 
at Stationers' Hall at the beginning of December, 1577. 

Young Stephen Gosson, who earned credit also as a writer of 
pastorals, was moved by the controversies of the time not only 
to abandon his new calling as a writer for the stage, but to join 
in attack upon the theatres. This he did in 1579, by publishing 
a short prose book called The School of Abuse, containing a 
Plesaimt Invective against Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters, and 
such-like Caterpillers of a Commonwelth ; setting up the Flagge 
of Defiance to their mischievous exercise, and overthrowing their 
Bulwarkes, by Profane Writers, Naturall Reason, and Common 
Experie7ice: a Discourse as pleasaunt for Gentlemen that favour 
Learning, as profitable for all that wyll follow Vertue. This 
was entered at Stationers' Hall in July. " Euphues " had been 
published in the spring. There was just time for Gosson to have 
read " Euphues " before writing his own little treatise, which was 
produced under the influence of the same fashion which Lyly's 
book illustrated. The dedication to Sir Philip Sidney might, for 
its style, have been signed " John Lyly " instead of " Your Wor- 
shippes' to command, Stephen Gosson." For example, after 
citing Caligula's great preparation to invade England, where 
he only " charged every man to gather cockles," Gosson says, 
"The title of my book doth promise much, the volume you 
see is very little : and sithens I cannot bear out my folly by 
authority, like an emperor, I will crave pardon for my phrensy, 
by submission, as your worships' to command. The school which 
I build is narrow, and at the first blush appeareth but a dog- 
hole ; yet small clouds carry water ; slender threads sew sure 
stitches ; little hairs have their shadows ; blunt stones whet 
knives ; from hard rocks flow soft springs ; the whole world is 
drawn in a map, Homer's ' Iliad ' in a nut-shell, a king's pic- 
ture in a penny," and so on. Philip Sidney, we learn, was ill- 
pleased with the dedication to him of a book that set out with an 
attack on poetry, and Gosson's "School of Abuse" is believed to 
have prompted Sidney to the writing of his " Apology for Poetry." 
From the poets Gosson went on to the musicians, and then to 
the players. One passage in his attack upon them is worth 
notice. He said it might be urged that, whatever were the 
immoralities of ancient comedy, " the comedies that are exercised 
in our days are better sifted, they show no such bran." After 
comparing the immorality of the old plays with the morality of 



to a.d. 1582.] STEPHEN GOSSON. THOMAS LODGE. 389 

the new ones, he said, " Now are the abuses of the world revealed ; 
every man in a play may see his own faults, and learn by this 
glass to amend his manners." But admitting this, he added, 
" If people will be instructed (God be thanked) we have divines 
enough to discharge that, and more by a great many than are 
well hearkened to." So that even in these days of its first 
infancy there was the earnest spirit of the time in the Elizabethan 
drama ; the same earnest spirit that in another form laboured 
for its destruction. Stephen Gosson having left the stage, added 
to his invective a short Apology for the School of Abuse, and 
went into the country as a tutor. 

42. Thomas Lodge, son of Sir Thomas Lodge, a London 
grocer who was Lord Mayor in 1563, was a fellow-student of 
Gosson's, a young man of his own age. He wrote at once a 
reply to Gosson, "Honest Excuses" on behalf of the stage. 
Early in 1582 the players also defended their calling in their own 
way by acting a Play of Plays. Stephen G-osson then pro- 
duced at once a five-act answer, entitled, Plays Confuted in Five 
Actions, &>c, proving that they are not to be suffered in a Chris- 
tian Commonwealth j by the way both the cavils of Thomas Lodge 
and the Play of Plays w?itten in their defence, and other objec- 
tions oj Players' 'friends, are truly set down and directly answered. 

In 1 591, Gosson was made Rector of Great Wigborough, in 
Essex. In 1600, by an exchange of livings, he came to town, 
aged forty-five, as Rector of St. Botolph, Bishopsgate, and 
there he officiated for nearly a quarter of a century, until his 
death in 1624. 

Thomas Lodge made for himself a name of honour among 
the men who were creating a poetical drama when Shakespeare 
began his career in London. Lodge was a Roman Catholic and 
a good scholar. From Oxford he went to Avignon, where he 
graduated as doctor of medicine. On his return he was incor- 
porated at Cambridge; and he became in London not only a 
successful dramatist and poet, but also a thriving physician, with 
a practice chiefly among those of his own religious faith. John 
Lyly, a year or two older than Lodge and Gosson, we shall also 
find to be in the first group of Elizabethan dramatists. Robert 
Greene was a few years younger, perhaps not more than two or 
three years older than William Shakespeare ; and Christopher 
Marlowe was born in the same year as Shakespeare. Two 
other dramatists of this group, Thomas Kyd and Henry 
Chettle, may have been of about the age of Robert Greene. 



39° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1580. 

43. On the 6th of April, 1580, there was a considerable shock 
of earthquake felt in many parts of England. It produced a 
Discourse upon the Earthquake, from Arthur Golding (§ 6), the 
translator of. Ovid ; A Warning 011 the Earthquake, from Thomas 
Churchyard (§ 10), and with a preface, dated June 19, 1580: 
Three proper and wittie familiar letters lately passed betweene 
two University men, touching the earthquake in April last, and 
our English refor?ned versifying, with the preface of a well- 
wisher to them both. The two University men were Edmund 
Spenser and Gabriel Harvey. As to the earthquake, 
Harvey described the effect of it on minds at Cambridge, and 
protested against the practice of converting natural events into 
Divine warnings, and associating them with predictions. He had 
a strong sense of the emptiness of this part of the supposed 
knowledge of the time, the stronger because one of his brothers 
gave much attention to the study of astrology. The " English 
eformed versifying " meant a fancy of the day among some 
University men who discussed literature together — Harvey, 
Spenser, Sidney, and Sidney's friends and college companions, 
Edward Dyer and Fulke Greville, with others — for the abolishing 
of rhyme and introduction of the Latin system of quantity into 
English verse. They were amusing themselves with English 
hexameters, sapphics, and other forms derived from the old 
Latin poetry. Spenser sent Harvey four lines of hexameter as a 
sample, and asked, " Seem they comparable to those two which 
I translated you extempore in bed the last time we lay together 
in Westminster?" He observed difficulties in accent, and 
desiring a fixed system to work upon, wished Harvey would 
send him " the rules and precepts of art which you observe in 
quantities, or else follow mine that M. Philip Sidney gave me, 
reing the very same which M. Drant devised, but enlarged with 
M. Sidney's own judgment, and augmented with my observations, 
that we might both accord and agree in one, lest we overthrow 
one another and be overthrown of the rest." He said that Dyer 
had liked Harvey's satirical verses, and that he himself was about 
to write Epithalamium Ta?nesis (its idea seems to have been 
worked afterwards into the " Faerie Queene," Book IV., canto 
xi.); his Dreams and Dying Pelican were about to be printed; 
and he was already at work upon The Faerie Queene. The 
Dreams were not published ; perhaps Spenser withdrew them 
because they were exercises of ingenuity, according to a fashion 
of the time with which his own taste as a poet was not in unison. 



a.d. 1580.] EDMUND SPENSER AND GABRIEL HARVEY. 391 

Because they were after the manner of the time they delighted 
Harvey, who was clever and liberal of mind, with a quick-witted 
delight in literature, but who was simply a clever man of his own 
day. Harvey worshipped Euphuism in its sources : " I like your 
e Dreams ' passingly well," he told Spenser, " the rather because 
they savour of that singular and extraordinary vein and invention 
which I ever fancied most, and in a manner admired only in 
Lucian, Petrarch, Aretino, and all the most delicate and fine- 
conceited Grecians and Italians (for the Romans, to speak of, 
are but very ciphers in this kind), whose chief endeavour and 
drift was to have nothing vulgar, but in some respect or other, 
and especially in lively hyperbolical amplification, rare, quaint, 
and odd in every point, and, as a man would say, a degree or 
two above the reach and compass of a common scholar's 
capacity." Spenser had written at this time nine comedies after 
the manner of Ariosto, and these also he probably withheld from 
publication because they had the qualities that caused Harvey 
to write, " I am void of all judgment if your nine comedies 
whereunto, in imitation of Herodotus, you give the names of the 
nine Muses (and in one man's fancy not unworthily) come not 
nearer Ariosto's comedies, either for the finesse of plausible 
e-locution or the rareness of poetical invention, than the Elvish 
Queene doth to his ' Orlando Furioso,' which, notwithstanding, 
you will needs seem to emulate and hope to overgo, as you flatly 
professed yourself in one of your last letters." Spenser then had 
begun his " Faerie Queene," and begun it with high aspiration. 
He went on with it undaunted by his friend Harvey's warning, 
" If so be the ' Faerie Queene ' be fairer in your eye than the 
nine Muses " (the comedies) " and Hobgoblin run away with the 
garland from Apollo, mark what I say — and yet I will not say that 
I thought. But there, an end for this once, and fare you well till 
God or some good angel put you in abetter mind." It was really 
'" fare you well," for in this year Spenser went to Ireland. 

44. At the beginning of 1580, Philip Sidney had ad- 
dressed to the queen a wise and earnest written argument 
against the project of her marriage with the Duke of Anjou. 
His uncle, Leicester, whose secret marriage with Lettice, Countess 
of Essex, had become known, was already under the queen's 
displeasure ; and Sidney, after writing this letter, found it best 
to withdraw from court. Towards the end of March, 1580, he 
went to stay at Wilton with his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, 
whom Spenser afterwards honoured as 



392 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1580 

" The greatest shepherdess that lives this day. 
And most resembling both in shape and spright 
Her brother dear ; " 

and upon whose death, when her course was ended, Ben Jonson 
wrote : 

' Underneath this sable herse 
Lies the subject of all verse, 
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother ; 
Death, ere thou hast slain another 
Learn'd and fair and good as she, 
Time shall throw a dart at thee. " 

Sidney's sister became " Pembroke's mother " in that spring of 
1580 when her brother Philip was staying at Wilton. He re- 
mained there about seven months. Brother and sister worked 
together at that time upon a joint translation of The Psalms of 
David into English verse. It was then also that Sidney occu- 
pied hours of his forced idleness by beginning to write for the 
amusement of his sister a long pastoral romance, in prose mixed 
with verse, according to Italian fashion, with abundance of 
poetical conceits— his Arcadia. It was done at his sister's wish, 

and as he wrote to her, " only for you, only to you 

For, indeed, for severer eyes it is not, being but a trifle, and that 
triflingly handled. Your dear self can best witness the manner, 
being done in loose sheets of paper, most of it in your pre- 
sence, the rest by sheets sent unto you as fast as they were done." 
This romance was not published by Sidney. Not long before 
his death he said that he wished it to be burnt. But it belonged 
to his sister, who valued it, and by her it was, after his death, 
prepared for the press, and published in 1590. Much of it was 
written during the summer of 1580, and the rest chiefly, or 
entirely in 1581. Though long, Sidney's "Arcadia" is un- 
finished except by the addition of a hurried close. It is a pas- 
toral of the school of the " Arcadia " of Sanazzaro, and the 
" Diana Enamorada" by George of Montemayor (ch. vi. § 39), 
but its intermixture of verse and prose develops more com- 
pletely a romantic story, and it adds to the pastoral a new 
heroic element. This was suggested partly by the Spanish ro- 
mances of "Amadis" and " Palmerin " (ch. vi. § 40), partly by the 
^Ethiopian Historie of Heliodorus, lately translated from the 
Greek by Thomas Underdown. Heliodorus, Bishop of Tricca, in 
Thessaly, who lived at the end of the fourth century, wrote, under 
the name of " ^Ethiopica," ten books of romance on the loves of 
Theagenes and Chariclea. Sidnev had been enjoying this in 



toa.d. 1581.] SIDNEY'S ARCADIA. 393 

Underdown's translation. In his " Defence of Poesy," written 
in 15S1 (although not published until 1595J, after saying that 
Xenophon had " in his portraiture of a just empire under the 
name of Cyrus (as Cicero saith of him), made therein an abso- 
lute heroical poem ; so," he added, " did Heliodorus in his 
sugared invention of that picture of love in Theagenes and 
CLariclea, and yet both these writ in prose : which I speak to 
show that it is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet, no 
more than a long gown maketh an advocate, who, though he 
pleaded in armour, should be an advocate and no soldier." 
Sidney's Arcadia may be, in this sense, taken as all poet's work ; 
giving a new point of departure for heroic romance grafted upon 
pastoral. As he was writing for his sister a romance after the 
fashion of his day, Sidney, in the " Arcadia," would amuse him- 
self by showing how he also could be delicate and fine conceited. 
This is the groundwork of its story. Two cousins and close 
friends, Musidorus, the elder, Prince of Thessaly, and .Pyrocles, 
the younger, Prince of Macedon, are wrecked on the Spartan 
coast. Musidorus is saved and taken to the delicious pastoral 
land of Arcadia. His friend is supposed to have been lost. 
Musidorus is sheltered by Kalander, an Arcadian noble. Pre- 
sently he leads an Arcadian force against Helots of Sparta, 
who have made Kalander's son their prisoner, and at the close 
of combat with a mighty captain of .the Helots, finds him to be 
his lost friend Pyrocles. Peace is made. Kalander's son is re- 
leased, and the two friends begin a course of love adventures. 
Basilius and Gynecia, king and queen of Arcadia, have two 
daughters — majestic Pamela, and sweet Philoclea. To keep 
men away from his daughters, Basilius has built two lodges in a 
forest. In one he lives with his wife and his younger daughter 
Philoclea ; in the other Pamela lives under the care of a clown 
Dametas, who has an ugly wife, Miso, and an ugly daughter, 
Mopsa. The only men who may come near are a priest and 
some shepherds skilled in music. Musidorus now loves Pamela; 
he is disguised as a shepherd, Dorus, and affects passion for 
Mopsa. Pyrocles loves Philoclea ; he is disguised as an 
Amazon, Zelmane, and inspires love in King Basilius, who takes 
him for a woman, as well as in Queen Gynecia, who sees that 
he is a man. Many troubles and adventures, episodes of 
romance, conceited dialogues and songs, including experiments 
in " our English reformed versifying," are built upon this ground- 
work. The king's sister-in-law, Cecropia, desires to set up her 



394 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1580 

son Arnphialus as King of Arcadia, that she may rule through 
him. Cecropia carries off Pamela, Philoclea, and Zelmane. 
She fails to bend Philoclea to assent to the love of her son, 
goes to the chamber of Pamela, hoping to prevail over her, 
and hears her praying to heaven for succour. We shall 
meet again with Pamela's prayer. The Arcadian army 
battles for the rescue of the captives, and in the course of this 
contest Amphialus slays Argalus, the husband of Parthenia. 
She afterwards arms herself to avenge her husband, comes as a 
stranger knight, and is herself slain by Amphialus, who suffers 
grief and shame for his victory. The latter part of the 
" Arcadia" is less fully worked out. The princesses and Pyrocles. 
still as the Amazon Zelmane, are again at home. Musidorus 
escapes with Pamela to Thessaly. Pyrocles remains, troubled 
by the affections of the king and queen, but he brings both to 
their senses, they resume their royal duties, and the lovers are 
made happy. 

There is much difference between the style of Sidney's 
" Arcadia," and that of his Apologie for Poetrie, written in 1581, 
although not published until 1595, when Sidney was dead. This 
little treatise, in simple English, maintains against such attacks 
as Gosson's (§ 41) the dignity of the best literature. The 
" Apologie for Poetrie " is the first piece of intellectual literary 
criticism in our language ; it springs from a noble nature feeling 
what is noblest in the poet's art, is clear in its plan, terse in its 
English, and while all that it says is well said, it is wholly free 
from conceits. The conceited style, indeed, it explicitly con- 
demns, as eloquence disguised in painted affectation, " one 
time, with so far-fetched words, they may seem monsters, but 
must seem strangers to any poor Englishman; another time, 
with coursing of a letter, as if they were bound to follow the 
method of a dictionary ; at another time with figures and 
flowers extremely winter-starved. But I would this fault were 
only peculiar to versifiers, and had not as large possession 
among prose printers ; and (which is to be marvelled) among 
many scholars ; and (which is to be pitied) among some 
preachers. . . . For now they cast sugar and spice upon 
every dish that is served to the table ; like those Indians, not 
content to wear earrings at the fit and natural place of the ears, 
but they will thrust jewels through their nose and lips, because 
they will be sure to be fine." 

45. In 1576, Pope Gregory XIII. had issued a bull depriving 



toa.d. 1581.] SIDNEY. SPENSER. RALEIGH. 395 

Elizabeth of all title to Ireland, and releasing her Irisn subjects 
from allegiance. Sir Henry Sidney had returned to England, 
and resigned his office as Lord Deputy of Ireland in the autumn 
of 1578. In 1578, James Fitzmaurice, who had been for two 
years seeking aid from the Catholic powers, got from the pope 
some arms, ammunition, and money, sailed to Ireland with 
adventurers, chiefly Spaniards and Italians, commanded by an 
Italian, landed at Smerwick Bay, in Kerry, and began to con- 
struct a fort there, which was called Del Oro. A great part of 
Ireland was in insurrection when the English Government at last 
appointed as successor to Sir Henry Sidney, Arthur Lord Grey 
of Wilton, a strict Puritan, whom we have already met with as 
a patron of the poet Gascoigne (§ 29). He arrived at Dublin 
August, 1580, having with him Edmund Spenser as his 
private secretary. The patronage of Leicester, and the good 
word of Philip Sidney through his father, would suffice as intro- 
duction for a man in himself welcome, since the secretary was 
upon matters of policy of like mind with his chief. On the 
7th of September, Lord Arthur Grey assumed his office. On 
the 14th a fresh force of six or seven hundred Spaniards disem- 
barked, repaired and took possession of the Fort del Oro. The 
Earl of Desmond was ready with his followers to join them and 
act with them if he could. Lord Grey marched promptly on 
Del Oro, Admiral Winter co-operating with him at sea. On the 
2nd of November Lord Grey pitched his camp within eight 
miles of the fort. Within the fort was an advanced guard of 
the power of Spain, seeking through Ireland to oppose the 
heresies of England. Lord Grey had with him his secretary 
Spenser, and in his camp was Captain Walter Raleigh. The 
garrison of the fort was in a few days forced to surrender at 
discretion ; Lord Grey telling its captains, who pleaded obedience 
to authority, that he " would not greatly have marvelled if men 
commanded by natural and absolute princes did sometimes take 
in hand wrong actions ; but that men of account, as some of 
them made show of being, should be carried into unjust, wicked 
and desperate actions, by one that neither from God nor man 
could claim any princely power or empire, but, indeed, a detes- 
table shaveling of the Antichrist and general ambitious tyrant 
over all principalities, and patron of the diabolical faith, I could 
not but greatly wonder." The fori: was given up, and on the 10th 
of November two officers, one of them Captain Raleigh, were 
sent in to massacre the prisoners. " I put in certain bands," 



396 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 158© 

wrote Lord Grey, " which straightway fell to execution. There 
were six hundred slain." Spaniards and Italians of rank were 
spared, and distributed among officers, who were to make prize- 
money by their ransoms. Such was the bitterness of the strife 
which Spenser witnessed, and which he was then expressing 
through sweet music of his verse ; sweet music from a soul pure, 
earnest, but strongly sharing in the conflict of its time. To 
Spenser, as to his chief, Catholicism was " the diabolical faith," 
the pope " a detestable shaveling of the Antichrist." 

46. These also were the events which first brought Edmund 
Spenser and Walter Raleigh together. Raleigh had come back 
to London from his service with the Huguenots, and lived for a 
short time in the Middle Temple, where he wrote a poem of 
compliment, prefixed in 1576 to Gascoigne's "Steel Glass" 
(§ 29). In 1578, Sir John Norris crossed to the Low Countries 
with a small force, of which Raleigh was one, to join in the con- 
test against Don John, who, after his triumph over infidels at 
Lepanto, was to master heretics as Governor of the Netherlands. 
Early in 1578 the Netherlander had been banned by the pope 
as unbelievers. There was appeal to arms. The forces of 
Spain had from their Chureh the privileges of crusaders. The 
Spaniards obtained a great victory over the army of the States 
at Gemblours. War went on nevertheless. In Holland and 
Zealand the Reformation was in 1578 formally established by 
civic revolution, that placed Protestants instead of Catholics in 
the magistracy at Amsterdam and Haarlem. Raleigh took part 
in a success of arms on Lammas-day ; and Don John died on 
the 1st of October, at a time when Raleigh was busy on another 
enterprise. On the 19th of November he sailed from Plymouth 
with his brother-in-law, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who took seven 
ships and 350 men on an expedition that was foiled. They fell 
in with a Spanish fleet, lost one of their ships, and Gilbert and 
his brother-in-law, Walter Raleigh, came back to England in 
the early summer of 1579, with the wreck of their small force. 
After a few months of London life, Raleigh then sailed for Ire- 
land, in January, 1580. His energy was overbearing, and weak 
leaders did not love the bold, proud, and plain-spoken captain, 
who shone in conflict with the rebels, and in suggestion of policy 
for quelling the rebellion ; until, in December, 1581, he was sent 
back to the Court at London with despatches. 

After the massacre at Del Oro, Spenser returned with 
Lord Arthur Grey to Dublin. In 15S1, Spenser was made Clerk 



toa.d. 1585.] EDMUND SPENSER. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 397 

of Degrees and Recognisances in the Irish Court of Chancery, 
and received also a lease of the lands and abbey of Enniscorthy, 
in Wexford county. He transferred the lease within a year ; and 
in 1582, Lord Arthur Grey, "after long suit for his revocation, 
received Her Majesty's letters for the same." Spenser remained 
in Ireland as an English Government official. In 1588 he 
vacated his post in the Irish Court of Chancery, on being ap- 
pointed clerk to the Council of Munster. In 1589 he came to 
London with Sir Walter Raleigh, to present to the queen the 
first three books of The Faerie Queene, which were first pub- 
lished in 1590. Before speaking of this, we trace the other out- 
lines of our sketch from 1579 to 1590. 

47. William Shakespeare (§ 37) was in 1579 fifteen years 
old, and his home had fallen into poverty. In 1580 his father's 
name appeared in a list of gentlemen and freeholders in Barlich- 
way hundred ; but poverty still pressed, and John Shakespeare 
sold his reversionary interest in the Snitterfield tenements for 
£\o to R. Webbe. In the same year, 1580, another son, 
Edmund, was born. The 28th of November, 1582, is the date 
of the preliminary bond with a notary, for marriage licence of 
William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, daughter of Richard 
Hathaway, " husbandman," of Shottery. Her father had been 
dead a twelvemonth. The marriage would have followed im- 
mediately, but before marriage there was, in those days, a more 
binding ceremony of betrothal than is customary now. Thus, 
in a play of George Peele's, " The Old Wives' Tale," there is a 
magic light to be blown out by a woman who is neither maid, 
wife, nor widow. The light is blown out by Venelia, not maid 
because she is betrothed, not wife because she is not married, 
and not widow because he lives to whom she was betrothed. 
Shakespeare's age when he married was eighteen years and 
seven months ; Anne Hathaway was six-and-twenty. There is 
no evidence whatever that this marriage was other than a happy 
one. On the 26th of May, 1583, Shakespeare's first child, 
Susanna, was baptised. On the 2nd of February, 1585, there 
were twins to baptise. They were named Hamnet and Judith ; 
no doubt after Hamnet and Judith Sadler, bakers, friends of the 
Shakespeares. (Hamnet Sadler, when he died, left Shakespeare 
36s. 8d. to buy a ring.) In some way Shakespeare must have 
endeavoured to support his little family ; his father could not 
help him. In 1585, John Shakespeare was arrested for lack of 
goods to distrain on. In 1586, John Shakespeare was twice 



39 8 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. |a d. .586 

arrested for debt ; and, on the ground of his constant absence 
from the meetings of the Corporation, he was deprived of his 
alderman's gown. He was an unprosperous man, of at least 
fifty-six, with five children, the youngest six years old. William, 
the eldest, was then about twenty-two, had been four years 
married, and his wife ha'd three babies to feed and train — 
Susanna, three years old ; the twins, Hamnet and Judith, two. 
How could he best maintain them ? He was a poet. Players 
had been to Stratford. He would go to London, and would 
seek his fortune by steady work in association with the rising 
power of the stage. 

His wife and babies he would not take with him into the 
unwholesome atmosphere of the great town, or bring into contact 
with the wild life of the playhouse wits. The children would 
be drawing health from the fresh breezes of Stratford ; the wife 
would be living a wholesome life among her old friends, neigh- 
bours, and relations ; while he worked hard for them where money 
could be earned, took holiday rests with them when theatres 
were closed, and hoped that he might earn enough to enable him 
to come home for good before he was very old, and live a natural 
and happy life among the quiet scenes of his birthplace, among 
relatives who loved him, and among the old friends of his child- 
hood and his youth. The man of highest genius is the man also 
of highest sanity. In lower minds unusual excitement of the 
brain may lead to bold or eccentric forms of expression, with 
half-bred resemblance to originality and energy of thought. 
Ephemeral and even lasting reputations may be founded on this 
form of wit ; but the greatest among poets, a Chaucer or a 
Shakespeare, is calm and simply wise. He is greatest of poets 
not because he does not, but because he does feel, and that 
more intensely and more truly than his neighbours, the natural 
ties of life. He has keen happiness in the home circle, in the 
scenes associated with his childhood, in the peaceful fellowship 
of man. His old friends, Judith and Hamnet Sadler, the bakers> 
were more, not less, to the author of "King Lear" than they 
would be to the citizen with less perception of the harmonies of 
life. Of all that it is natural and fit for common men to say 
and do, Shakespeare had, because of his transcendent genius, 
only a simpler, truer sense than any of his neighbours. 

Shakespeare came to London, then, in or about the year 
1 586 ; and, Shakespeare though he was, he did not leap to instant 
fame, but worked his way to a front place in his profession by 



toa.d. 1589.] WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. FRANCIS BACON. 399 

six years of patient industry. He was so ready to do any honest 
work, that at the end of six years we have the first indication of 
his rise in the complaint of a competitor, that he is a Johannes 
Factotum (Jack of all Trades). This was the position of 
William Shakespeare in 1590, when he was twenty-six years 
old. In studying Shakespeare's life it is needful to distinguish 
firmly between facts of which there is evidence and idle fancies : 
as of Shakespeare having in his youth stolen deer from a park 
in which there were no deer to be stolen ; of his having been a 
butcher, and, when he killed a calf, having done so with a grand 
air ; with other small-talk of dead gossips. 

48. Francis Bacon (§ 38), aged eighteen at the time of his 
father's death in 1579, studied at Gray's Inn, was admitted an 
utter barrister in June, 1582; and about this time, aged twenty- 
one, sketched briefly in a Latin tract, called Temporis Partus 
Maximus (The Greatest Birth of Time), the first notion of his 
philosophy. In November, 1584, Bacon took his seat in the 
House of Commons, as member for Melcombe Regis, in Dorset- 
shire. In the next Parliament, which met in October, 1586, he 
sat for Taunton, and was one of those who presented a petition 
for the speedy execution of Mary Queen of Scots. He was then 
member for Liverpool, active in public affairs, and presented 
to the ministry a wise paper of his own called, An Advertise- 
ment Touching the Controversie of the Church of Engla?id. 
Its topic was the Marprelate Controversy, presently to be 
described, and it contained the germ of his essay u Of Unity in 
Religion." In October, 1589, there was given to Bacon the 
reversion of the office of Clerk of the Council in the Star 
Chamber, with ;£ 1,600 or ^2,000 a year, and the further 
advantage that its work was done by deputy. But for this 
Bacon had twenty years to wait ; the holder of it lived 
till 1608. If that office had fallen to him early in life, Bacon 
might possibly have given up his career as a lawyer, and 
devoted himself wholly to the working out of his philosophy. 

49. Let us turn now to the controversies of the Church, first 
going back a little way to trace events in Scotland. There, as we 
have seen (§ 3), the confession of John Knox was established 
by the Three Estates in 1560 as the confession of the Scottish 
people ; by three Acts the rule of the pope was abolished, and 
the Reformation was established. There was a new sense of 
fellowship between England and Scotland ; the patriotic Scot 
of the Reformed Church no longer looked upon France as his 



AOO A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1560 

country's natural ally; but the Scottish Catholics looked both 
to France and Spain. In 1 561 there was a systematic demolition 
of monasteries, and of images and altars in the cathedrals. In 
August of that year, Queen Mary, who had become a widow at 
the end of 1560 by the death of Francis II. of France, returned 
to Scotland, aged nineteen. On the first Sunday after her 
arrival she heard Mass ; and, by the new law of Scotland, that 
was a crime, with penalty for the first offence of confiscation of 
goods, for the second of banishment, and for the third of death. 
At a banquet to the queen and her court in Edinburgh, enter- 
tainment was provided in presentment of a mystery of Korah, 
Dathan, and Abiram, who were destroyed for burning strange 
fire on the altar. It included parody of the Mass, and burning 
of a priest in effigy. The Earl of Huntly, leader of the Roman- 
ist party, stopped the performance. Guises and Frenchmen 
were in Scotland, and the question was raised of Mary's suc- 
cession to Elizabeth upon the throne of England. With this in 
view, Mary served the time, and showed herself well-disposed 
towards the Protestantism of the people. Knox maintained 
his cause in plain words, both in his preaching and in interviews 
with the queen. He wished that she could hear the preaching 
too : " If your grace," he said, " please to frequent the public 
sermons, then doubt I not but ye shall fully understand both 
what I like and mislike, as well in your Majesty as all others." 
And of his bold preaching he said, " Why should the pleasing 
face of a gentlewoman affray me ? I have looked on the faces of 
many angry men, and yet have not been affrayed above measure." 
In May, 1564, about a month after the birth of Shakespeare, 
Calvin died. In July, 1565, Queen Mary married, without advice 
of Parliament, her cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley ; and 
proclaimed her husband King of the Scots. He also was Roman 
Catholic, and the marriage was according to the rites of the 
Church of Rome. In March, 1566, Darnley, with Lord Ruthven 
and others, seized and murdered David Rizzio in the queen's 
rooms. Knox approved the deed in his history, where he said, 
" That great abuser of this commonwealth, that poltroon and 
vile knave, Davie, was justly punished for abusing of the 
commonwealth, and for his other villany which we list not to 
express." With Darnley the queen dissembled, and he meanly 
turned with her against his associates. "As they have brewed," 
he said, "so let them drink." On the 19th of June, 1566, 
Mary's son was born, afterwards to become James VI. of Scot- 



TOA.D. 1572.] SCOTTISH AFFAIRS. JOHN KNOX. 40f 

land and James I. of England. His father was then detested 
by his mother. Soon afterwards there was a gunpowder plot 
against Darnley, directed by the Earl of Bothwell. On the 9th 
of June, 1567, Darnley was murdered. Early in May, Bothwell 
was divorced from his wife, and on the 15th of May, Queen 
Mary married him. The Barons rose ; Bothwell and Mary were 
parted. The queen was brought back to Edinburgh, thence she 
was removed to Lochleven ; and at Lochleven she was compelled 
to sign an abdication in favour of her son, and appoint the 
Earl of Moray regent during the child's majority. Thus James 
Stuart, when not quite a year old, became King James VI. 
of Scotland; and John Knox preached the sermon at his 
coronation. 

In the last years of Knox there was not only political con- 
fusion, but there were defections from the cause for which 
he lived, and there were differences of opinion between him and 
his brethren in the General Assembly. In 1568, in an answer 
to a letter written by James Tyrie, a Jesuit, he wrote himself 
"John Knox, the servant of Jesus Christ, now weary of the 
world, and daily looking for the resolution of this my earthly 
tabernacle." In these his latter days, Knox, somewhat palsied, 
went to preach, supported by a staff in one hand, and his 
servant Richard Bannatyne upon the other side. " In church," 
wrote one who knew him then, " he was by the said Richard 
and another servant lifted to the pulpit, where he behoved to 
lean at his first entry ; but ere he had done with his sermon he 
was so active and vigorous that he was like to ding the pulpit 
in blads " (break it in pieces) " and fly out of it." In September, 
1572, he preached in the Tolbooth, then a dying man, upon the 
horror of that year, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. He 
died on the 24th of the following November. John Knox's 
Historie of the Reformation of Religioun within the Reahn of 
Scotland first appeared twelve years after his death, in 1584, 
published in Edinburgh, but printed in London, and afterwards 
partly suppressed in 1587 by the seizure and destruction of 
copies, at the order of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The 
whole grim energy of Knox's character animates this recital 
of events in which and for which he lived. 

50. Of the learned men employed in education of the young 
King James of Scotland, there is one, George Buchanan, 
nistorian and poet, who has a place of honour in our literature. 
He was was born at Kellerne, Lennoxshire, in 1506. His father 

A A 



402 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1506 

died, leaving his mother almost destitute, with five boys and 
three girls ; and George was sent by James Heriot, a brother of 
hers, to Paris for his education. There he already wrote much 
Latin verse. His uncle's death, two years afterwards, obliged 
him to come back without health or money. He made a cam- 
paign with French auxiliaries in sharp weather, lost health again, 
was in bed the rest of the winter, went to St. Andrew's to study 
under old John Mair (ch. vi. § 33), with whom he went to Paris. 
There he became Lutheran, was for two years very poor, then 
for two years and a half he taught grammar at the College of St. 
Barbe. He was then in France as tutor and companion for five 
years to the young Earl of Cassillis, and went back with him to 
Scotland. He there acted as tutor to the king's natural son, James, 
afterwards Earl of Moray. But he attacked the monks in Latin 
satires, especially in his Francis canus and Fratres Fraterrimi, 
was denounced by Beaton, and compelled to leave Scotland again. 
He went to England ; but there, he says, he found Henry VIII. 
burning men of both parties, more intent on his own interests 
than on purity of religion. So being half at home in France — 
though Buchanan carried Scotland about with him wherever he 
went — he went to Paris, found his enemy Cardinal Beaton there 
also in his way, and was invited by a learned Portuguese, Andrew 
Goveanus, who resided at Bordeaux, to teach there. Thus he 
became Professor of the Humanities at Bordeaux, where he had 
Montaigne in his class, and where he wrote two Latin tragedies 
of his own, on Jeplithah and John the Baptist, and translated 
into Latin the Medea and Alcestis of Euripides. These were 
written, year by year, as they were required — the translations 
first — to be acted, according to custom, by the students of 
Bordeaux. Goveanus was at last summoned to Portugal by his 
king, and invited to bring with him men learned in Greek and 
Latin, to join in the work of the newly-founded University of 
Coimbra. All Europe was involved in war. Buchanan was 
glad to find in Portugal a quiet corner. There he was very 
happy, with bright associates, and his brother Patrick among 
them, till the death of Goveanus. A persecution then began, 
some teachers were imprisoned; for a year and a half Buchanan 
was worried, and inquired into ; and then he was confined for a 
few months in a monastery. There he occupied himself by 
making his famous poetical paraphrase of the Psalms into 
Latin verse — Paraphrasis Psalmornm Davidis poetica — first 
published at Paris in 1564. When he left Portugal, Buchanan 



to a.d. 1582.] GEORGE BUCHANAN. 403 

came first to England — it was in the time of Edward VI. — then 
he went to France ; then was called to Italy by Marshal de 
Brissac, and was for five years with the marshal's son, some- 
times in France, sometimes in Italy. During that time he made 
a special study of the religious controversies of the day. In 
1566, at the age of fifty, Buchanan was made Principal of St. 
Leonard's College, in the University of St. Andrew's. In the 
earliest childhood of James VI., Buchanan became his 
tutor. George Buchanan was the best Latin poet this country 
had produced. He would seek to instil scholarship and theology of 
the Reformed Church into the boy whose father was murdered, 
and whose mother was in England. Mary had escaped from 
Lochleven in 1568, nobles had gathered force to rally round her; 
they had been defeated at Langside by the Regent Moray, 
and the queen then fled across the border into England. There 
Elizabeth detained her. Mary's party and her cause were the 
party and cause of Catholicism. The Scottish Reformers under 
Moray's regency acted with Protestant England, and fell into 
disrepute even of subserviency to England. The question of 
Mary's complicity in the murder of Darnley was in agitation at 
Elizabeth's court, and in the case against her a chief part was 
played by eight letters and some verses cut into lengths of 
fourteen lines, and called sonnets of hers, said to have been 
found on the 20th of June, 1567, in a casket that Bothwell 
left behind him in Edinburgh. After the assassination of the 
Regent Moray in 1670, civil discord between the two parties in 
Scotland rose to an extreme height. The friends of Mary were 
active ; a messenger from the Duke of Alva was in Scotland ; 
and a new Catholic rebellion broke out in the North of England. 
Lennox, next regent, perished in the Scottish turmoil, in 1571 ; 
he was succeeded by young James's governor, the Earl of Mar. 
Then came, in 1572, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, to deepen 
the sense of danger from Catholicism. Sentence of death was 
resolved by Elizabeth's advisers upon Mary of Scotland, as a 
foremost cause of peril to the country. Elizabeth was not to be 
answerable for the act, but Mary was to be returned to Scotland 
with a secret understanding that she was returned for execution. 
Then it was that the Casket Letters were first published to 
the world. George Buchanan published anonymously in Latin, 
an enforcement of the charges against Queen Mary. It was 
published in London, and there appeared immediate translations 
of it into French and Northern English, the latter as Ane Detec- 

AA 2 



404 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1572. 

tioun of the Doi?igis of Marie Que?ie of Scottis, twiching the 
Murthir of Mr Husband, &*c., Translatit out of Latin quhilk 
was written be M. G. B. Sanctandrois, be Robert Leckprevik. 
The Latin translation of the Casket Letters is here rendered 
into Scottish dialect; and there is a rendering of nearly all into 
French. We now have them in no other shape. The originals 
are lost ; it is not an improbable supposition that they were 
destroyed by Mary's son. During the last twelve or fourteen 
years of his life, Buchanan employed his mastery of Latin, 
and his knowledge of events, in writing a Latin History of 
Scotland — Rerum Scoticarum Historia — in twenty books. It 
connected with the past the life of his own day, gave unity to 
all, and placed at the head of it the sense of nationality. 
It was in his nature to care rather to mark the progress of a 
people than to celebrate the power of a chief. This was dis- 
tinctly shown in a sort of Socratic dialogue, published by him 
in Latin, in 1579, on the law as it relates to government among 
the Scots — Jus Regni apud Scotos — which ends by replying to 
their neighbours who called the Scots seditious, " What is that 
to them ? We make our tumults at our own peril. No people 
were ever less seditious, or more moderate in their seditions. 
They contend much about laws, royal rights, and duties of 
administration ; not for destruction and hatred, but for love of 
country and defence of law." Buchanan's history was first pub- 
lished in 1582, the year of its author's death. 

51. Meanwhile, Buchanan and others had been doing their 
best for the education of young James VI. He was a clumsy 
boy, with ungainliness produced by physical defect, a tongue 
too large for his mouth, and a mind in which all depths that 
there could ever be must be made artificially. Good workmen 
dug and shaped ; the boy was good-tempered, picked up some 
shrewdness, lived a creditable life, had respect for knowledge, 
and good appetite for it, though bad digestion. He had a 
pleasant type of it before him in cheery, impressible George 
Buchanan ; a Presbyterian, austere but half way through, with 
a face like a Scotch Socrates, although more apt than Socrates 
to take offence, familiar with Latin as with his native tongue^ 
full of anecdote and good talk, familiar also with languages 
and people round about, and liking Scotland all the better for 
experience in other lands. But for James the horizon did not 
widen as he climbed the hill of knowledge, his heart did not 
swell as he rose to higher sense of harmony and beauty; he 



toa.d. 1585.] GEORGE BUCHANAN. JAMES VI. 405 

hammered at the big lumps about him, and was proud of 
being so far up. In 1585, when his age was but nineteen, 
he published at Edinburgh The Essay es of a Prentise in the 
Divine Art of Poesie. In preliminary sonnets of compliment, 
the Muses, through various courtly representations, sought to 

" Tell how he doth in tender yearis essay- 
Above his age with skill our arts to blaise 
Tell how he doeth with gratitude repay 

The crowne he won for his deserved praise. 
Tell how of Jove, of Mars, but more of God 
The glorie and grace he hath proclaimed abrod." 

The " Essayes " opened with twelve sonnets of invocations to 
the gods, namely, Jove, Apollo, each of the four Seasons, Neptune, 
Tritons and their kind, Pluto, Mars, Mercury, and finally, for 
the twelfth sonnet : 

" In short, you all fore named gods I pray 

For to concur with one accord and will 
That all my works may perfyte be alway : 

Which if ye doe, then swear I for to fill 
My works immortall with your praises still : 

I shall your names eternall ever sing 
I shall tread downe the grass on Parnass hill 

By making with your names the world to ring : 
I shall your names from all oblivion bring ; 
I lofty Virgill shall to life restoirr." 

Buchanan was for three years dead, and there were few left 
who would tell a young king that his works were not " perfyte 
alway." Then followed a translation of UUranie, or "The 
Heavenly Muse/' from Du Bartas, original and translation 
printed upon opposite pages, with a modest preface in admira- 
tion of " the devine and illuster poete, Salust du Bartas " (§ 35), 
by the " oft reading and perusing " of whom James was moved 
" with a restless and lofty desire to preas to attaine to the like 
virtue." To the level of Du Bartas he could not at all aspire in 
his own verse ; let him, he said, follow imperfectly as a translator. 
This represented only the common admiration of his time 
which Du Bartas enjoyed. In a copy of " Quintilian," anno- 
tated by Gabriel Harvey when the Sepmaine of Du Bartas 
was a new book, Harvey wrote in the margin, beside a mention 
of Euripides, " Euripides, wisest of poets : except now at length 
the divine Bartas." After his version of one of the shorter 
poems of Du Bartas, King James gave for his next essay a 
dim allegory, smoothly versified, in Chaucer's stanza, " Ane 



4o5 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 15S0 

Metaphoricall Invention of a Tragedie called Phoenix/' with a 
preface of eighteen bad lines, arranged first as shaped verse, in 
the form of a lozenge upon a little pedestal, then as a com- 
pound acrostic. Then followed a short bit of translation out 
of the fifth book of Lucan; and then, lastly, " Ane Schort 
Treatise, containing some Reulis and Cautelis to be observit 
and eschewit in Scottis Poesie." Here we find, among other 
things, that the technical name then given to Chaucer's stanza 
was derived from Chaucer's most popular example of it. It was 
called "Troilus Verse." 

52. We glance abroad to connect the narrative with facts 
in foreign literature which concern our story. Michel de 
Montaigne, who had been among George Buchanan's students 
at Bordeaux, produced the first edition of his Essays in 1580. 
There was a second edition in 1588. This first of the great 
essayists had learnt Latin as a mother tongue, had seen much 
of the world in his youth ; and he died in 1 592, aged fifty-nine, 
after much enjoyment and half philosophical half gossiping 
discussion of life, at his seat of Montaigne, near Bordeaux. 

In 1 581, when Torquato Tasso was still a prisoner with 
the insane, appeared his great heroic poem in twenty-four books, 
on the First Crusade, and recovery of Jerusalem from the 
Saracens, at the end of the eleventh century. The poem had 
two names, Goffredo, from its hero, Godfrey of Bouillon, and 
Gerusalemme Libcrata (" Jerusalem Delivered "), from its action. 
There were eight independent and sometimes conflicting issues 
of this poem in Italy within nine months of its first publication. 
One of these had an essay prefixed on the question of the two 
titles. To one of the last of them there was appended an alle- 
gorical interpretation. The old relish for allegory in literature,, 
which we have traced down from early Christian days, was in 
Elizabeth's time unabated. 

But for some years after 1581 the fame of the now obscure 
Du Bartas rose higher than that of Tasso. The " Divine Week " 
of Du Bartas was followed by a " Second Week" [Second 
Sepmaine), in 1584. This divided into seven periods, poetically 
called days, the religious history of man expressed in the suc- 
cessive histories of Adam, Noah, Abraham, David, Zedekiah, 
the Messiah, and, for seventh " day," the Eternal Sabbath. 
Du Bartas only lived to complete four of the seven sections of 
this work, but he wrote also many other moral and religious 
poems. He also repaid the royal compliment of a translation 



to a.d. 1587. ] FOREIGN RELA TIONS. TRANS LA TORS. ' 407 

of L Uranie by translating into French, as La Lepanthe, the poem 
on the battle of Lepanto which King James of Scotland wrote 
soon after publishing his " Essayes of an Apprentise." This 
appeared with a preface of the translator to the author, wherein 
James was honoured with the name of a Scotch Phoenix, and 
the divine Du Bartas himself declared that he could not soar 
with him, could only stand on earth to see him in the clouds. 
Du Bartas wished he had only so much of James, as to be but 
the shadow of his shape, the echo of his voice. 

" He ! fusse ie vrayment, O Phoenix Escossois, 
Ou 1'ombre de ton corps, ou l'echo de ta voix ! " 

There was another Frenchman then in high and deserved 
repute among English Reformers, one of Philip Sidney's friends, 
Philip de Mornay, Seigneur du Pies sis. He was not much 
older than Sidney, for he was born in 1549 ; and he would have 
been endowed with good things in the Church by family in- 
fluence, if his mother had not become Protestant, and trained 
her child from ten years old in the Reformed opinions. He served 
awhile in the army, went to Geneva, studied law in Heidel- 
berg, travelledin Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and England. 
He went in 1576 to the court of King Henry of Navarre, became 
one of his nearest friends, and helped to make him Henry IV. 
of France. Philip du Plessis Mornay was an accomplished man 
of the world, with tact, experience, and a practical mind, as well 
as religious earnestness and a delight in literature. He became 
known as an envoy at Elizabeth's court, where the best men 
were his companions. The influence obtained by his high 
character, his skill in management of affairs, and the pure tone 
of his writings, caused him to be called sometimes the Pope of 
the Huguenots. In 1587, Arthur Golding (§ 6) published a 
translation of Du Plessis Mornay on the Truth of Christianity. 

53. There were still also translations from the ancient poets. 
Bichard Stanihurst, who was son of a Recorder of Dublin, 
had written at University College, Oxford, a system of logic, in 
his eighteenth year, had studied law also at two Inns of Court, 
had been married to a knight's daughter, and was living at 
Leyden, when he published in 1583 a translation of the first four 
books of Virgil's " ^Eneid " into English hexameters. This 
was made at the time of the small war against rhyme, and 
fashion for this sort of " new English versifying " (§ 43) ; and 
Stanihurst was accounted a fine scholar. His attempt at an 



405 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1560 

English "Virgil" in Virgil's own measure was praised by those 
who encouraged the experiment, attacked by others. Had 
Virgil himself written in English in 1583, he would hardly have 
expressed Jupiter's kiss to his daughter by saying, as Stanihurst 
made him say, that he " bussed his pretty prating parrot," or 
written hexameters of this sort to describe Laocoon's throwing 
his spear at the great wooden horse: 

" ' My lief for an haulfpennie, Troians, 
Either heere ar couching soom troups of Greekish asemblie, 
Or to crush our bulwarcks this woorck is forged, al houses 
For to prie surmounting thee town : soom practis or oother 
Heere lurcks of coonning : trust not this treacherus ensigne ; 
And for a ful reckning, I like not barrel or herring ; 
Thee Greeks bestowing their presents Greekish I feare mee.' 
Thus said, he stout rested, with his chaapt staffe speedily running, 
Strong the steed he chargeth, thee planck ribs manfully riding. 
Then the iade, hit, shivered, thee vauts haulf shrillie rebounded 
With clush clash buzzing, with droomming clattered humming." 

Richard Stanihurst published in 1584, in Latin, four books of 
an Irish chronicle, De Rebus i?i Hibemia Gestis Libri IV. He 
had been at work on this since the close of his college days, and 
though born in Dublin he had been bred in England, and was 
trained into the prevalent opinion then held by the English of 
the native Irish race. It is not necessary to believe that he 
desired to write only what would please his English patrons. 
He afterwards took orders in the Catholic Church, and, it is said, 
undertook to recant the errors in his " Irish Chronicle." In 
1587 he published at Antwerp, in two Latin books, a Life of St. 
Patrick, the apostle of Ireland, and his later writings were 
religious. He lived on through a great part of the reign of 
James I., and died in 161 8. 

The first attempt at a translation of Homer into English 
Alexandrine verse was begun in 1563, and published in 1581. 
This appeared in Ten Books of Hojner's Wades. It was not 
translated from the Greek direct, but chiefly through the French 
version of Hugues Salel, by Arthur Hall, of Grantham, a 
member of Parliament. The fact that this is the first Englishing 
of Homer gives the book importance. 

54. Barnaby Googe, born about 1 540, at Alvingham, and 
son of the Recorder of Lincoln, was a translator from the 
moderns. In 1560 he issued the first three books, and in 1565 
all twelve books of an English version of the Italian Manzolli's 
satirical invective against the Papacy, The Zodiac of Life. In 



toa.d. 1584.] TRANSLATORS. ANTHONY MUND AY. 409 

1570, Googe published a translation of another Latin invective, 
written by Thomas Kirchmeyer, which he called The Popish 
Kingdoms j or, Reigne of Antichrist. In 1577 he published a 
translation from the Latin of the Four Bokes of Husbandrie, by 
Conrad Heresbach. He also translated from the Spanish ; and 
a little volume of his own verse, Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonettes, 
was issued in 1563. Googe died in 1594. 

George Whetstone, a minor poet of this time, who 
was in repute with his contemporaries as " one of the most 
passionate above us to bewail the perplexities of love," wrote 
under a name taken from the popular story-book of Marguerite 
of Navarre, A Heptameron of Civil Discourses. This also is a 
book of tales. Among those which he took from the " Hecatom- 
mithi," or " Hundred Tales," of Giraldi Cinthio, first published 
in 1565, tales which deal with the tragic side of life, is one that 
was used by Shakespeare for the plot of his Measure for Mea- 
sure. Whetstone had himself written a play on the same sub- 
ject, Promos and Cassandra, in two parts, printed in 1578. 

Anthony Munday was a minor writer, whose literary activity 
in verse and prose, as playwright, ballad writer, and pamphleteer, 
began in 1579, and extended through the rest of the reign of 
Elizabeth, and the whole reign of her successor. He died in 
the reign of Charles I., in 1633. He was bred in the English 
college at Rome, and afterwards turned Protestant. His earliest 
introduction to literature was as a player and a writer for the 
stage. In 1582 he gave great offence to the Catholics by pub- 
lishing The Discoverie of Edmund Campion, the Jesuit, which 
provoked reply. After this he was in the service of the Earl of 
Oxford, and was also a messenger of the queen's bedchamber. 
He had reputation among our first dramatists for skill in the con- 
struction of a comic plot. His earliest printed book is religious 
in its tendency ; and so indeed was a great part of the drama 
during Elizabeth's reign. Its title explains its purport. It was 
in verse, and called The lifirror of Mutabilities or, Principal 
Part of the Mirrour of Magistrates : Selected out of the Sacred 
Scriptures. The titles of his next two books may be taken as 
examples of Euphuism; they are both dated in 1580, the year of 
the second part of Lyly's Euphues (§ 22). One is The Fountaine 
of Fame, Erected in an Orchard of Amorous Adventures; the 
other, The Paine of Pleasure, profitable to be perused of the 
Wise, and necessary to be by the Wanton. 

Munday took violent interest in the arrest and execution of 



4'0 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1582 

the Jesuits sent by the pope as devoted missionaries for the re- 
conversion of England. Edmund Campion had been an Oxford 
student and a Protestant. He changed his faith from con- 
viction, became a Jesuit, and exposed himself to death in Eng- 
land for devotion to what seemed to him the highest duty he 
could find. In his torture and execution, and in the other exe- 
cutions of like men, we feel painfully, as elsewhere proudly, the 
intensity of conflict in their day. They did not, it was said by 
those who sent them to death, suffer for their faith, but for their 
political assent to the pope's right to depose the Queen of 
England. They did suffer for that assent ; but then unhappily 
it was a part of their religious faith. There were high principles, 
momentous interests of the future, then at stake ; the immediate 
issues of the struggle were uncertain, peril was great, on each 
side temper rose with the excitement of a noble energy : but we 
need not now read with the pleasure that was taken in the 
writing of it, Anthony Munday's Breefe and True Reporte of the 
Execution of ceriaine Tray tours at Tibome, the xxviii. and xxx. 
Dayes of May, 1582 ; though we can understand the ground of 
his Watchiuoordto Euglandc, to beware of Tray tors and Tretche- 
rous Practises, which have beene the Overthrowe of many famous 
Kingdomes and Commonweales (1584) ; and see the harmony 
between this strength of public feeling and the religious tempera- 
ment which caused him to print in 1 586 a book of Godly Exercise 
for Christian Families, containing an Order of Pi-aires for 
Morning and Eve7iing, with a little Catechis?n between the Man 
and his Wife. Such men were of the common crowd of English 
dramatists of Elizabeth's day, and there was a bright spirit of 
song in them all. Munday's next book (in 1588) was A Ba?iquet 
of Dai?tty Conceits; furnished with verie delicate and choyce 
Inventions to delighte their Mindes who take Pleasure in 
Musiquej and there withall to sing sweete ditties, either to the 
lute, bando7'a, virginalles, or anie other Instrument. 

55. George Peele, a playwright with genius, who belonged 
also to this early group, was born in 1558, a gentleman's son, 
and said to be of a Devonshire family. He became a student 
of the University of Oxford, at Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke 
College, took his degree of B.A. in June, 1577, became M.A. in 
1579, when twenty-one years old. He remained another two 
years in the University, thus having been a student there for nine 
years, when he married a wife with some property, and went to 
London. While in the University he was esteemed as a poet r 



TOA.D. 1589.] GEORGE PEELE. THE FIRST DRAMATISTS. 411 

made a version (now lost) of one of the two Iphigenias of 
Euripides into English, and probably then wrote his Tale of 
Troy, in one book of heroic couplets ; but this was first printed 
in 1589. In London, Peele took his place, probably at once, 
among the poets. 

They were almost without exception University men who 
were writing for the players. It was pleasant work and profit- 
able. Hitherto everywhere, and still outside the theatre, the 
man with ability to be useful or pleasant — and to be whole- 
somely pleasant is also to be useful — as a writer, could not 
expect to live by the use of his pen, unless he received indirect 
aid from the patronage, or direct aid from the purse, of a great 
lord or of the sovereign. Without help of the patron, or hope 
of such help, many works of genius could never have been 
written in a world where daily bread costs daily money. Such 
patronage took many gracious forms ; often it was ungracious. 
It offered only a precarious support, and lured sensitive men 
through years of vain anxiety and hope to a sorrowful old age.. 
Spenser described it in his " Mother Hubbard's Tale : ,; 

" So pitiful a thing is suitor's state ! 
Most miserable man, whom wicked fate 
Hath brought to court, to sue for had ywist 
That few have found, and many one hath mist ! 
Full little knowest thou that hath not tried, 
What hell it is in suing long to bide : 
To lose good days that might be better spent ; 
To waste long nights in pensive discontent ; 
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow ; 
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow ; 
To have thy princes' grace, yet want her peers'; 
To have thy asking, yet wait many years ; 
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares ; 
To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs ; 
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run, 
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone." 

But there was no large public of readers, and there was no 
possible escape from the patron till the theatres began to rise. 
Then those who would now be readers became hearers, and 
paid for hearing as they would now pay for reading. From the- 
money taken for each performance, there was pay to the author, 
pay to the actors ; pay earned as simply and independently by 
the use of a craft, as money earned by carpenter or smith. A 
short experience of this made known to the clever men who 
came to London from the Universities to make their way in. 



412 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1583 

life how they could run alone at once, and remain masters of 
themselves. If they chose to seek a patron, they might do that 
also, but they were not compelled to feed on hope ; there was 
money for their bread, unless they spent all upon sack. In later 
years, when the stage had a less direct relation to all classes of 
the people, but was itself debased by court patronage, this way 
of escape from the patron became but a narrow one. All hope 
of independence for the men of genius rested then upon the 
slow advance of education, till the readers could do gradually, 
now for one, then for another, and at last for all forms of litera- 
ture, what in Elizabeth's day the hearers did for one form only. 
The young men thus established in London, drawing money 
from the theatres, could add also to their reputations and their 
incomes by writing for the booksellers tales, poems, or pamph- 
lets upon stirring questions of the day. This they did, and 
there were some who flung themselves with high glee into paper 
wars, ready to profit in all possible ways by skill in the amuse- 
ment of the town. 

Peek's acquired knowledge caused him to be employed in 
Oxford, in 1583, as acting manager for two Latin plays, by his 
friend Dr. Gager, presented at Christ Church before a Polish 
prince. His first published verse was prefixed to Thomas 
Watson's " Passionate Centurie of Love," published in 1583. 

56. Thomas Watson was of about Peele's age, and died 
in 1592. The thirty-five years of his age were all lived in 
Elizabeth's reign. He was born in London, studied in Oxford, 
then in London again, and applied himself to common law ; 
was in Paris for a time before 1581, in which year he published 
a version in Latin of the Antig07ie of Sophocles. A scholar 
and a poet ; at first writing chiefly in Latin, afterwards in Eng- 
lish verse : appreciated as he deserved to be by Sidney, Lyly, and 
Peele ; a friend of Spenser's ; Watson was the sweetest of the 
purely amatory poets of Elizabeth's reign. In 1582 appeared 
his book with a Greek and English title — Greek titles were then 
becoming fashionable — 'EKaro/jLiraeia ( The Passionate Centurie of 
Love), that is to say, a Love Passion in a Hundred Sonnets. 
According to the old Italian method, which had been revived 
by Surrey (ch. vi. § 46), exercises upon various phases of the 
passion of love in sequences of sonnets were still in fashion ; 
these poems were known as Passions. Each of Watson's 
hundred passions has a prose explanation before it ; and 
each consists of three of the six-lined stanzas then called 



toa.d. 1592.] GEORGE PEELE. JOHN LYLY. 413 

Common Verse, the stanza which, as King James VI. recorded, 
poets were to use " in materis of love." Take one of Watson's 
for example : 

"Tully, whose speech was bold in ev'ry cause, 
If he were here to praise the saint and serve, 
The number of her gifts would make him pause, 

And fear to speak how well he doth deserve. 
Why then am I thus bold, that have no skill ? 
Enforced by love, I show my zealous will." 

In 1585 appeared Watson's Latin Poem, Amyntas, from 
which his fellow poets took the name they gave him in their 
rhymes; and in 1595 — after Italian Madrigals Englished and 
other works — appeared his Teares of Fansie; or, Love Dis- 
dained. From Watson we return to his friend, 

57. George Peele, who published anonymously, in 1584, 
The Araygnement of Paris : a Pastor all, presented before 
the Queefies Maiestie by the Children of her Chapell. It is a 
pastoral play in five acts, not the less but the more poetical for 
a child-like simplicity of dialogue. It is written at first in various 
rhymed measures, which run into musical songs, passions, and 
complaints that sing themselves, but the metre becomes blank 
verse when the arraigned shepherd Paris has to defend himself 
before the council of the gods against the charge of unjust judg- 
ment. The gods, greatly puzzled, leave Diana to settle the 
question, and she settles it by compromise. In the fifth act 
she comes with Juno, Pallas, and Venus, all content to present 
the apple to Elizabeth, before whom also the three sisters, 
" Dames of Destiny," yield up their distaff, reel, and fatal knife. 
By way of epilogue, the performers at the end of the play poured 
the good wishes of men and gods on Her Majesty in two Latin 
hexameters. 

In 1585, George Peele was the deviser of a Lord Mayor's 
pageant. Of his other plays, there were none printed before 
1590, the year in which Spenser published the first three books 
of the " Faerie Queene," and which we take as a convenient 
dividing point for study of the second part of the reign of 
Elizabeth. 

58. John Lyly, after the publication of the two parts of 
his "Euphues," in 1579 and 1580, was paying suit and service 
to Lord Burghley. Sir Thomas Benger, Master of the Revels, 
had died in 1577, and the place, which remained for a time 
vacant, was desired by Lyly. But Edmund Tylney was 



414 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1584 

appointed in July, 1579. Lyly now became a dramatist, and 
wrote plays for the court on classical or mythological subjects, 
nine plays in all, seven in prose, one of the later ones — The 
Woman in the Moon — in blank verse, and another of the later 
ones — The Maid's Metamorphosis — chiefly in rhyme. The 
prose is laboured to the fashion of the day ; a Euphuism, rich 
in far-fetched, whimsical, and delicate conceits, play upon words, 
and antithesis with alliteration, interspersed with songs which 
now and then are excellent. In each play the plot, characters, 
and dialogues are alike artificial ; the poet's aim is not to stir 
the soul, but to provide a pleasant entertainment for the fancy. 
The first printed of Lyly's plays, in 1584, was Campaspe, played 
before the queen by Her Majesty's children, and the children of 
Paul's. It was acted both at court and at the Blackfriars' 
theatre. In this play is Lyly's well-known song of Apelles — 
founded on a conceit, of course : 

" Cupid and my Campaspe played 
At cards for kisses, Cupid paid ; 
He stakes his quiver, bow and arrows, 
His mother's doves, and team of sparrows, 
Loses them too ; then down he throws 
The coral of his lip, the rose 
Growing on's cheek (but none knows how), 
With these the crystal of his brow, 
And then the dimple of his chin : 
All these did my Campaspe win. 
At last he set her both his eyes, 
She won, and Cupid blind did rise. 
O Love ! has she done this to thee ? 
What shall, alas, become of me?" 

In the same year was printed Sapho and Phao, which had 
been played before the queen on Shrove Tuesday, by the children 
of her chapel and the boys of Paul's. These were the only 
plays of Lyly's printed before 1590. But we shall find him 
presently taking a part, through his tract called Pap with a 
Hatchet, in the paper war of 1589, which gave rise to Bacon's 
" Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of 
England." 

59. Robert Greene was novelist as well as dramatist, and 
as a novelist he was a follower of Lyly. He was born at Nor- 
wich, educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, took his degree 
of B.A. in 1578. Peele taking his at Oxford in 1577, there 
probably was little difference between the ages of those poets ; 
and Greene may have been born about 1559 or 1560. After 



toa.d. 1588.] LYLY'S PLAYS. ROBERT GREENE. 415 

1578, Greene visited Italy and Spain, before graduating as M.A. 
in 1583. In 1584 he published three prose love-pamphlets, in 
the style of Euphues, The Myrrour of Modestie ; Mirando, the 
Tritameron of Love j and Groydonius, the Carde of Fancie. 
On the title-page of his little book of 1585, Planetomachia, 
he wrote himself, " Student in Physicke." In the same year he 
satisfied the natural interest of the public in what was for that 
time of conflict with Catholicism one of the great topics of the 
day, the death of the pope, by translating through the French, 
An Oration, or Fimerall Sermon, uttered at Roome, at the 
Buriall of the Holy Father, Gregorie the XIII., who departed 
in Christ Jesus, the nth of Aprill, 1585. In this or the next 
year Greene married. He himself told, in one of his last 
writings, of the vicious way of life into which he had now fallen. 
Dramatists and players enjoyed jovial fellowship at the tavern, 
the money soon earned was soon spent; temptations pressed on 
the weak will, and more than one fine mind sank under them. 
Greene's wife, a gentleman's daughter, endeavoured in vain to 
part him from bad company; he says that he spent her marriage 
portion, and after the birth of a child forsook her ; she going 
into Lincolnshire, he working on in London, " where in short 
space I fell into favour with such as were of honourable and 
good calling. But here note that though I knew how to get a 
friend, yet I had not the gift or reason how to keep a friend." 
In these and all such words we must not omit to observe that 
Greene's object in accusing himself was to warn others to keep 
in the right way. He was, like Occleve in one of his poems 
(ch. v. § 8), seeking to win hearts to his cause by holding a brief 
against himself as advocate for virtue. But Greene was actually 
sinking low in 1590, and within two years of death. His plays 
remained unprinted until after his death. The actors were 
unwilling to chill interest in a play, while it was still upon the 
stage, by publication of its dialogue. The date, therefore, of the 
first printing of any good Elizabethan play is often much later 
than that of its first performance. Love-pamphlets Greene was 
issuing steadily. In 1587, Euphues, his Censure to Philautus, 
was followed by an Arcadia. In 1588 he printed Pandosto; 
cr, the Triumph of Time, the story upon which Shakespeare 
founded his " Winter's Tale." In the same year followed a 
collection of stories, poems, and reflections, called Perimedes, 
the Blacke-Smith : a Golde?i Methode how to vse the Mind in 
Pleasant and Profitable Exercise. If Greene was himself 



41 6 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1589. 

falling from the true standard of life, yet to the last he laboured 
to maintain it in his writings. Perimedes was followed, still in 
the same year, by Alcida and Greenes Metainorphosisj and, 
in 1589, by the Spanish Masq2ierado, Tzillie's Love, and 
Orpharion. 

60. Christopher Marlowe, who advanced the Elizabethan 
drama to the point from which Shakespeare rose to the supreme 
heights of poetry, was six years younger than George Peele. He 
was but two months older than Shakespeare ; born at Canterbury 
in Shakespeare's birth-year, 1564, one of several children of John 
Marlowe, shoemaker, and clerk of St. Mary's, and he was baptised 
on the 26th of February. He was educated first at the King's 
School, Canterbury, and then at Corpus Christi (Benet) College, 
Cambridge. For his University education he must have been 
indebted to the kindness of some liberal man who had observed 
his genius. He did not go with a scholarship from the King's 
School. He graduated as B.A. in 1583, as M.A. in 1587, by 
which time he had achieved great success at a stroke with his 
play of Tamburlaine the Great. The theme, like the grievance 
of Mycetes, with which it opened, required " a great and thunder- 
ing speech," and Marlowe did not, like Mycetes, find himself 
" insufficient to express the same." The old British public had 
enjoyed for centuries, in Herod of the miracle-plays (ch. iv. § 5), 
the character of a pompous braggart, who could rant well. In 
one of the sets of plays Herod's speeches were crowded with 
words that began with "r," for greater convenience of r-r-rolling 
them well in his mouth. Marlowe gave them a Tamburlaine 
who could out-herod Herod, and he roared Marlowe into sudden 
fame. The desire indeed was so great to hear him roar, that 
Marlowe let him roar again, and maintained his success by the 
production of a Second Part of Tainburlaine. The two parts 
were first printed in 1590, without author's name. These plays 
were founded on the story of Tamerlane, or Timour the Tartar, 
who after leading his countrymen to their own deliverance from 
foreign oppression, was crowned at Samarcand in 1370, and 
presently set forth on a career of conquest. In 1402, he made 
the great Ottoman sultan, Bajazet, his prisoner. He had set 
out in winter weather, at the age of seventy, for the addition of 
China to his conquests, when he died. In the embodiment of 
this notion of an all-devouring conqueror, "the scourge of God," 
Marlowe used the blank verse, which had not then secured its 
footing on the public stage. Our first tragedy was in that new 



a.d. isS 9 .J CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 417 

measure ; but it was written for Christmas entertainment at the 
Inner Temple. Blank verse was used in the last two acts of 
"The Arraignment of Paris ; " but that was written for the queen 
and court. The plays for the public were in prose or rhyme, 
till the Prologue of Tamburlaine said to the people : 

" From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, 
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, 
We'll lead you to the stately tent of war, 
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine 
Threaten the world with high astounding terms, 
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword." 

Marlowe, by his " Tamburlaine," and by the better plays 
which followed it, developed blank verse as the measure for 
English dramatic poetry, made its worth felt, and was among 
dramatists the first cause of its general adoption. 

" Tamburlaine " is rant glorified. It was enjoyed even by 
those who laughed at it. The boldest stroke was in the opening 
of the 3rd Scene of the 4th Act of Part II. "Enter Tambur- 
laine, drawn in his chariot by the Kings of Trebizon and Soria 
with bits in their mouths, reins in his left hand, and in his right 
hand a whip with which he scourgeth them." 

" ' Holla, ye pamper'd jades of Asia ! 

What ! can ye draw but twenty miles a day, 
And have so proud a chariot at your heels, 
And such a coachman as great Tamburlaine ? 

Marlowe's Tragical History of Doctor Fanstus probably 
appeared on the stage in 1589, in blank verse intermixed with 
scenes of prose ; but it was not printed in the lifetime of its 
author. The hero of this famous legend, which is said by some 
to have been grafted upon Faust the printer (ch. v. § 26), seems 
to have been really a man who, at the beginning of the sixteenth 
century, affected pre-eminence in necromancy, astrology, and 
magic, and took as one of his sounding names, " Faustus," for 
its Latin meaning — favourable, or auspicious. About him, as a 
centre of crystallisation, tales ascribed in the first instance to 
other conjurors arranged themselves until he became the popular 
ideal of one who sought to sound the depths of this world's 
knowledge and enjoyment without help from God. But in the 
religious controversies of the sixteenth century, the connection 
between Faustus and Satan associated this legend in the minds 
of ardent Reformers with the Church of Rome ; and in 1587 
there appeared at Frankfort, written with a strong Protestant 

B B 



41 8 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1589. 

feeling, the first elaborated " History of Dr. Faustus," told as a 
terrible example to all high-flying, headstrong, and Godless men. 
It gathered about Faustus more old tales of magic, and was so 
popular that it was reprinted in 1588. From this edition of 
1588 an English story-book of Dr. Faustus was translated. 
This book Marlowe also translated in his nobler way, taking the 
plot of his play either from the German original, or from this 
first translation, perhaps while it was yet in hand. 

Marlowe, in telling this tale on the stage, made no division 
into acts. Using the chorus as narrator of any part of a tale 
that was not to be shown or told during the action, Marlowe 
first brought in Chorus to tell how Faustus was born of poor 
parents, at Rhodes, in Germany, taught at Wittenburg made 
Doctor of Divinity, and excelled all in dispute, 

" Till swoln with cunning of a self conceit, 
His waxen wings did mount above his reach, 
And melting, heavens conspired his overthrow." 

He turned to magic — "And this the man that in his study sits." 
Chorus then left the audience to hear Faustus condemn each of 
the sciences in turn, discard the Bible, and swell with desire for 
the magician's power, stretching as far as doth the mind of man. 
The people saw his good and evil angels stand beside him, as he 
heard one warn, the other tempt. They saw him yield him- 
self to Valdes and Cornelius, to be taught magic arts ; saw 
Mephistophiles appear to his incantation in his own natural 
ugliness, but, at Faust's bidding, reappear in the shape of a 
Franciscan Friar. Compelled to answer, Mephistophiles spoke 
truth. The people heard Faustus disdain the fear of God : 

" But leaving the vain trifles of men's souls, 

Tell me what is that Lucifer thy lord ? 
Meph. Arch-regent and commander of all spirits. 
Faust. Was not that Lucifer an angel once ? 
Mefih. Yes, Faustus, and most dearly-loved of God. 
Fatist. How comes it, then, that he is prince of devils ? 
Meph. Oh, by aspiring pride and insolence ; 

For which God threw him from the face of heaven. 
Faust. And what are you that live with Lucifer? 
Meph. Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer, 

Conspired against our God with Lucifer, 

And are for ever damned with Lucifer. 
Faust. How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell ? 
Meph. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it ; 

Think'st thou that I, that saw the face of God, 

And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, 

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells 



a.d. 1589.] MARLOWE'S FAUSTUS. 419 

In being deprived of everlasting bliss ? 
O Faustus, leave these frivolous demands 
Which strike a terror to my fainting soul. 
Faust. What ! Is great Mephistophiles so passionate 
For being deprived of the joys of heaven ? 
Learn then of Faustus manly fortitude, 
And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess." 

Boldly Faustus sends an offer of his soul to Lucifer, for four- 
and-twenty years of his own will. At midnight he expects the 
answer. Midnight approaches, and again his good and evil 
angels speak at either ear. The guardian angel's voice is heard 
in vain. The bond is signed with blood stabbed from the arm. 
Upon the first hour of its enjoyment a touch of repentance 
breaks. Again his good angel pleads with him ; his evil angel 
seeks to harden him against the warning voice. His heart is 
hardened, he cannot repent. He questions Mephistophiles upon 
the heavenly spheres ; and he is answered. He asks, " Who 
made the world ? " and his familiar will not tell. Again comes 
the pang of conscience. He cries to himself, " Think Faustus 
upon God who made the world ! " 

"Re-enter Good Angel and Evil Angel. 
" E. Ang. Too late. 
G. A ng. Never too late, if Faustus will repent. 
E. A ng. If thou repent, devils will tear thee in pieces. 
G. Aug. Repent, and they shall never raze thy skin. 

\_Exeu71t Angels. 
Faust. O Christ, my Saviour, my Saviour, 

Help thou to save distressed Faustus' soul ! " 

But Lucifer and Beelzebub now stand with Mephistophiles before 
him; hold him to his bond; will show him pastime. They 
introduce to him the seven deadly sins. Chorus explains now 
to the people that we shall see Faustus next at Rome, and 
straightway the pomp of the court of Rome is marshalled out 
for mockery. Pope Adrian in supreme pride ascends his chair, 
by using for a footstool Saxon Bruno, whom the Emperor ap- 
pointed. Adrian will depose the Emperor, and curse his people. 
Then Faustus and Mephistophiles beguile him in his policy; 
scatter confusion in his court ; snatch, being invisible, his dishes 
and his cup; box his ears; and beat the friars, who come in 
with bell, book, and candle, to sing maledictions on them. Other 
scenes follow to represent incidents in the life for which a soul 
was paid. Touches of farce lie by the tragic scenes. Then 
Faustus is in his study again. His end is near. To some of 
his scholars he shows a fair vision of Helen. They depart. An 

B B 2 



420 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1583 

old man enters who, with loving words, warns Faustus of his 
peril. Faustus despairs. Mephistophiles gives him a dagger. 
" Oh, stay ! " cries the old man : 

" Oh, stay, good Faustus, stay thy desperate steps ! 
I see an angel hover o'er thy head, 
And with a vial full of precious grace 
Offers to pour the same into thy soul : 
Then call for mercy, and avoid despair." 

He repents, yet he despairs ; he cannot escape from the toils 
of Mephistophiles. Helen is brought to him between Cupids, 
He leaves the stage worshipping her, and then the thunder rolls ; 
the Powers of Evil enter, and from the background Lucifer and 
Beelzebub keep grim watch over their victim. With changed 
looks Faustus parts from his scholars, and they leave him to 
his last agony on earth. The poet makes its horror felt. The 
good and evil angels speak again. His good angel sets before 
him and before the audience, while music sounds, a vision of 
the heavenly throne among the saints which he has forfeited. 
His Evil Angel then sets before him and the audience a vision 
of that " vast perpetual torture-house" to which he goes : 

u Those that are fed with sops of naming fire 
Were gluttons, and loved only delicates, 
And laughed to see the poor starve at their gates. 
But yet all these are nothing ; thou shalt see 
Ten thousand tortures that more horrid be. 
Faust. Oh, I have seen enough to torture me ! 
E. Aug. Nay, thou must feel them, taste the smart of all ; 
He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall." 

The clock strikes eleven, and the terror of the last hour is then 
painted. In language drawn from Scripture, Faustus cries in his 
despair : 

" Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me, 
And hide me from the heavy wrath of heaven ! 
No! 

Then will I run headlong into the earth ; 
Gape earth ! Oh, no, it will not harbour me ! " 

The terror grows, and the clock strikes the half hour. Faustus 
now cries in his anguish : 

" Cursed be the parents that engender'd me ! 
No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer, 
That hath deprived thee of the joys of heaven." 

The clock strikes twelve, and the audience sees the terrible fulfil- 
ment of the bond. Depths of religious energy were stirred when 



toa.d. i 5 3 9 .] SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. Afi\ 

this was the new play, and the last great event in the real world 
had been the defeat of the Spanish Armada. 

Marlowe's Fatistus represents the highest point reached by 
the Elizabethan drama before 1590. Shakespeare, who had 
come unknown and poor among the dramatists and actors, with 
credentials from no University, was then quietly and surely 
working his way up. Bound to the truth of nature, he could not 
rise by an audacity like that of Marlowe, who in 1590 had a 
higher public reputation. In 1589, Shakespeare was one of 
the sixteen sharers in the Blackfriars Theatre, an actor and a 
working playwright, ready at any time to mend and alter old 
plays for revival, or to do what else he could for the general 
welfare of the company. 

61. Philip Sidney, at court again, after the months of 
retirement at Wilton, during which he wrote "Arcadia," was 
knighted by Elizabeth in January, 1583, when his age was about 
twenty-eight. In the following March he was married to Frances, 
eldest daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, and the next year 
was spent in married peace. Sidney wrote sonnets in those days 
— " Passions " of the old conventional type — meaning, as usual, 
to address them to some lady who deserved compliment, and of 
whom his conventional rhapsodies could not very well be taken 
seriously. As the Earl of Surrey addressed his love exercises 
to a child for whom the court felt sympathy, Sidney paid 
the like compliment to an unhappy wife. Penelope Devereux, 
daughter to his old friend the late Earl of Essex, had once been 
talked of as his own possible wife. Her father said that he 
would have been proud of Philip Sidney for a son-in-law. And 
if so why had the match not taken place ? If Sidney had been 
really devoted to the lady he could have married her. He did 
not marry her because he did not wish to do so, and in his own 
day no reasonable being ever supposed that he paid suit to her 
except in the way of verse. Towards the close of 1580, 
Penelope, then about eighteen, was married by her guardian 
against her will to Lord Robert Rich, heir to the ill-gotten 
wealth of Lord Chancellor Rich. That chancellor, the grand- 
son of two thriving London mercers, had risen by his want 
of principle, and had secured to himself great bargains at 
the suppression of the monasteries. He grasped wealth 
enough to endow two earldoms acquired by his descen- 
dants. The chancellor died in 1568, and his son Robert, second 
baron Rich, died in 1581, leaving his son and heir, another Lord 



422 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1574 

Robert, the rich man to whom Penelope was sold. She pro- 
tested even at the altar. The contractor for her is described as 
" of an uncourtly disposition, unsociable, austere, and of no 
very agreeable conversation to her." The unhappiness of her 
forced marriage made Lady Rich at this time an object 0: 
considerate attention. Philip Sidney was an old friend of her 
father's, and he gave her the place of honour in his sonnet- 
writing, wherein she was to be Stella (" the Star "), he Astrophel 
" the Lover of the Star ".) ; and certainly, as all the court knew, 
and as the forms of such ingenious love-poetry implied, so far 
as love in the material sense was concerned, with as much dis- 
tance between them as if she had shone upon him from above 
the clouds. Sidney's Asti'ophel and Stella sonnets were being 
written at the time when he was about to marry Fanny Wal- 
singham ; and in those earnest Elizabethan days, at the fitfully 
strict court of Elizabeth, since the character of such poetical love- 
passions was then understood, they brought upon Sidney's credit 
not a breath of censure. As for Lady Rich, she gave herself 
to Sir Christopher Blount, who became Lord Mountjoy in 1600, 
and after divorce from her husband she married him. But that 
was a real passion, and what each felt in it was not told for the 
amusement of the public. 

In 1584 the course of events led Sir Philip Sidney to advo- 
cate direct attack by sea upon the Spanish power. He would 
have Elizabeth come forward as Defendress of the Faith, at the 
head of a great Protestant League. He was a member of the 
Parliament that met in November, 1584, and in July, 1585, he 
was joined with the Earl of Warwick in the Mastership of the 
Ordnance. His strongest desires caused him to look in two 
directions for his course of action : he might aid in direct attack 
on the Spanish possessions, which, as source of treasure, were a 
source of power ; he might aid in the rescue from Spain of the 
Netherlands. During a great part of the year 1585 his mind 
was very much with Drake and Raleigh. 

62. Naval enterprise had advanced rapidly in England since 
the days of the Cabots (ch. v. § 29). In 1574, George Gascoigne 
(§ 29) obtained from Sir Humphrey Gilbert — who had been 
knighted for his services against the Irish— his Discourse to 
p?-ove a Passage by the North-West to Cathay and the East 
Indies. He first sought to prove that America was an island ; 
and then brought together the reports of voyagers by whom a 
North- West Passage to Cathay and India had been attempted. 



-TOA.D. 1585.] ADVENTURERS BY SEA. 423 

By this route only, he argued, we could share the wealth derived 
by Spain and Portugal from traffic with the East ; be unmolested 
by them in our course; and undersell them in their markets, 
besides finding new sources of wealth, and founding colonies for 
the relief of overcrowded England. 

This treatise revived interest in the subject. It passed from 
hand to hand in M.S., and was printed in 1576, the year in 
which Martin Frobisher started, on board the Gabriel, of twenty- 
five tons burthen, upon the first of his three voyages in search of 
a North-West Passage. He entered the bay called Frobisher' s 
Straits, and believed that through this he should find a passage. 
He was away four months, and from a piece of stone brought 
back with him it was inferred that he had found a region rich 
in gold. A " Company of Cathay " was formed, with Frobisher 
for Captain- General by Sea, and Admiral of the ships and Navy 
of the company. This company received its charter in March, 
1577; and in May Frobisher started on his second voyage. The 
chief aim now was to secure a gold district on the north shore 
of America. He took possession of Meta Incognita for Queen 
Elizabeth, and carried home 200 tons of the supposed ore, 
reaching England again at the close of September. The ad- 
venturers did not find satisfaction in their ore ; it was admitted 
to be " poor in respect of that brought last year, and of that 
which we know may be brought the next year." At the end 
of May, 1578, Frobisher started again. He found the channel 
afterwards known as Hudson's Straits, but was obliged to hold 
to the search for gold, and his little fleet brought home, after 
many perils, a good supply of the stones, out of which no gold 
could be got. The Cathay Company broke up in quarrel and 
confusion, and Frobisher himself was brought low by the un- 
lucky bit of stone on which he stumbled. It had excited thirst 
for gold, which ruined both his enterprise and him. Francis 
Drake, a Devonshire sailor's son, had been a sea-captain at the 
age of twenty-two. He had served against the Spaniards^ under 
Sir John Hawkins ; had damaged them much in an expedition of 
his own in 1572. In November, 1577, he had been entrusted 
with a-little fleet of five vessels to attempt a voyage into the 
South Seas through the Straits of Magellan, and in November, 
1580, he returned in his own ship, the Pelican, from his 
memorable voyage round the globe. The queen knighted him 
in April, 1581, and ordered his ship to be preserved. 

In June, 1578, Sir Humphrey Gilbert obtained a charter for 



424 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1579 

discovery and occupation of distant and barbarous lands, and 
for the planting of a colony which he was to rule " as near as 
conveniently might be according to the laws of England." His 
brother-in-law, Sir "Walter Raleigh, went with him on his 
first unlucky voyage (§ 46), and returned with him to Plymouth 
in May, 1579. After this, Gilbert fought in Ireland and the 
Netherlands. In the summer of 1583, having raised money by 
admitting others to a share in the adventure, Gilbert and Raleigh 
started again, and arrived at St. John's Harbour, in Newfound- 
land, where were some six-and-thirty vessels of merchants and 
fishermen. There Gilbert determined to set up his colony. The 
traders agreed to join the colonists in paying their tax to the 
governor ; but of the colonists brought with him, most were 
men from whom the steadier sort asked to be taken away home. 
After many misfortunes, Gilbert on the homeward voyage went 
down with his vessel, the last words heard from him by those 
on board a companion ship being his cry to them, as he stood 
firm to the helm of his own little craft — the Squirrel, of ten 
tons — " Courage, my friends, we are as near heaven by sea as 
on the land." 

Such letters-patent as Gilbert had held were given by the 
queen, in March, 1584, to his step-brother, Walter Raleigh. In 
April he sent out Captains Barlow and Amadas, in two vessels, 
to explore the coast of America from Florida northward, and 
report promptly upon any region he found fit for colonising. 
They returned in September, after a fortunate voyage, and 
Captain Barlow gave an excellent account of the shores to 
which our maiden queen was pleased to give the name of 
" Virginia." 

In the spring of 1585, Raleigh sent a fleet of seven vessels 
to Virginia, in charge of his cousin, Sir Richard Grenville, with 
Ralph Lane, who was to be governor of the colony they went to 
found. Lane was left with 105 colonists on the island of Roanoake. 
In the same year Sir Francis Drake was sent as admiral, with a 
fleet of twenty-one ships, against the Spaniards in the West 
Indies. Sir Philip Sidney helped towards the fitting of this 
expedition, and was bent on taking part in it himself, sharing 
authority with Drake after they had put to sea. Sidney went 
to Plymouth ; but his secret plan became known, and his 
sailing with Drake's fleet was stayed by the queen's absolute 
command. Drake, therefore, sailed without him in September; 
and soon afterwards a daughter was born to Sir Philip Sidney, 



to a.d. 1586.] RALEIGH. SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 425 

who was baptised Elizabeth, the queen standing as sponsor. 
Then he went to his death in the Low Countries. 

63. The seven northern provinces of Holland had declared 
their independence on the 29th of September, 1580. In 1584, 
William of Orange had been assassinated. In 1585, the ten 
southern provinces were conquered by the Prince of Parma. 
Catherine de' Medici was in that year proposing to Philip of 
Spain invasion of England for the crushing of heresy. Philip 
pointed to heretics nearer home. Protestants of the Nether- 
lands appealed to England, and on the 10th of August, 1585, a 
treaty, was signed at Nonsuch, stipulating that England should 
provide 5,000 foot-soldiers and 1,000 horse to aid war in 
the Netherlands, while, as security for expenses, and as head- 
quarters for troops, temporary possession was to be taken of 
Flushing, Brill, and the Castle of Rammekins. Then England 
declared war for three objects : to secure peace to all of the 
Reformed Faith ; restoration to the Netherlands of ancient 
rights ; and the safety of England. The English went out with 
the Earl of Leicester for their leader ; Sir Philip Sidney as 
Governor of Flushing and of Rammekins ; and Sir Thomas 
Cecil, eldest son of Lord Burghley, as Governor of Brill. Sidney 
went to his post in November, 1585 ; the earl followed in Decem- 
ber, and spent over-much time in feasting. Sidney's heart was 
in his duty ; he planned work in vain, and he sought in vain to 
protect the poor soldiers against chiefs who enriched themselves 
out of their pay and their supplies. In January, Leicester 
offended Elizabeth by accepting from the States the rank of 
Governor- General of the United Provinces. Sir Philip Sidney 
fretted at inaction. His wife joined him at Flushing. In May, 
1586, Sidney received news of the death of his father. In July, 
he had a chief part in the capture of Axel. In August his 
mother died. In September he joined with Sir John Norris 
and Count Lewis William of Nassau, in the investment of 
Zutphen. On the 22nd of that month Sir Philip Sidney received 
his death wound in a gallant assault made by a few hundred 
English against a thousand cavalry, and under fire from walls 
and trenches. A musket-ball from one of the trenches shattered 
Sidney's thigh-bone. His horse took fright and galloped back, 
but the wounded man held to his seat. He was then carried to 
his uncle, asked for water, and when it was given, saw a dying 
soldier carried past, who eyed it greedily. At once he gave the 
water to the soldier, saying, " Thy necessity is yet greater than 



4^6 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. i 5 86 

mine." Sidney lived on, patient in suffering, until the 17th of 
October. When he was speechless before death, one who stood 
by asked Philip Sidney for a sign of his continued trust in God. 
He folded his hands as in prayer over his breast, and so they 
were become fixed and chill when the watchers placed them by 
his side, and in a few minutes the stainless representative of the 
young manhood of Elizabethan England passed away. 

64. In the same year Ralph Lane and his colonists were 
brought back from Roanoake, rescued by Drake, as he returned 
from his West Indian expedition. The colonists had ruined 
themselves by ill-treatment of the friendly natives, whom they 
had converted into foes. They brought tobacco back with 
them, and were the first to teach England the art of smoking 
it. Thomas Hariot, one of their number, published in 1588 
A Briefs and Trite Rcpot't of The New Found Land of Vi?'gi?iia, 
&*e., in which he described the cultivation by the natives of the 
herb which they called appowoc, but the Spaniards, tabacco. 
" They use to take the fume or smoke thereof by sucking it 
through pipes made of claie into their stomacke and heade," 
with wonderfully good results. " We ourselves," Hariot added, 
" during the time we were there, vsed to suck it after their 
maner, as also since our returne, and have found manie rare 
and wonderful experiments of the vertues thereof; of which 
the relation would require a volume by itselfe : the vse o^. it by 
so manie of late, men and women of great calling as else, and 
some learned phisitions also, is sufficient witnes." 

The year of the death of Sidney, and the return of Drake 
from his success in the West Indies, 1586, was the year also 
of the plot known as Babington's Conspiracy, for the murder 
of Elizabeth and setting of Queen Mary upon the throne. 
Elizabeth's secretary, Walsingham, gave Mary full opportunity 
of committing herself to this scheme before it was disclosed. 
She was then tried, under a commission issued in October. 
That she had plotted for her own rescue by a Spanish invasion, 
Mary did not deny. She denied privity in the conspiracy for 
assassination, but was declared guilty of that, the sentence being 
without derogation to James King of Scots. On the 8th of 
February, 1587, Mary Queen of Scots was executed in the 
Great Hall at Fotheringay. A .week afterwards there was in 
London a funeral pageant for Sir Philip Sidney. 

Haleigh was growing rich by his adventures. Sir Richard 
Grenville, who arrived too late at Roanoake for the relief of 



toa.d. 1589.] RALEIGH. HAKLUYT'S "VOYAGES." 427 

Lane and his party, obtained great booty from Spain on the way 
home. One of Raleigh's privateers took a Spanish ship in the 
Azores with great treasure of gold, jewels, and merchandise. 
Two barks of his in the Azores made more prizes than they 
were able to bring home. Raleigh was in favour too, at court, 
knighted (1585), enriched with 12,000 acres of forfeited land in 
Ireland (1586), with a lucrative licence for the sale of wines, 
with the profits on over-lengths of cloth, alone worth more than 
^4,000 a year. He was made Captain of the Guard, Gentleman 
of the Privy Chamber, Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and 
Lord- Lieutenant of Cornwall. Money was sunk in the attempts 
to colonise Virginia, but it was only a part of the money made 
by Spanish prizes. Another expedition to Virginia was sent out 
by Raleigh in 1587; it was unsuccessful, and, in March, 1589, 
Raleigh transferred his patent to a company of merchants. In 
1588, Raleigh was at work with all his might upon the raising of a 
fleet to resist Spanish invasion. Elizabeth was excommunicated 
by Pope Sixtus V. Crusade was preached against England; 
the Armada came. On board one of its ships was Cervantes. 
On Sunday, the 24th of November, 1588, Queen Elizabeth went 
in state to St. Paul's, to return thanks for the defeat of the 
Armada. Shakespeare, with his career before him, was at work 
in London in those days, with his great successes all to come, 
but sharing the deep feelings that bred noble thought in the 
Elizabethan time. 

The narratives of our adventurous seafarers were in those 
days treasured for posterity by Richard Hakluyt, who was 
born at Eyton, Herefordshire, in 1553. He was educated at 
Westminster School, and Christchurch, Oxford, and delighted 
always in tales of far countries and adventure by sea. He 
entered the Church, went to Paris in 1584, as chaplain to the 
English Ambassador, and was made prebendary of Bristol. In 
1582, when he was twenty-nine years old, Hakluyt issued his 
first publication, Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of 
America, and the Lands adjacent unto the same, made first of 
all by our Englishmen, and afterward by the Frenchmen and 
Bretons: a7id certain Notes of Advertise7nents for Observations, 
necessarie for such as shall hereafter make the like atte?npt. 
Hakluyt also translated books of travel from the Spanish, but 
his great work was that which first appeared in folio in 1589 — 
The Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries made by 
the English Nation. 



428 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1583- 

65. In such times William Camden (§ 16) published his 
Britannia, which described the country that had risen to its 
front place in the world ; and William Warner, born in 
London in the year of Elizabeth's accession, a poetical attorney, 
celebrated Albion's England in thirteen books of fourteen- 
syllabled rhyming verse, first published in 1586. His poem 
was of Albion's England, because it did not, like Albion, 
include Scotland. It was an easy, lively, homely history of 
England, from the Deluge down to Warner's own time, homely 
in use of simple idiomatic English, full of incidents and stories, 
often rudely told, and often with a force or delicacy of touch 
that came of the terse directness with which natural feeling was 
expressed. Warner's poem had for a time great popularity. 
He was not a great poet, but the times were stirring, and they 
drew ten thousand lines of lively verse upon his country, even 
out of an attorney. 

66. But the Elizabethan time, like any other, had its surface 
follies and its varieties of fashion. In 1583 the Reverend 
Philip Stubbes published The Anatomie of Abuses : conteyn- 
ing a Discover ie or Briefe Sinnmarie of such Notable Vices 
and Impeifections as now raigne in many Christian Countreyes 
of the World: but especialie in a very famoiis Ilande called 
Ailg7ia : Together with most fearful Exa?nples of God's Judge- 
mentes executed vpon the wicked for the same as well in Ailgna 
of late, as in other places elsewhere. Ailgna, of course is 
Anglia, and a second part of " The Anatomie of Abuses " 
appeared in the same year. The book is in dialogue between 
Philoponus and Spudeus. Ailgna, says Stubbes, is a famous 
and pleasant land, with a great and heroic people, but they 
abound in abuses, chiefly those of pride ; pride of heart, of 
mouth, of apparel. In pride of apparel they pane, cut, and 
drape out with costly ornaments the richest material, and spread 
out ruffs with supportasses — wires covered with gold or silk — 
and starch. Philip Stubbes denounced starch as " the devil's 
liquor," and told of a fair gentlewoman of Eprautna (Ant- 
werp) upon whom a judgment had fallen for her vanity in 
starched ruffs, even so lately as the 22nd of May, 1582. She 
was dressing to attend a wedding, and falling in a passion 
with the starching of her ruffs, said what caused a handsome 
gentleman to come into the room, who set them up for her to 
perfection, charmed her, and strangled her. When she was 
being taken out for burial, the coffin was so heavy that four 



toa.d. 1589.] WARNER. STUBBES. WEBBE. PUTTENHAM. 429 

strong men could not lift it. It was opened. The body was 
gone ; but a lean and deformed black cat was sitting in the 
coffin, " a setting of great ruffs and frizzling of hair, to the great 
fear and wonder of all the beholders." 

67. The days that were to produce great poets produced also 
discussions on the Art of Poetry. Young King James of Scot- 
land had tried his 'prentice hand at this (§ 51) ; Sidney had 
written "An Apologie for Poetrie " (§ 44). William Webbe, of 
whom little is known, was a Cambridge man, who took his B. A. in 
1573, and was a friend of Harvey and Spenser. He was after- 
wards private tutor in the Sulyard family, at the manor-house of 
Flemings, near Chelmsford, and there he wrote in the summer 
evenings A Discourse of English Poetrie ; which was printed in 
1586. Webbe shared Gabriel Harvey's interest in the reformed 
English versifying. His book, which dwells much on Phaer's 
"Virgil," and most upon Spenser's " Shepheard's Calender" 
(§ 31), leads up to a discussion of metres, with special reference 
to Latin models and to his own translation of the first two 
Eclogues of Virgil into English hexameters ; beginning thus : 

" Tityrus, happilie thou lyste tumbling under a beech tree, 
All in a fine oate pipe these sweete songs lustilie chaunting." 

Webbe added to his little book a summary of Horace's " Art of 
Poetry," taken from George Fabricius, of Kemnitz, himself a 
very good poet in Latin, who died in 1571. Another Eliza- 
bethan book upon the art of verse was by George Puttenham 
— The Art of English Poesie, in Three Books; the first of Poets 
and Poesy e, the second of Proportion, a,7id the third of Orna- 
mente — written about 1585, and published in the spring of 1589. 
The author, who cited a dozen other works of his own which are 
lost, was born about 1530, had been a scholar at Oxford, had 
delighted in verse and written it, had seen the courts of France, 
Spain, Italy and the Empire, and was skilled in French, Italian, 
and Spanish, as well as in Greek and Latin. There was no 
author's name on the title-page of his book; but as early as 1605 
it was said to be by George Puttenham, one of the queen's 
gentlemen pensioners. The book is a systematic little treatise 
of some extent, dealing with the origin and nature of poetry ; its 
several forms, as satire, comedy, tragedy, &c. ; its several metres 
and proportions, including the various ways of writing verse in 
shapes, as the lozenge, or rombus ; the fuzie spindle, or romboides ; 
the triangle, or tricquet ; the square ; the pillar, pilaster, or 



43° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1589. 

cylinder; taper, or piramis; rondel, or sphere; egg, or figure 
oval; with many of these reversed and combined; a fashion 
then coming into use from Italy and France. Puttenham says 
that an Eastern traveller whom he met in Italy told him that 
this fashion was brought from the courts of the great princes ot 
China and Tartary. The introducer of " shaped verses " into 
Europe is said to have been a Simmias of Rhodes, who lived 
under Ptolemy Soter, about 324 B.C. Puttenham's argument 
concerning metres includes, of course, some reference to the 
question of Latin quantity applied to English verse. The last 
book discusses the language of the poet; tropes and figures of 
speech, with examples ; fitness of manner, and the art that con- 
ceals art. Among illustrations of poetical ornament is a poem 
by Queen Elizabeth herself, written when the presence of Mary 
Queen of Scots in England was breeding faction; and the 
Queen of England, " nothing ignorant in those secret favours, 
though she had long, with great wisdom and pacience, dissem- 
bled it, writeth this ditty most sweet and sententious, not hiding 
from all such aspiring minds the daunger of their ambition 
and disloyaltie : " 

" The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy, 
And wit me warns to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy. 
For falsehood now doth flow, and subject faith doth ebb, 
Which would not be if reason ruled or wisdom weaved the web. 
But clouds of toys untried do cloak aspiring minds, 
Which turn to rain of late repent by course of changed winds. 
The top of hope supposed the root of ruth will be, 
And fruitless all their graffed guiles, as shortly ye shall see. 
Then dazzled eyes with pride, which great ambition blinds, 
Shall be unsealed by worthy wights, whose foresight falsehood finds ; 
The daughter of debate, that eke discord doth sow, 
Shall reap no gain where former rule hath taught still peace to grow, 
No foreign banished wight shall anchor in this port, 
Our realm it brooks no stranger's force, let them elsewhere resort. 
Our rusty sword with rest shall first his edge employ 
To poll their topes that seek such change and gape for joy." 

68. The year of the publication of George Puttenham's book, 
1589, was the year of chief activity in the Martin Marprelate 
Controversy. Martin Marprelate was the name under which 
first one epistle writer than many companions of his in the work 
of " Pistling the Bishops " — nearly all these writers being deprived 
ministers — waged war against that which Elizabethan Puritans 
condemned in Episcopacy. Government sought to suppress 
their publications. They were " printed in Europe not fur from 
some bouncing priests ; " or " over sea, in Europe, within two 



A p. 1589/I THE MARPRELATE CONTROVERSY. 43 1 

furlongs of a bouncing priest, at the cost and charges of Martin 
Marprelate, gent." The first tract was temperately answered 
by Thomas Cooper, Bishop of Winchester, in An Admonition 
to the People of England. This made Cooper himself an object 
oi attack. The Martinists were earnest men, who affected light 
speech to win light minds of the many to their side. The books 
were printed at a wandering press, hunted by the Government 
from Moulsey, near Kingston-on-Thames, where it was first set 
up, to Fawsley, in Northamptonshire, thence to Norton, thence 
to Coventry, thence to Welstone, in Warwickshire, whence 
letters were sent to another press in or near Manchester, which 
was found printing More Work for a Cooper. The chief Mar- 
tinists were John Penry, John Udall, John Field, and Job 
Throckmorton, who wrote, Hae ye any Work for Cooper. John 
Penry, a Welshman, bred at both Universities, and earnestly- 
devoted to his cause, was hurried to the gallows for his writings. 
Yet, as he wrote before his execution, " I never did anything in 
this cause for contention, vain-glory, or to draw disciples after 
me. Great things in this life I never sought for : sufficiency I 
had, with great outward trouble ; but most content I was with 
my lot, and content with my untimely death, though I leave 
behind me a friendless widow and four infants." John Udall, 
left unexecuted, died in prison. He was tried for the authorship 
of an anonymous book, called, The Demo?istration of Discipline j 
and when he would have called witnesses they were refused 
hearing, on the ground that witnesses in favour of the prisoner 
were against the queen. " It is for the queen," said John Udall, 
" to hear all things, when the life of any of her subjects is in 
question." The literary war against the maintainers of Martin 
Marprelate was carried on by the wits and playwrights. John 
Lyly contributed Pap with a Hatchet j or, a Fig for 7ny God- 
son; or, O'ack me this Nut. To be sold at the sign of the Crab- 
tree Cudgel, in Thwack-coat Lane. " Who," he said in it, "would 
curry an ass with an ivory comb ? Give the beast thistles for 
provender." Conscious of the unseemly tone of the whole con- 
troversy, he wrote towards the end, " If this vein bleed but six 
ounces more, I shall prove to be a pretty railer, and so in time 
grow to a proper Martinist ; " and he took leave of his adversary 
with a " farewell and be hanged." 

Another active writer was a scurrilous and unscrupulous 
young wit, Thomas Nash, then about twenty-three years old, 
beginning to be active as a dashing pamphleteer. One of his 



432 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.p. 15S9. 

pieces was called Almond for a Parrot; or, an Alms for Martin. 
Francis Bacon was twenty-nine years old when, in his paper 
on these Controversies of the Church (§ 48), he reasoned against 
contention about ceremonies and things indifferent, strife in a 
spirit opposite to that of St. James's admonition, " Let every 
man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath." Bacon 
thought men over-ready to say of their own private opinions, 
" Not I, but the Lord," where Paul said " I, and not the Lord," 
or " according to my counsel ; " he desired, therefore, as to the 
Church controversies, to point out " what it is on either part 
that keepeth the wound green, and formalizeth both sides to a 
further opposition, and worketh an indisposition in men's minds 
to be reunited." " And, first of all," he said, " it is more than 
time that there were an end and surcease made of this immodest 
and deformed manner of writing lately entertained, whereby 
matters of religion are handled in the style of the stage." 
Bitter and earnest writing came, he said, of an enthusiasm not 
to be hastily condemned ; but to leave all reverent and religious 
compassion towards evils, to intermix Scripture and scurrility 
sometimes in one sentence, was far from the manner of a 
Christian. It was an evil, too, " that there is not an indifferent 
hand carried towards these pamphlets as they deserve. For 
the one sort flieth in the dark, the other is uttered openly. And 
we see it ever falleth out that the forbidden writing is thought 
to be certain sparks of a truth that fly up in the faces of those 
that seek to choke and tread it out ; whereas a book authorised 
is thought to be but the language of the time." Bacon thought 
that, except Bishop Cooper's, the pamphlets were equally bad 
on both sides. As to the occasion of the controversies, if 
any bishops be as all are said to be, let them amend ; men 
might abate some of their vanities of controversial zeal, think 
less of measuring the value of religion by its distance from the 
error last condemned as heresy, and care less about introducing 
new forms from abroad. Bacon, whose mother sympathised 
with the Nonconformists, avowed in this paper his own adherence 
to the established system in the Church, but he desired to urge 
on both parties moderation, a spirit of concession in discussing 
mere externals, and a better sense of Christian brotherhood, 
for " the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God." 
" A contentious retaining of custom," he urged, " is a turbulent 
thing, as well as innovation." He agreed " that a character of 
love is more proper for debates of this nature than that of 



a.d. 1589.3 CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT. 433 

zeal," and trusted that what he had said should " find a corre- 
spondence in their minds which are not embarked in partiality, 
and which love the whole better than a part." 

69. In August, 1589, the rule of the house of Valois came to 
an end in France by the assassination of Henry III. The king 
in the preceding December had by assassination got rid of his 
powerful opponents, the Duke of Guise, head of the Catholic 
League, and the duke's brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine. The 
League was therefore in open revolt against him ; the Sorbonne 
released Frenchmen from their oath of allegiance to him ; the 
pope excommunicated him ; and he was driven into alliance with 
Henry of Navarre and the Huguenots for the recovery of his 
capital. At the beginning of these days Catherine de' Medici 
died. While the King of France and the King of Navarre, 
whom the League wished to exclude from the succession, were 
besieging Paris, Henry III. was stabbed by an enthusiastic 
young Dominican. Before he died he acknowledged the King 
of Navarre his successor. Henry IV. thus became King of 
France, with a promise to maintain the Catholic faith and the 
property and rights of the Church. Many of his Huguenot 
followers fell from him, because they looked on this as an 
engagement to protect idolatry. But the League opposed him. 
Queen Elizabeth sent succour of men, and ,£22,000 in money. 
In September Henry IV. repulsed the Leaguers at Arques. At 
the end of October he carried the suburbs of Paris. He then 
retired on Tours, making that his capital. On the 14th of 
March, 1590, he obtained a signal victory over the Leaguers 
and the Spanish auxiliaries at the battle of Ivry, in which " the 
divine Bartas " fought. 

Against England Spain was yet gathering force. He would 
persevere, Philip said, even if he sold the silver candlesticks on 
his table. But England had risen to the occasion. The golden 
time of Athens was the time when the soul of the people was 
stirred nobly in contest for liberty against the power of the 
Persians. The Netherlands were so much the better for their 
life-struggle on behalf of all that men should hold most dear, 
that while the southern unemancipated provinces were declining, 
the Dutch were adding to the streets of their old towns, new 
towns were erected by the industries that flocked in, and in 
the year 1586-7 eight hundred ships entered their ports. So 
England, trained for generations in the path of duty, faced tjie 
great peril of these days, held in the world of thought the 

c c 



434 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1589 

ground which she had thus far conquered, and, gathering all her 
energies, went strongly forward. When, in 1589, Drake was 
sent as admiral, with Sir John Norris in command of the land 
forces, to attack the Spanish power over Portugal, by making 
Don Antonio king, George Peele, the dramatist (§ 55, 57), sang 
A Farewell, ejitituled to the Famous and Fortunate Generalls 0/ 
our English Forces : Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake, 
knights, and all theyr brave and resolute followers ; to which he 
added his Tale of Troy (§ 55), then first printed. Peele's cry 
was: 

" To arms, to arms, to glorious arms ! 
With noble Norris and victorious Drake, 
Under the sanguine cross, brave England's badge, 
To propagate religious piety ; 

* * * * * 

Sail on, pursue your honours to your graves : 
Heaven is a sacred covering for your heads, 
And every climate virtue's tabernacle. 
To arms, to arms, to honourable arms ! 
You fight for Christ, and England's peerless queen, 
Elizabeth, the wonder of the world, 
Over whose throne the enemies of God 
Have thunder'd erst their vain successful braves. 
Oh, ten times treble happy men, that fight 
Under the Cross of Christ and England's queen, 
And follow such as Drake and Norris are ! 
All honours do this cause accompany ; 
All glory on these endless honours waits : 
These honours and this glory shall He send, 
Whose honour and whose glory you defend." 

Thus spoke out of our literature the mind of England ; and such 
was its mind in the year 1590, to which we have now brought 
down this narrative. 

70. Robert Greene was much occupied during his last 
years in exposure of the cheats of London, by his Notable 
Discovery of Coosnage; also his two parts of Coney Catching, 
published in 1591, and a third part of " Coney Catching" in the 
year of his death, 1592. In his novel of Never Too Late, 
published in 1590, he shadowed his relation to his own wife; 
and in the Groafs Worth of Wit Bought with a Million of 
Repentance, he drew from incidents in his own sad life part of 
the story of a reprobate Roberto. His hero, reduced to a single 
groat, said, " Oh, now it is too late to buy wit with thee ! and 
therefore will I see if I can sell to careless youth what I 
negligently forgot to buy." This novel was published after 
Greene's death, in September, 1592. He died at the house of a 



toa.d. 1592.] GEORGE PEELE. ROBERT GREENE. 435 

poor shoemaker, near Dowgate, to whom he owed ten pounds. 
Under the bond for this money, he wrote to his deserted wife, 
" Doll, I charge thee, by the love of our youth and by my soul's 
rest, that thou wilt see this man paid; for if he and his wife had 
not succoured me I had died in the streets." These last lines of 
of his, in Chaucer's stanza, were written not long before his 
death : 

" Deceiving world, that with alluring toys 

Hast made my life the subject of thy scorn, 
And scornest now to lend thy fading joys 

T'outlength my life, whom friends have left forlorn; 

How well are they that die ere they be born, 
And never see thy sleights, which few men shim 
Till unawares they helpless are undone ! 

" Oft have I sung of Love, and of his fire ; 

But now I find that poet was advised 
Which made full feasts increasers of desire, 

And proves weak love was with the poor despised; 

For when the life with food is not sufficed, 
What thoughts of love, what motion of delight, 
What pleasaunce can proceed from such a wight? 

" Witness my want, the murderer of my wit : 

My ravished sense, of wonted fury reft, 
Wants such conceit as should in poems fit 

Set down the sorrow wherein I am left ; 

But therefore have high heavens their gifts bereft, 
Because so long they lent them me to use, 
And I so long their bounty did abuse. 

" Oh, that a year were granted me to live, 

And for that year my former wits restored ! 
What rules of life, what counsel would I give, 

How should my sin with sorrow be deplored ! 

But I must die, of every man abhorred : 
Time loosely spent will not again be won ; 
My time is loosely spent, and I undone." 

Here also the depths were stirred ; but the earnest spirit of the 
time, and the sweet music it drew from the souls of men, 
ennobled also the fallen dramatist whom a town ruffian, " Cut- 
ting Ball," defended from arrest. Among Greene's plays was 
one, written with Thomas Lodge, called A Looking-Glass for 
London a?id England. This was not printed until 1594. In it 
the corruption of Nineveh stood as a figure for the sins of 
England. Oseas the prophet witnessed and warned from the 
stage : 

" Look, London, look ; with inward eyes behold 
What lessons the events do here unfold. 
Sin grown to pride, to misery is thrall : 
The warning bell is rung, beware to fall." 

C C 2 



436 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1590- 

At the close of the play the prophet Jonas, who had been calling 
on Nineveh to repent, turned to the audience of islanders, 
" whose lands are fattened with the dew of heaven," and ex- 
claimed : 

" O London ! maiden of the mistress isle 
Wrapt in the folds and swathing-clouts of shame, 
In thee more sins than Nineveh contains ! 
Contempt of God ; despite of reverend age ; 
Neglect of law ; desire to wrong the poor ; 

***** 
Thy neighbours burn, yet dost thou fear no fire ; 
Thy preachers cry, yet dost thou stop thine ears ; 
The 'larum rings, yet sleepest thou secure. 
London, awake, for fear the Lord do frown : 
I set a looking-glass before thine eyes. 
Oh, turn, oh, turn, with weeping to the Lord, 
And think the prayers and virtues of thy queen 
Defer the plague which otherwise would fall ! 
Repent, O London ! lest, for thine offence, 
Thy shepherd fail — whom mighty God preserve, 
That she may bide the pillar of His Church 
Against the storms of Romish Antichrist ! 
The hand of mercy overshade her head, 
And let all faithful subjects say, Amen." 

Whereupon there arose, it may be, an emphatic " Amen " from 
the playhouse benches ; for although many precisians stayed 
away, a playhouse audience under Elizabeth represented more 
nearly than it has done at any later time the whole people of 
England. 

There were plays wholly by Greene, on the stories of Orlando 
Furioso; Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay; George a Greene, the 
Pinner of Wake field j Alfihonso,King of Aragon ; and Scottish 
James IV. 

His Groat's Worth of Wit was published after his death 
by his friend Henry Chettle, a fat and merry dramatist, of 
whose forty plays about four remain, and who was a printer 
before he became wholly a playwright. To the " Groat's Worth 
of Wit" there was an appended address from Greene to his 
brother playwrights, Marlowe and Peele, with whom he 
associated Lodge, which includes this reference to Shakespeare: 
— " Unto none of you, like me, sought those burrs to cleave ; 
those puppets, I mean, that speak from our mouths, those antics 
garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange that I to whom they 
all have been beholding — is it not like that you to whom they 
all have been beholding — shall, were ye in that case that I am 
now, be both of them at once forsaken ? Yea, trust them not ; 



-to a.d. 1593.] GREENE. CHETTLE. SHAKESPEARE. 437 

for there is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that, 
with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is 
as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you ; 
and, being an absolute Johannes-fac-totum, is in his own conceit 
the only Shake-scene in a country. Oh, that I might entreat 
your rare wits to be employed in more profitable courses, and 
let these apes imitate your past excellence, and never more 
acquaint them with your admired inventions ! " 

71. Here, then, about six years after his coming to London, 
is, in 1592, the first evidence that William Shakespeare has 
worked his way up to success. It is the first and last unkind 
word spoken of him, spoken in bitterness of spirit and in sick- 
ness, by a fallen man. A few weeks after the appearance of this, 
Henry Chettle took occasion, in a publication of his own, 
called Kind-Hart's Drea?n, to regret that he had not erased 
what Greene wrote about Shakespeare. " I am so sorry," he 
said, " as if the original fault had been my fault, because myself 
have seen his demeanour no less civil than he excellent in the 
quality he professes ; besides, divers of worship have reported 
his uprightness of dealing, which augurs his honesty, and his 
facetious grace in writing that approves his art." 

Greene's special reference is to Shakespeare's work upon 
those old plays which are placed among his own as the three 
parts of King Henry VI. The First Part of Henry VI. is doubt- 
less an old play slightly altered and improved by Shakespeare. 
The Second Pa?'t of King Henry VI. was Shakespeare's altera- 
tion of a drama, printed in 1594 as The First Part of the Conten- 
tion betwixt the two famous Houses of York and Lancaster; and 
The Third Part of King Henry VI. was an alteration from The 
True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the Death oj good 
King Henrie the Szxt, with the whole Contentione betweene the 
two Houses Lancaster and Yorke, first printed in 1595. This 
was the play that contained the line preserved by Shakespeare, 
.and turned against him by Greene, " O tiger's heart wrapt in a 
woman's hide" (Act I., Scene 4). The line may have been 
Greene's own, for one or two of the plays thus altered may have 
been written by Greene or by Marlowe. 

72. Greene died at the age of thirty-two, on the 3rd ot 
September, 1592. Marlowe died when he was not yet thirty, 
on the 16th of June, 1593, stabbed in the eye by Francis Archer, 
who was defending himself in a brawl after a feast at Deptford. 
We have spoken of Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and of his Faustus. 



43& A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1590 

His Jew of Malta gives in Barabas a powerful picture of the 
Jew maligned still by the mediaeval prejudices of the Christians. 
Marlowe's Edward the Second was the nearest approach made 
by the year 1590 to a play in which there is a natural develop- 
ment of character. The last and worst of Marlowe's plays, 
and the one that was most carelessly printed, is his Massacre 
of Paris, which dramatised the strife in France. It included 
not only the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, but also the death 
of Charles IX., the assassination of the Duke of Guise by- 
Henry III., and the assassination of Henry himself by the 
Dominican Friar, Jacques Clement, with the succession of Henry 
of Navarre to the French throne. The dying Henry III. in the 
last scene of the play breathed vengeance against the pope, and 
said: 

" Navarre, give me thy hand : I here do swear 
To ruinate that wicked Church of Rome, 
That hatcheth up such bloody practices ; 
And here protest eternal love to thee, 
And to the Queen of England specially, 
Whom God hath blest for hating papistry."' 

In the last lines of the play Henry of Navarre vowed so to re- 
venge his predecessor's death, 

" As Rome, and all those popish prelates there, 
Shall curse the time that e'er Navarre was king, 
And rul'd in France by Henry's fatal death." 

A tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, left unfinished by- 
Marlowe, was completed by his friend Thomas Nash, and acted 
by the children of Her Majesty's chapel. Thomas Nash (§ 68), 
who was baptised at Lowestoft in November, 1567, was dead in 
1 601. Marlowe made a poor version of Ovid's Elegies, first 
published in 1596 with the Epigrams of Sir John Davies. His 
beginning of a free paraphrase of the Hero and Leander ascribed 
to Musasus, was afterwards completed by George Chapman. 
George Peele died about 1598 ; but Thomas Lodge, whose 
novel of Rosalynde, published in 1590, suggested the plot of 
Shakespeare's " As You Like It," lived on throughout the reign 
of Elizabeth's successor. 

In Peele's Old Wives' Tale, printed in 1595, there was a sort 
of child's story told with a poet's playfulness. There was no- 
division into acts. Three men lost in a wood were met by Chinch, 
and introduced to his old wife Madge, who gave them a sup- 
per, over which they sang, and then began telling them in old. 



toa.d. I593-] PEELE'S OLD WIVES' TALE. SHAKESPEARE. 439 

wives' fashion the " Old Wives' Tale." It is a tale of a king's 
daughter stolen by a conjuror, who flew off with her in the shape 
of a great dragon, and hid her in a stone castle, " and there he 
kept her I know not how long, till at last all the king's men went 
out so long that her two brothers went to seek her." While the 
old woman talked, the two brothers entered, and the story-telling 
passed into the acting of the story : very much as the art of the 
mediaeval story-teller had passed into that of the Elizabethan 
dramatist. The Princess Delia was sought by her brothers, and 
sought also by Eumenides, her lover. A proper young man, 
whom the magician had turned into a bear by night and an old 
man by day, delivered mystic oracles by a wayside cross. 
Sacrapant triumphed in his spells, until Eumenides had made 
a friend of the ghost of Jack by paying fifteen or sixteen shil- 
lings to prevent the sexton and churchwarden from leaving poor 
Jack unburied. The ghost of Jack played pranks, and made an 
end of Sacrapant, whose destiny it was " never to die but by a 
dead man's hand." The light in the conjuror's mystic glass had 
been blown out, as before said (§ 47), by one that was " neither 
wife, widow, nor maid." The piece included a comic braggart, 
who could deliver himself— in burlesque of Stanihurst (§ 53) — 
according to the reformed manner of versifying : 

" Philida, phileridos, pamphilida, florida, flortos ; 
' Dub dub-a-dub, bounce/ quoth the guns, with a sulphurous huff-snuff." 

The piece was a playful child's story, told with child-like simpli- 
city and grace. 

73. William Shakespeare in 1593, the year of the death 
of Marlowe, had not yet produced any of his greatest plays. 
The plays of his own then written were The Two Gentletnen of 
Verona (1591 ?), The Comedy of Errors (1 592?), probably also 
Love's Labour's Lost. In 1593 he first appeared in print by 
publishing his Venus and Adonis, a poem in the six-lined stanza 
then used as the common measure for a strain of love. It was 
dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, who in 
1593 was twenty years old ; the age of Shakespeare being 
twenty-nine. The Earldom of Southampton had been given in 
1546 by Henry VIII. to the grandfather of Shakespeare's friend 
and patron. The father of Shakespeare's earl had been a 
Roman Catholic, and friend to the cause of Mary Queen of 
Scots. He died when his successor in the earldom (through 
death of an elder brother) was a child. The young earl, a ward 



44° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1589 

of Lord Burghley's, had been educated at Cambridge, where he 
took his degree of M.A. in 1589; he then came to London, 
joined an Inn of Court, was in favour with the queen, and was 
a liberal friend of the poets. In his dedication of it to Lord 
Southampton, Shakespeare called Venus and Adonis the "first 
heir of my invention." To the same patron Shakespeare dedi- 
cated in the following year, 1594, his Lucrece, in Chaucer's stanza 
— " Troilus verse." The two poems, one of the passion of love, 
one of heroic chastity, belong together, and their sweet music 
spread over the land that once had been filled with the songs of 
Chaucer. Of the Venus and Adonis there were five editions 
before the close of Elizabeth's reign. Titus Andronicus, a play 
ascribed to Shakespeare, but certainly a piece from another 
hand which he but slightly touched (in an older form it had been 
called " Titus and Vespasian "), seems to have been first acted in 
January, 1 594. 

74. In 1594 the Blackfriars Company built, as a summer 
theatre, The Globe, on Bankside. It was a wooden hexagon, 
circular within, and open to the weather ; but the stage was 
sheltered by some roofing. London Bridge was the one bridge 
of that time, and playgoers crossed to the Bankside theatres by 
water from various parts of London. Sunday performances had 
been abolished for the last ten years. They had been strongly 
opposed (§ 40). On the 13th January, 1 583, in Paris Garden — an 
old place of entertainment, where beasts had been baited early 
in Henry VIII.'s reign — during performance on the Sabbath, a 
decayed wooden gallery fell down, and many lives were lost. 
This was looked upon as a judgment from Heaven, and the 
Privy Council thenceforth enforced an order that the actors 
should " forbear wholly to play on the Sabbath-day, either in 
the forenoon or afternoon, which to do they are by their lord- 
ships' order expressly denied and forbidden." But there was 
now no want of audiences on other days. Having built the 
Globe, the Blackfriars Company, to which Shakespeare belonged, 
proceeded in 1596, not without opposition, to repair and enlarge 
the Blackfriars ; and after this the children of Her Majesty's 
chapel acted at Blackfriars when the adult company was acting 
at the Globe. Thus we have prefixed to Lyly's " Campaspe," " the 
Prologue at the Court," and " the Prologue at the Black Friars." 

75. John Lyly in 1590 was famous, but not prosperous in 
his dependence on court patronage. He had in vain sought 
office as Master of the Revels, and wrote to the queen, " If your 



toa.d. I595-] SHAKESPEARE. LYLY. SPENSER. 44 1 

sacred Maiestie thinke me vnworthy, and that after x yeares 
tempest, I must att court suffer shipwrack of my tyme, my 
wittes, my hopes, vouchsafe in your neuer-erring iudgement 
some plank or rafter to wafte me into a country where, in my sad 
and settled devocion, I may in euery corner of a thatcht cottage 
write praiers in stead of plaies, prayer for your longe and pros- 
prous life, and a repentaunce that I have played the foole so 
longe." In 1 593, in a second petition to the queen, Lyly prayed 
for " some lande, some good fines or forfeitures that should fall 
by the iust fall of these most false traitors, that seeing nothing 
will come by the Revells, I may pray vppon the Rebells. Thir- 
teene years your highnes servant, but yet nothing ; twenty freinds 
that though they saye they wil be sure I find them sure to be 
slowe. A thousand hopes, but all nothing ; a hundred promises, 
but yet nothing. Thus casting vpp the inventory of my freinds, 
hopes, promises, and tymes, the summa totalis amounteth to 
iust nothing. My last will is shorter than myne invencion; but 
three legacies — patience to my creditors, melancholie without 
measure to my friends, and beggerie without shame to my family." 
Lyly's comedy of Mother Bo??tbie, acted by the children of 
Paul's, was first printed in 1594. Mother Bombie is a fortune- 
teller, and the scene is laid at Rochester ; but the construction 
of the plot is artificial, and even the names of the characters 
show the relation between Plautus and Terence, and the earlier 
Elizabethan comedy. There are Memphis and Stellio, Prisius 
and Sperantus, Candius, Maestius, Accius, Livia, Serena and 
Silena, even a " Dromio, servant to Memphio," side by side 
with " Halfpenny, a boy, servant to Sperantus." Lyly, who 
lived in the parish of St. Bartholomew the Less, had a son born 
in 1596, who died in 1597, a son born in 1600, and a daughter in 
1603 ; and he died himself in November, 1606, aged fifty-two. 

76. Edmund Spenser (§ 23, 31, 34, 43, 45, 46), whose 
"Shepheard's Calender " had been reprinted in 1581 and 1586, 
came to London at the end of 1589, was introduced by Raleigh 
to Elizabeth, and published in 1590 the first section, containing 
the first three books, of The Faerie Queene, disposed into Twelve 
Bookes, Fashioning XII M or all Vertues. It was dedicated to 
Her Majesty, and had a prefatory letter addressed to Sir Walter 
Raleigh, dated January 23, 1589 (New Style, 1590). Spenser 
had been at work on his great poem for more than ten years 
(§ 43), and the part of it now published was received with an 
admiration that caused its publisher to get together a volume of 



44 2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1591. 

other poems by Spenser, which he published in 1591, under the 
title of Complaints. This volume contained Spenser's Rnines 
of Time; Teares of the Muses j VirgiVs Gnat j Prosopopoia, or 
Mother Hubberd's Tale; The Rubies of Rome ', by Bellay ; Muio- 
potmos, or the Tale of the Butterflies Visions of the IVorld's 
Vanities Bellayes Visions j and Petrarches Visions. The Ruines 
of Time, dedicated to Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke, 
was a series of mournful visions, forming a poem in Chaucer's 
stanza, on the death of" Philisides" (Sir Philip Sidney). In the 
Teares of the Muses, each Muse in turn lamented, in the six-lined 
Common Verse, the decay of her just rule. This poem Spenser 
dedicated to the Lady Strange, with whom he claimed kindred, 
and whom we shall meet again. She was Alice, youngest 
daughter of Sir John Spencer, of Althorpe, then married to 
Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, who became Earl of Derby 
by the death of his father, in September, 1593. He died him- 
self in the following April, leaving his widow Countess Dowager 
of Derby, and the mother of two girls. VirgiVs Gnat, done 
into octave rhyme, was said to have been long since "dedicated 
to the most noble and excellent lord, the Earl of Leicester, 
late deceased." It is a free version of a poem — Culex — that 
used to be ascribed to Virgil. Prosopopoias or, Mother JTubberd's 
Tale, Spenser dedicated to the Lady Compton and Monteagle r 
who was Anne, another of the daughters of Sir John Spencer, 
of Althorpe. It is a pleasant satirical fable, in Chaucer's rhym- 
ing ten-syllabled lines, and written designedly in Chaucer's 
manner, showing how the Fox and the Ape, his neighbour and 
gossip, went disguised into the world to mend their fortunes. 
To begin, they would not be of any occupation, but the free 
men called beggars. But what warrant should they have for 
their free life ? They would protect themselves by the name of 
soldiers — " That now is thought a civil begging sect." . The Ape, 
as likest for manly semblance, was to act the poor soldier ; the 
Fox to wait on him and help as occasion served. Spenser 
having cried shame on this common abuse of an honourable 
name, next made the Ape a shepherd, with the Fox for sheep- 
dog. In this character 

" Not a lamb of all their flockes supply 
Had they to shew ; but ever as they bred 
They slue them, and upon their fleshes fed." 

The Fox and the Ape, having escaped after a great slaughter of 
the flock entrusted to their care, set up a new calling " much like 



a.d. 1591.] SPEA T S£R'S COMPLAINTS. 44J 

to begging, but much better named." They got gown and 
cassock, and as poor clerks begged of a priest, who reproached 
them for not seeking some good estate in the Church. Through 
the counsel given by this priest when the Fox and the Ape asked 
for advice, Spenser satirised the too easy lives of an indolent, 
well-to-do clergy. 

" By that he ended had his ghostly sermon 
The Foxe was well induc'd to be a parson, 
And of the priest eftsoones gan to inquire 
How to a benefice he might aspire. 
' Marie, there,' said the priest, ' is arte indeed : 
Much good deep learning one thereout may read ; 
For that the ground-worke is, and ende of all, 
How to obtaine a beneficiall.' " 

They must dress well, wait on some religious nobleman, and 
affect a godly zeal ; or, if the Fox looked to court for pro- 
motion : 

" Then must thou thee dispose another way : 
For there thou needs must learne to laugh, to lie, 
To crouche, to please, to be a beetle-stock 
Of thy great Master's will, to scorne, or mock ; 
So maist thou chance mock out a benefice, 
Unless thou canst one conjure by device, 
Or cast a figure for a bishoprick. " 

The courtiers also must be bribed. The Fox and Ape were 
thankful for good counsel, and presently Fox was a priest, with 
Ape for parish clerk. They behaved so ill in their new calling 
that they were obliged at last to escape from it, and, by counsel 
of a fat mule from the court, they next tried life among the 
courtiers. At court the Ape walked on tiptoe, as if he were 
some great Magnifico ; and the Fox, as his man, supported him. 
Here followed Spenser's satire of court vices and follies, with a 
picture in verse of the true courtly gentleman, for which in 
Spenser's mind perhaps his friend Sir Philip Sidney sat. It is 
in this part of " Mother Hubberd's Tale" that we find Spenser's 
lines upon the pitiful state of the suitor (§ 55). From court also 
Fox and Ape were obliged to fly ; and next they came upon the 
Lion sleeping, stole his crown and skin, and assumed royalty. 
The Ape was king, the Fox his minister. A satire followed on 
tyrannical misgovernment. Jove saw it; and Mercury, sent from 
Jove to make inquiry into it, aroused the sleeping Lion, who> 
reclaimed his own. 

"The Foxe, first author of that treacherie, 
He did uncase, and then away let flie : 



444 ^ FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1591 

But th' Ape's long taile (which then he had) he quight 
Cut off, and both ears pared off their height ; 
Since which all Apes but halfe their eares have left, 
And of their tailes are utterlie bereft." 

Muiopotinos j or, the Tale of the Butter/lie, Spenser dedicated 
to the Lady Carey, who was Elizabeth, another of the daughters 
of Sir John Spencer, of Althorpe. It is an original allegory in 
octave rhyme. The Ruins of Rome and the Visions, both from 
Bellay, his own Visions of the World's Vanity, and the Visions 
of Petrarch, are alike in form, and written sonnet wise, the 
" Visions " of Bellay and " Visions " of Petrarch, being chiefly a 
new version of Spenser's youthful contribution to the Theatre 
for Wo7-ldli?igs (§ 23). These were the contents of the volume 
of Spenser's poetry published as Complaints, in 1591, the year 
after the success of the the first three books of the " Faerie 
Queene." 

Spenser wrote also about this time an elegy on the death of 
the wife of Arthur (afterwards Sir Arthur) Gorges, a " lover of 
learning and virtue."' The lady was daughter and heir of Henry 
Lord Howard, Viscount Byndon, and the poem was published 
separately, under the name of Daphnaida. 

7 7. In February, 1591, Spenser received, as further earnest 
of success, a pension of ^50 a year from Queen Elizabeth. 

In October, 1591, a grant was made or confirmed to him of 
land in Cork, with the old castle of Kilcolman, in which he 
seems to have lived before his visit to England, and which had 
belonged to the Earls of Desmond. It was two miles from 
Doneraile, on the north side of a lake fed by the river Awbey, 
Spenser's Mulla. After his return to Ireland, Spenser dedicated 
to Sir Walter Raleigh, from his house at Kilcolman, the 27th of 
December, 1591, his poem entitled Colin Cloafs Come Home 
Again, to which additions were made before its publication. In 
this poem Colin, having told his fellow shepherds how Raleigh, 
"the Shepherd of the Ocean," visited him in 1589, and caused 
him to " wend with him his Cynthia to see," described, in pas- 
toral form, England, the queen herself, and, under pastoral 
names, celebrated personages of the court and living poets. 
Among them was he of the name Shake Spear, that doth 
heroically sound : 

"And there, though last, not least, is Aetion; 
A gentler shepherd may no where be found : 
Whose Muse, full of high thoughts' invention, 
Doth like himselfe heroically sound." 



to a.d. 1599.] EDMUND SPENSER. 445 

This was not published until 1595, and in the same year ap- 
peared Spenser's sonnets or Amoretti, and the Eftithalamium, 
an exquisitely musical and joyous bridal song, written about the 
time of his own wedding. No lady's name is publicly associated 
with the sonnets, and they were written doubtless for the plea- 
sure of the lady who became his wife. Three or four of them 
contain personal references, but the rest are of the usual kind. 
Spenser had been married on the nth of June, 1594, when his 
age was about forty, to a lady living near Kilcolman, whose name, 
like the name of his queen and of his mother, was Elizabeth. 
In 1595 he had come to England again with the next instal- 
ment of three books of the " Faerie Queene," and with a prose 
View of the Present State of Ireland, in a dialogue between 
Eudoxus and Irenaeus, which was circulated in manuscript, but 
was not printed until more than thirty years after his death. 
It was hard in the policy it recommended, and about Kilcolman 
Spenser was not kindly remembered. The Second Part of the 
Faerie Qiteene, containing the fourth, fifth, and sixth books, ap- 
peared in 1596, together with a reprint of the first three books. 
In the same year Spenser, while in London, added to two hymns 
of " Love and Beauty," written years before, two other hymns 
of " Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty." These Hymns were 
published at once, and in the same year appeared also his Pro- 
thalamium on the marriage of two daughters of the Earl of 
Worcester. Spenser published nothing more before his death. 
In 1597 he returned to Kilcolman. In 1598 he was named by 
the queen for Sheriff of Cork. Children had been born to him ; 
there were two sons living, Sylvanus and Peregrine. In October, 
1598, Tyrone's rebellion broke out. Kilcolman was attacked, 
plundered, and burnt. Spenser and his family were cast out ; 
an infant child of his is said to have perished in the flames, but 
that is doubtful. Spenser was thus driven back to England, and 
died soon after his arrival, on the 16th of January, 1599, at a 
tavern in King Street, Westminster. King Street was then a 
very good street, on one side open to fields, and forming the 
main road between the Abbey and Parliament House and the 
court, which since Wolsey's forfeiture had been at the old 
Palace of Whitehall. That palace having been for centuries the 
residence of the Archbishop of York, was the York House that 
Wolsey had enriched with his magnificence. Henry VIII. took 
it in 1529. Elizabeth held court there ; and Spenser had taken 
his lodging where he might be near the court, to which he 
looked for repair of his fortunes. 



446 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1590 

78. Spenser's letter to Raleigh prefixed to the fragment of 
the " Faerie Queene," " expounding his whole intention in the 
course of this work/' said only that he laboured to pourtraict in 
Arthure, before he was king, the image of a brave knight, per- 
fected in the twelve moral vertues, as Aristotle hath devised, 
the which is the purpose of the first twelve books ; which if I 
finde to be well accepted, I may be perhaps encouraged to frame 
the other part, of polliticke vertues, in his person after that hee 
came to be king." It was left for the reader to discover how 
grand a design was indicated by these unassuming words. 
Spenser said that by the Faerie Queene whom Arthur sought, 
" I mean glory in my generall intention, but in my particular I 
conceive the most excellent and glorious person of our sove- 
raine the queene, and her kingdom in Faeryland." The student 
of the " Faerie Queene " must bear in mind that its " general 
intention " is its essential plan as a great spiritual allegory ; that 
this is consistent throughout, is the very soul of the poem, source 
of its immortal life ; and that the "particular" significations, 
which are frequent and various, are secondary senses lying only 
on the surface of the main design, with which they harmonise, 
and to which they gave a lively added interest in Spenser's time. 
Faery means in the allegory Spiritual. A faery knight is a 
spiritual quality or virtue militant, serving the Faerie Queene, 
Gloriana, which means in the general allegory Glory in the 
highest sense — the glory of God. Read out of allegory, there- 
fore, " The Glory of God " is the name of Spenser's poem. 
Again said Spenser, in this introductory letter, " In the person of 
Prince Arthure I sette forth Magnificence in particular, which 
vertue, for that (according to Aristotle and the rest) is the per- 
fection of all the rest, and conteineth in it them all : therefore 
in the whole course I mention the deedes of Arthure applyable 
to that vertue, which I write of in that booke ; but of the xii 
other vertues I make xii other knights the patrones, for the 
more variety of the history." Spenser's ethical system was 
bound up with his religion ; he painted, therefore, in his sepa- 
rate knights, each single virtue of a man striving heavenward, 
but failing at some point, and needing aid of Divine grace. 
This came through Arthur, in whom all the virtues are con- 
tained, who is filled with a great desire towards the Faerie 
Oueene — the Glory of God — and who above all represents, in the 
literal sense of the word, Magnificence, since he may be said to 
indicate the place of the Mediator in the Christian system. If 



toa.d. 1596.] SPENSER'S "FAERIE QUEENE." 447 

we had had all twelve books of the poem, which was left only 
half finished, they would have been an allegory of man battling 
heavenward with all his faculties, through trial and temptation. 
The other poem, had it followed, would have been an endea- 
vour to represent through allegory an ideal citizenship of the 
kingdom of Heaven. Because the " Faerie Oueene " was pub- 
lished incomplete, Spenser told so much of what its readers 
could have found in the whole work as was necessary to direct 
their understanding to the well-head of the history, " that from 
thence gathering the whole intention of the conceit, ye may as 
in a handfull gripe at the discourse." He gave the clue into our 
hands, and then left us to find our own way through the poem 
upon which he spent the best thought of his life. 

Moral philosophy was divided into ethics, which dealt with 
the individual ; and politics, which dealt with the community. 
Spenser's project was of two poems, applying each of these to 
his own sense of the relation between man and God. In Plato's 
"Republic" there was mention of four Cardinal Virtues — Courage, 
Temperance, Justice, Wisdom. In the "Protagoras," Plato 
added to these, Holiness. This Aristotle omitted, because, as 
studies, he distinctly separated Ethics from Religion. Aristotle's 
list in his " Ethics," made without special devotion to the 
number twelve, was, in Book III., Courage and Temperance ; 
in Book IV., Liberality, Magnificence, Laudable Ambition 
(Philotimia), Mildness of a Regulated Temper; Courtesy, or re- 
gulated conduct in society ; Regulation of Boastfulness, including 
avoidance of the affectation of humility, that is to say, sincerity 
of manner ; Social Pliability of Wit (Eutrapelia) ; and Modesty, 
which Aristotle called hardly a virtue, but rather a feeling. In 
the fifth book of his " Ethics," the virtue he discussed was 
Justice. In the sixth book he took Intellectual Virtues — Phi- 
losophy and Wisdom, including Prudence, Apprehension, and 
Considerateness. The seventh book of the " Ethics " was on 
Pleasure, and dealt also with Incontinence and Intemperance ; 
the eighth and ninth books were on Friendship. Upon the 
groundwork of this treatise of Aristotle's there had been built 
this classification of the virtues, which was that commonly 
received in Spenser's time : they were of three kinds— I. Intel- 
lectual, II. Moral, III. Theological. The Intellectual Virtues 
were — Intellectual Knowledge, producing Art ; Wisdom, 
producing Prudence. The Moral Virtues were — 1, Prudence, 
Mother of All ; 2, Justice ; 3, Courage ; 4, Temperance. These 



44° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1590 

were the four Cardinal Virtues. Then came, 5, Courtesy ; 6, 
Liberality ; 7, Magnificence ; 8, Magnanimity ; 9, Philotimia 
(Laudable Ambition); 10, Truth; 11, Friendship; 12, Eutrapelia 
(Social Pliability of Wit). The theological virtues were these 
three — Faith, Hope, and Charity. Spenser dealt as a poet with 
his subject, and in no way bound himself to the scholastic list. 
In the six books of the " Faerie Queen " which are extant, and 
the fragment of a seventh, first printed with a new edition of 
the poem, in 161 1, this is Spenser's order of the virtues: — 1, 
Holiness; 2, Temperance; 3, Chastity; 4, Friendship; 5, 
Justice ; 6, Courtesy; and (probably) 7, Constancy. The several 
qualities of the true man taken in this order represent fidelity 
to God, I, in soul, and, 2, in body ; 3, 4, the bond of love 
between man and woman in pure marriage, this form of love 
being dealt with especially under the head of Chastity ; and 
between man and man, this form being dealt with especially 
under the head of Friendship. Love, the great bond of humanity, 
having been taken first, Spenser then passed to the next great 
bond, 5, Justice. Where the supremacy of Love does not 
suffice, Justice must govern. Having dealt with these two 
great bonds between man and man, Spenser passed next to the 
lighter, all-pervading bond of, 6, Courtesy. " Greet kindly, 
though ye be strangers," said one of the old Cymric bards. 
The recognition of this bond of common kindliness, where there 
has been no opportunity for closer ties, was the next condition 
in a sequence reasoned out like Spenser's. But Courtesy, which 
bids us yield to others on all non-essential points, needs to be 
balanced with the virtue that will save us from a careless yielding 
of essentials. So after Courtesy came, probably, Constancy, in 
Spenser's system. Thus we may trace the mind of the poet 
even in the sequence of the six books of his poem. 

The more detailed study of English writers, to which this 
volume is an introduction, attempts an analysis of the whole 
allegory of the " Faerie Queene." Here there can be no more 
said than will suffice to show its nature. The form of a 
romance of chivalry was in its own day the most popular that 
could have been selected. Spenser not only followed Spanish 
romances, and Ariosto's " Orlando," but adapted himself to 
the humour of his time, as illustrated by the Famous Historie 
of the Seve7i Champions of Christendome, a pious romance 
of saintly knights and fair ladies, dragons and chivalrous 
adventures, told in Euphuistic style, of which the first part, 



- to a. d. 1596.] SPENSER'S "FAERIE QUEENE. 449 

which Spenser had read, appeared probably about the middle 
of Elizabeth's reign, the second part certainly in 1597. Richard 
Johnson, whose name is associated with this book, and who 
finished re-editing it in the year of Shakespeare's death, was 
not its author. Shakespeare also had read it ; and since 
Elizabeth's time it has been dear to many generations of children. 
Spenser formed his allegory out of stock incidents in such 
romances, but he so told his story as to give to every incident a 
spiritual meaning. The form of verse contrived by Spenser 
for exclusive use in this poem is a nine-lined stanza, called 
" Spenserian." It was made by adding an Alexandrine to the 
stanza that French poets often used in the Chant Royal, a longer 
form of balade, called "Royal Song," in which God was the King 
celebrated. That eight-lined stanza was applied also to other uses. 
Marot, for example, who did not use it for his "Chants Royaux," 
made it the measure of his poem on the marriage of James V. 
of Scotland with Magdalene of France. Chaucer and followers 
of his had used it now and then, as in the " Envoye to the 
Complaint of the Black Knight," in " Chaucer's A B C," in " The 
Balade of the Village without Painting," and "UEnvoye a 
Bukton" It consisted of two quatrains of ten-syllabled lines, 
with alternate rhyme ; the second rhyme of the first quatrain 
agreeing with the first rhyme of the quatrain that followed, 
thus, abab, bcbc; this could go on indefinitely upon the 
same system — c d c d, de d e, ef ef, &c. Now, Spenser's 
added line follows the system of the verse as to its rhyme, but 
destroys expectation of continuance by the two extra sylla- 
bles, which close with a new turn the music of the stanza. 
Thus the Spenserian stanza becomes as to its rhyming abab, 
bcbc, c. The Fae?'ie Queene, it may be added, abounds in 
graceful imitations or paraphrases from the ancient poets, and 
from Ariosto and Tasso ; incidents are also suggested by 
Spenser's readings in Arthurian romance, in the first part of 
"The Seven Champions," in "The Orlando Furioso," and in 
Tasso's heroic poem. 

Let us now lightly illustrate from the first book the manner 
of the allegory. Twelve Faerie Knights, who represent twelve 
virtues, were knights of the Faerie Oueene ; they served the 
Divine glory. One, a clownish young man — " base things of the 
world, and things that are despised, hath God chosen " — desired 
to serve, and rested on the floor, " unfit through his rusticity for 
a better place." Then came Truth, as a fair lady, to complain 

D D 



45° 'A ZIKST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1590 

of the huge dragon— "the Dragon, that old serpent, which is 
the Devil " — who besieged her father and mother, an ancient 
Icing and queen, Adam and Eve, typifying the race of man. 
What knight would aid her ? Then " that clownish person?" 
who was to represent in the allegory Holiness, or the religion 
of England in Spenser's time, and that, too, in Spenser's form 
of it — i; upstarting, desired that adventure." The lady told him 
that unless he could use the armour which she brought, he 
could not succeed in that enterprise : that was the armour of a 
Christian man specified by St. Paul : " Wherefore take unto 
you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand 
in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand, there- 
fore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on 
the breast-plate of righteousness, and your feet shod with the 
preparation of the Gospel of Peace ; above all, taking the 
shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the 
fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, 
a. id the sword of the spirit, which is the Word of God." St. 
Paul used the image again : "Let us who are of the day be 
putting on the breast-plate of faith and love; and for an 
helmet the hope of salvation." When thus armed, the clownish 
person " seemed the goodliest man in all that company, and 
well liked of the lady." " If any man," said St. Paul, " be in 
Christ, he is a new creature." The knight set out to battle with 
the Dragon, and — so much having been indicated in the letter 
to Raleigh — here the first book of the Faerie Queene begins. 
'lie gentle knight was the element of holiness in the Christian 
soul, seeking conquest of evil, clad in the armour of righteous- 
ness, with the cross on his breast and on his shield. His 
steed represented passions and desires, disdaining the curb, 
but needing the curb as they carry us upon the chosen path. 
The kr iight sought his adventure to win the grace of Gloriana, 
which of all earthly things he most did crave. "The Lord 
sh all be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory." 
Beside him rode a lovely lady, Truth, on a lowly ass, more white 
than snow — patient of desire, dispassionate of temper — Truth 
under a veil. " And by her, in a line, a milk-white Lamb she 
led," guide and companion of innocence, herself as guileless, 
descended from the angels who knew man in Paradise. 

*' Behind her farre away a Dwarfe did lag 

That lasie seemd, in being ever last, 
Or wearied with bearing of her bag 
Of needments at his backe.' 



toa.d. 1596.] SPENSER'S "FAERIE QUEENE." 451 

The dwarf was the Flesh, with its needments : sometimes the 
bodily life of the man; sometimes, when the allegory took a 
wider range, the common body of the people, with, its natural 
instincts. The theme of the book was opened with a general 
allegory of the contest with Error; then it became individual 
and national, painting English religion from the point of view of 
an Elizabethan Puritan. 

The day became troubled, and the knight and his companions 
found shelter in a wood, whose ways were the ways of the world. 
The trees in it typified the forms of human life : " the sailing 
pine " for trade ; " the vine-prop elm " for pleasure : " the poplar 
never dry," freshness of youth ; " the builder oak, sole king of 
forests all/' man in mature strength building his home in the 
world ; " the aspen, good for staves," to support decrepid age ; 
and then the grave, "the cypress funeral." The other trees 
typified glory and tears, chase of meat, grinding of meal, griefs 
of life and their consolations, the shock of war and the wise 
uses of life, fruitfulness, completeness in form, that which" is for 
us to mould, and that which is often rotten at the core. Losing 
themselves among the pleasant ways of the world the knight 
and his companions took the most beaten path, which led them 
to the den of Error. Before the battle with the monster there 
was flinching of the flesh, eagerness of the spirit. By the light 
of his spiritual helps the Red Cross Knight could see the monster 
as it was ; it was a light from his glistening armour which the 
brood of Error could not bear. 

" Soone as that uncouth light upon them shone 
Into her mouth they crept, and suddain all were gone." 

When the knight, in the contest, was wound about with the huge 
train of the monster, the poet cried, " God helpe the man so 
wrapt in Errores endlesse traine ! " That was the help his lady 
urged him to secure. " Add faith unto your force, and be not 
faint." After this general picture of the conquest over Error, 
Spenser began to sketch, in the bitter spirit of his time, the rela- 
tion of Catholicism to the Red Cross Knight of England. 

The knight's armour was worn that he might stand against 
" the wiles of the devil." That chief deceiver, Archimago, now 
appeared, representing as a simple hermit the first stage of what 
Spenser looked upon as the "diabolical faith" (§ 45). He bade 
the Red Cross Knight and his companions to rest within his 
hermitage, and, as they slept there he created by his magic a 

D D 2 



45 2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1590 

deceiving semblance of the lady, now named Una, because of 
the singleness of Truth. The deceiving image represented 
sensuous religion. The Christian misdoubted the corrupt Church 
that yet feigned to be his, and missed the firm voice of his guide 
and comforter: 

" ' Why, dame,' quoth he, ' what hath ye thus dismayed ? 
What frayes ye, that were wont to comfort me affrayd?'" 

The close of that first canto represented, then, from Spenser's 
point of view, the Christian before the Reformation. In the second 
canto, simple Truth having been maligned by arts of the devil, 
the Christian was stirred to passion against her, she was deserted 
by him, body and soul, but at her slow pace she followed the 
man carried away by his swift passions. Then the devil, hater 
of truth, disguised himself as the Red Cross Knight, and there 
was the " diabolical faith " personified. The true Saint George — 
the religion of England — parted from Truth, met with a faithless 
Saracen, named Sansfoy, Infidelity, strong, careless about God 
and man, companion of the woman clothed in scarlet, who was 
mitred, jewelled, and borne on a " wanton palfrey" — by wanton 
passions. Then followed the shock of battle against infidelity, 
which only through the death of Christ has Christianity been 
able to survive : 

" ' Curse on that Cross ' (quoth then the Sarazin), 
' That keepes thy body from the bitter fitt ! 
Dead long ygoe, I wote, thou haddest bin, 
Had not that charme from thee forwarned itt.' " 

The heavenward -striving soul could strike down infidelity; 
but then it took the woman clothed in scarlet, named Duessa, 
because of the doubleness of Falsehood, for Fidessa, the true 
faith. She was another image of the Church of Rome — 

" Borne the sole daughter of an Emperour, 
He that the wide West under his rule has, 
And high hath set his throne where Tiberis doth pas." 

Her the knight took for companion; but she appealed rather to 
his eyes than to his mind, he was — 

" More busying his quicke eies her face to view, 
Than his dull eares to heare what shee did tell. 

He travelled on with his new lady, who could not endure the 
heat of the day, and rested with her under shade of trees, from 
which he plucked a bough to make a garland for her forehead. 
But the tree bled, and uttered a sad voice. It was Fradubio, 



TOA.D..1596.] SPENSER'S "FAERIE QUEENE." 453 

thus transformed because he had doubted between the witch 
Duessa and Fraelissa. That witch had caused Fraelissa to 
appear deformed, Fradubio had then given himself to Duessa, 
till one day he saw her in her own true ugliness. Fradubio 
and Fraelissa were both turned to trees, and 

" 'We may not channge' (quoth he) 'this evill plight, 
Till we be bathed in a living well.' " 

Fraelissa being thus transformed, and awaiting such release, 
could not herself represent true Christian faith, between which 
and the false Church Fradubio was in doubt. Spenser repre- 
sented by her a pure heathen philosophy, like that of Plato ; 
purer and fairer than the "diabolical faith" that rivalled and 
supplanted it, but no longer an active moving power in the 
world. Philosophy must live with its votary a vegetative life 
until its powers are renewed by union with the Church of Christ. 
" A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse— a well of living 
waters." 

In the next canto, forsaken Truth, parted from men, 

" Her dainty limbs did lay 
In secrete shadow, far from all men's sight : 
From her fayre head her fillet she undight, 
And layd her stole aside. Her angel's face, 
As the great eye of heaven, shyned bright, 
And made a sunshine in the shady place ; 
Did never mortal eye behold such heavenly grace." 

A lion that rushed upon her was subdued to the service of her 
innocence. Spenser used here the romance doctrine that a lion 
will not hurt a virgin. St. George, in " The Seven Champions," 
recognised the virginity of Sabra by two lions fawning upon her. 
Spenser's lion, whose yielded pride and proud submission made 
him the companion of Una, represented Reason before the 
Reformation serving as ally of Truth against Ignorance and 
, Superstition. " The lion would not leave her desolate, but with 
her went along," and presently they came near the dwelling of 
Ignorance and her daughter Superstition. Una called to the 
damsel — the voice of Truth calling to Superstition : 

" But the rude wench her answered nought at all : 
Shee could not heare, nor speake, nor understand ; 
Till seeing by her side the Lyon stand 
With suddeine feare her pitcher downe she threw. 
And fled away : for never in that land 
Face of fayre Lady she before did view, 
And that dredd Lyon's looke her cast in deadly hew." 



454 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1590 

She never had seen the fair face of Truth, and dreaded the 
attack of Reason. The Lion, " with his rude clawes, the wicket 
open rent," thus representing still the work of Reason at the 
Reformation. Una and the lion, Truth served by Reason, lay- 
down in the house of Ignorance and Superstition, whither by 
night came Kirk-rapine with plunder of the Church to his com- 
panion, " the daughter of this woman blind, Abessa, daughter of 
Corceca slow." Kirk-rapine represented theft of sacred things 
and of the money of the poor, by men who entered the Church 
only for the goods they could take out of it ; by the abbots and 
high clergy, the hirelings in the Church, false pastors who took 
no care of the sheep committed to their care, except to fleece 
them and devour their flesh. Kirk-rapine found in Abessa's 
den the lion, who, 

"' Encountring fierce, him suddein doth surprize; 
And, seizing cniell clawes on trembling brest, 
Under his lordly foot him proudly hath supprest." 

Doubtless, the general image of the force of reason in attack on 
the ill-gotten wealth of those who took to their own use what 
was given to maintain religion and relieve the poor, was joined 
here to a particular image of the lion of England, as Henry 
VIII., with his foot on the suppressed monasteries. Therefore, 
when it is said of Kirk-rapine that " the thirsty land dranke up 
his life," there might be reference to the enrichment of the land 
by restoration of wealth that had been drawn from it to feed the 
luxury of Churchmen. 

Reason had now taken its fit place in the allegory. In 
Spenser's system it was not by help of Reason, but only by 
Grace of God, that the last triumph was to be secured. The 
lion, therefore, fell under the stroke of Sansloy. Reason could 
not resist the force of lawlessness. Not yet joined to her Red 
Cross Knight, Una had only the natural heart of man to recog- 
nise her beauty. She was adored by the " salvage nation." 

" During which tyme her gentle wit she plyes 
To teach them truth, which worshipt her in vaine, 
And made her th' Image of Idolotryes." 

The Red Cross Knight was taken by Duessa to the House of 
Pride, thence, warned and aided by the natural instincts of his 
dwarf, he escaped, wounded by Joylessness ; and being weary 
took his armour off and rested by the way. He sat by a fount- 
ain which had been once a nymph — one of Diana's nymphs— 



toa.d. 1596.3 SPENSER'S "FAERIE QUEENE.' 455 

who " satt downe to rest in middest of the race." " Let us not 
be weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap — if we 
faint not." The Christian warrior, thus resting in midst of his 
race, escaped from the pomps of " the diabolical faith " only to 
become the thrall to like pomps in another form. That Spenser 
held to be the present danger of the English Church. The woeful 
dwarf, the common body of the people, took up the knight's 
neglected arms, carried them on, seeking aid in this distress, 
and met with Una. Then to the aid of Truth and to the rescue 
of the religion of England came Prince Arthur, bearing the 
shield of Divine Grace. " Ay, me," now says the poet in the 
prelude to the canto which describes Prince Arthur's inter- 
vention, — 

" Ay, me ! how many perils doe enfold 
The righteous man, to make him daily fall, 
Were not that heavenly Grace doth him uphold 
And stedfast Truth acquite him out of all." 

The wondrous horn blown by Arthur's squire — the faithful 
preacher — before the giant's castle, was the horn of the Gospel. 

" Wyde wonders overall 
Of that same homes great virtues weren told, 
Which had approved bene in uses manifold." 

The rescued Christian looking back on his delusions and 
misdeeds was tempted by despair, but the voice of Truth 
answered to his doubt : 

Come, come away, fraile, feeble, fleshly wight, 

Ne let vaine words bewitch thy manly hart, 

Ne divelish thoughts dismay thy constant spright; 

In heavenly mercies hast thou not a part ? 

Why should'st thou then despeire that chosen art ? 

Where justice growes, there grows eke greater Grace. 

And when the Red Cross Knight was next brought by Una 
to the House of Holiness, where Dame Ccelia lived with her 
three daughters, Faith, Hope, and Charity, to be prepared for 
the last great fight with the Dragon, the opening stanza showed, 
again, how carefully Spenser had provided for the most essential 
feature of his poem, express declaration of its meaning: 

' What man is he, that boasts of fleshly might 
And vaine assuraunce of mortality, 
Which, all so soone as it doth come to fight 
Against spirituall foes, yields by and by, 
Or from the fielde most cowardly doth fly! 



4)6 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE [a.d. 159& 

Ne let the man ascribe it to his skill, 
That thorough Grace hath gained victory : 
If any strength we have, it is to ill, 
But all the good is God's, both power and eke will." 

Spenser believed that he had given aid enough for the inter- 
pretation of his allegory. In the introduction to his second 
book he told the reader that 

" Of faery land, yet if he more inquyre, 
By certein signes, hege sett in sondrie place 
He may it fynd: ne let him then admyre, 
But yield his sence to bee too blunt and bace 
That no'te without an hound fine footing trace." 

Spenser's "fine footing" has been traced but carelessly % 
while all readers have felt the sweetness of music, and enjoyed 
the feast of imagination that the Faerie Queene offers ta 
those who simply yield themselves up to a sense of the sur- 
passing beauty of its pictures and of its deeply earnest spiritual 
undertone. Profoundly earnest, and the work of a pure mind, 
the Faerie Queene is yet bitter at core. It is the work of a 
great poet, who felt and expressed both the essence and the 
accidents of the great struggle in which he was himself a com- 
batant. Through all its delicious melody it breathes a stern 
defiance of whatever cause was not, in the eyes of a true-hearted 
Elizabethan Puritan, the cause of God. The deeper allegory 
that expresses abstract truth holds on throughout the Faerie 
Queene its steady course, but it is conveyed through many 
references, in their own time not in the least obscure, to affairs 
of England, Ireland, France, Spain, Belgium. For example, in 
the ninth canto of Book V. Spenser enforced the whole case for 
the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, and at the beginning of 
the next canto he spoke his mind, still on the surface of the 
allegory of Mercilla and Duessa, upon Elizabeth's unwillingness 
to sentence Marv. The doom was 

" By her tempred without griefe or gall,, 
Till strong constraint did her thereto enforce:. 
And yet even then ruing her wilfull fall 
With more than needfull naturall remorse, 
And yeelding the last honour to her wretched corse.. 

The larger allegory dealt here with the mercy tnat should 
season justice ; but the bitterness of conflict was so prominent 
that, on the publication, in 1596, of the second part of the Faerie 
Queene, which contained this passage and others like it, King- 
James of Scotland desired Spenser's prosecution. The English 



toa.d. I599-] SAMUEL DANIEL. 457 

ambassador in Scotland wrote to Lord Burghley, in November, 
1596, that he had satisfied the king as to the privilege under 
which the book was published, yet he still desired that Edmund 
Spenser, for this fault, might be tried and punished. 

79. Samuel Daniel was born near Taunton, in 1 562, the son 
of a music master. From 1579 to 1582 he was studying as a 
commoner at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, but he did not take a 
degree. In 1585, at the age of twenty-three, he translated from 
the Italian The Worthy Tract of Patilus Iouius, contayning a 
Discourse of rare Inventions, both Militarie and Amorotis, called 
Impresse. W hereunto is added a Preface, contayning the Arte 
of Composing them, with many other Notable Deuises. Daniel 
became tutor to the Lady Anne Clifford, afterwards Countess of 
Pembroke, and became historian and poet under the patronage 
of the Earl of Pembroke's family. He began his career as an 
original poet, strongly influenced by the Italian writers, in 1592, 
with Delia: contayning certayne Sonnets, with the Complaint of 
Posamond. This he dedicated to Mary, Countess of Pembroke, 
Sidney's sister; augmented editions, bringing the number of 
sonnets to fifty-seven, followed in 1594 and 1595. In 1595, 
Daniel combined his functions of historian and poet by publish- 
ing The First Fowre Books of the Civille Warres betweene tJie 
Two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke. This poem is in stanzas 
of the octave rhyme, established by Boccaccio as the Italian 
measure for narrative poetry (ch. iv. § 12), used by Pulci, Boiardo, 
Ariosto, Tasso. Strongly influenced by Italian forms, and often 
paraphrasing and translating from Italian, Daniel took naturally 
to octave rhyme for his poem on the civil wars. It was, like 
Sackville's tragedy of Buckingham, in the Mirror for Magis- 
trates, too much of a history to be a poem in the true artistic 
sense, but it was musical in versification, patriotic and religious, 
and somewhat diffuse in moralising, with so much of the con- 
servative tone that, in Church matters, some thought Daniel 
inclined towards Catholicism. In 1597 appeared his Tragedy 
of Philotos; in 1599, Musophilus, and other Poetical Essay es. 
The poem on the Civil Wars was also extended to five books in 
1599, a sixth book followed in 1602. Daniel's Musophilus was 
a general defence of learning in dialogue between Philocosmus, 
a lover of the world, and Musophilus, a lover of the Muses. It 
has been said that after the death of Spenser, in 1599, Daniel 
Succeeded him as poet laureate. But there was in Elizabeth's 
time no recognised court office of poet laureate (ch. v. § 34). 



45§ A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1590 

80. Michael Drayton, born at Harthill, Warwickshire, 
was of about the same age as Daniel, but a poet with more 
sensibility, more vigour and grace of thought. Like Daniel, he 
began to write after 1590, and became a busy poet. He is said 
to have been maintained for a time at Oxford by Sir Henry 
Godere, of Polsworth, and he had a friend and patron in Sir 
Walter Aston, of Tixhall, in Staffordshire. In 1591, Drayton 
began his career as poet with a sacred strain : The Harmonie 
of the Church, containing the Spiritual Songs and Holy Hy nines 
of Godly Men, Patriarchs, and Prophets, all sweetly sounding 
to the Glory of the Highest. This was followed, in 1 593, by Idea; 
The Shepherd's Garland, fashioned in Nine Eclogs; Rowland's 
Sacrifice to the Nine Muses ; in 1594, by his Matilda, and 
his Idea's Mirrour, Amours in Quatorzains. In 1596, Matilda 
reappeared in a volume which showed Drayton's muse to be 
then running parallel with Daniel's in choice of subject, and to 
be passing from love pastorals and sonnets to a strain from the 
past history of England. A year after Daniel's "Civil Wars," 
appeared Drayton's Tragical Legend of Robert Duke of Nor- 
7nandy, with the Legend of Matilda the Chaste, Daughter of 
the Lord Robert Fit z water, poy soiled by Ki?ig Johnj and the 
Legend of Piers Gaveston, the latter two by him newly corrected 
and augmented; and in the same year, 1596 — year of the second 
part of the Faerie Queetie, and of Spenser's last publications — 
appeared Drayton's Mortimeriados ; The Lamentable Ciuell 
Warres of Edward the Second and the Barrons — a poem 
afterwards known as the Barons' Wars. It was in stanzas of 
octave rhyme, like that poem on the civil wars of Lancaster and 
York which Daniel had published in part, and was still at work 
upon. The poets chose these themes because they yielded 
much reverse of fortune that could point a moral in the spirit 
illustrated by the still popular Mirror for Magistrates (§ 9). 
In 1598 Drayton again made poetry of history by publishing — 
their idea taken from Ovid — Engla?id's Heroical Epistles— 
letters from Rosamond to Henry II. and Henry II. to Rosa- 
mond, with like pairs of letters between King John and Matilda, 
Mortimer and Queen Isabel, and so forth. 

Henry Constable published in 1592 twenty-three sonnets, 
under the title of Diana; or, the Praises of his Mistres in 
Certaine Sweeie Sonnets: five were added to the next edition 
(1594). Other occasional verses and his Spiritual Sonnets 
bear witness to his ingenuity and sense of music. Constable 



toa.d. 1599. J MICHAEL DRAYTON. CONSTABLE. DA VIES. 459 

belonged to a good Roman Catholic family, was born about 
1555, became B.A. of St. John's College, Cambridge, 1579, and 
falling, as a Roman Catholic, under suspicion of treasonable 
correspondence with France, left England in 1595. In 1601 or 
1602 he ventured to return, was discovered, and committed to 
the Tower, whence he was not released till the close of 1604. 
He was dead in 16 16. 

81. John Davies — who did not become Sir John till after 
the death of Elizabeth — was born in 1570, third son of John 
Davies, a lawyer at Westbury, in Wiltshire. He was sent to 
Oxford at the age of fifteen, as commoner of Queen's College, 
and thence went to study law at the Middle Temple, but he 
returned to Oxford in 1590 and took his degree of B.A. He was 
called to the Bar in 1595, and in 1596 published a poem on the 
art of dancing, entitled Orchestra. In the Middle Temple John 
Davies had been sometimes under censure for irregularities, and 
in February, 1598, he was expelled the Society for beating one 
Mr. Martin in the Temple Hall. John Davies then went back to 
Oxford and wrote a poem of good thoughts, pithily expressed, 
in quatrains. The poem was called (Know Thyself) Nosce 
Teiftstim. This Oracle Expoimded in Two Elegies. 1. Of 
Humane Knowledge. 2. Of the Soule of Man, a?id the Im- 
mortalite thereof j dedicated to Elizabeth, and published in 
1599. Its stanzas of elegiac verse were so well packed with 
thought, always neatly contained within the limit of each 
stanza, that we shall afterwards have to trace back to this 
poem the adoption of its measure as, for a time, our "heroic 
stanza." The manner of it may be shown in a few quatrains 
that point the connection between Nosce Teiftsum (Know Thy- 
self) and its author's recent disgrace at the Middle Temple : 

" If aught can teach us aught, Affliction's looks 
(Making us pry into ourselves so near), 
Teach us to know ourselves, beyond all books, 
Or all the learned schools that ever were. 

' This mistress lately pluck'd me by the ear, 
And many a golden lesson hath me taught ; 
Hath made my senses quick and reason clear; 
Reform'd my will and rectify'd my thought. 

*** So do the winds and thunders cleanse the air: 
So working seas settle and purge the wine : 
So lopp'd and pruned trees do flourish fair: 
So doth the fire the drossy gold refine. 



460 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1530 

" Neither Minerva, nor the learned Muse, 
Nor rules of art, nor precepts of the wise, 
Could in my brain those beams of skill infuse, 
As but the glance of this dame's angry eyes. 

" She within lists my ranging mind hath brought. 
That now beyond myself I will not go; 
Myself am centre of my circling thought, 
Only myself I study, learn, and know." 

Thenceforth there was a change in Davies's career. He 
was a member of the Parliament which met in October, 1601, 
showing liberal interest in the privileges of the House and the 
liberties of the people. In Trinity term of that year he was 
restored to his old rank in the Temple; and at the death of 
Elizabeth stood ready for a rapid rise in his profession. 

82. William Camden (§ 16, 65), who was second master 
of Westminster School when he published, in 1586, the first 
edition of his Britannia— a work afterwards much expanded — 
succeeded Dr. Edward Grant as head master in 1593. In 1597 
he published for the use of Westminster boys a Greek Grammar, 
which in course of time went through a hundred editions. In 
the same year he left the school on being appointed Clarencieux 
King-at-Arms. Camden was widely famed for learning, and 
his purity of life and modest kindliness surrounded him with 
friends. 

John Stow (§ 16) still worked at history, and published in 
1598, when more than seventy years old, the first edition of his 
Survey of London — a book of great value. But he had lost 
his best friends, and at the end of Elizabeth's reign he was dis- 
tressed by poverty. 

John Hayward — who became Sir John in the next reign — • 
published, in 1599, the first of his historical biographies, as the 
First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie I II I, 
Extending to the end of the first yeare of his raigne. It was 
dedicated, with high admiration, to the Earl of Essex, at a time 
when the earl's dealing with the question of King James's suc- 
cession was bringing his head into peril ; and it contained a 
passage on hereditary right in matters of succession that caused 
Elizabeth to imprison the author and bid Francis Bacon search 
the book for any treasonous matter to be found in it. Narra- 
tives and stage presentations of the deposition of Richard II. 
were at this time supposed to have political significance. 
Bacon's report was a good-natured joke : he found no treason 
but much larceny from Tacitus. 



toa.d. 1599.] HISTORIANS. BACON. RALEIGH. <J.6l 

83. Francis Bacon (§ 38, 48, 68), who had sat in Parliament 
for Melcombe Regis and Taunton, became member for Middlesex 
in the Parliament that met in February, 1593. One of the 
first questions before it was the granting of money to provide 
against danger from the Catholic Powers by which England was 
threatened. The Lords asked for a treble subsidy, payable 
within three years, in six instalments. Bacon assented to the 
subsidy, but raised a point of privilege in objection to the joining 
of the Commons with the Upper House in granting it. The point 
of privilege was overruled ; the Lords and Commons did confer ; 
the treble subsidy was granted ; four years instead of three being 
allowed for the payment. Bacon had argued that the payment 
ought to extend over six years, for three reasons— the difficulty, 
the discontent, and the better means of supply than subsidy. 
His speeches on this occasion gave serious offence to the queen. 
He had no longer free access to her at Court, and this displeasure 
made her less ready to give him, over the heads of older lawyers, 
the office of Attorney- General, which presently fell vacant. The 
Earl of Essex, six years younger than Francis Bacon, was then 
looked to by both Anthony and Francis as their patron, and he 
did all that he could to influence the queen in Bacon's favour. 
The queen hesitated; dwelt on Bacon's youth and small ex- 
perience — he was thirty-three — and in April, 1594, she gave the 
desired office to Sir Edward Coke, who was already Solicitor- 
General, who had large practice and high reputation as a 
lawyer, and was nine years older than Bacon. But Coke's 
appointment left vacant the office of Solicitor-General. For this 
suit was made with continued zeal, but in November, 1595, it 
was given to Serjeant Fleming. Essex, generous and impulsive, 
wished to make some amends to Bacon for his disappointment, 
and gave him a piece of land, which he afterwards sold for 
^1,800 — say about ,£12,000, at the present value of money. 
Before July, 1596, Bacon was made Queen's Counsel. At the 
beginning of May in that year, Sir Thomas Egerton, who had 
been Master of the Rolls, became Lord Keeper. Bacon then 
sought in vain to succeed Egerton as Master of the Rolls. That 
was the year in which the Earl of Essex sailed for Cadiz. 

84. Sir Walter Kaleigh. (§ 27) went with Essex on that 
expedition. He and Essex had been volunteers in the expedi- 
tion of Drake and N orris (§ 69) to Portugal, which came home 
with much booty. Then the " Shepherd of the Ocean" went to 
Ireland, and came back with his friend Spenser to Court, after 



402 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1590 

planting about his own house at Youghal the first potatoes in 
Ireland, with roots brought from Virginia. In the spring of 
1 59 1 an expedition was sent out under Lord Thomas Howard 
and Raleigh's cousin, Sir Richard Grenville, to intercept the 
fleet which annually brought to Spain its treasure from the 
East. The English cruised about the Azores, where the Spanish 
fleets from the East and the West Indies came together. The 
Spanish fleet was found to be too strong, and Lord Thomas 
Howard ordered his ships to keep together and avoid attack ; 
but Sir Richard Grenville, in the Revenge, believing that others 
would follow, boldly dashed into the enemy's armada, where he 
was left unaided, and fought desperately for fifteen hours with 
fifteen great ships out of a fleet of fifty-five, sinking two and 
doing great damage to others. When the Revenge must needs 
be lost, and Grenville himself was wounded in the brain, he 
ordered his surviving men to blow up the vessel. But the 
Revenge was surrendered, Grenville's wounds were dressed by 
the Spanish surgeons, the Spaniards who stood by marvelling 
at his stout heart. As death drew near he said to them, in 
Spanish, " Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet 
mind, for that I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to da 
that hath fought for his country, queen, religion, and honour ;. 
whereby my soul most joyful departeth out of this body, and 
shall always leave behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and 
true soldier that hath done his duty, as he was bound to do." 
A Report of the Truth of the Fight about the lies of Azores 
this last Sommer Betuuixt the Reuenge, one of her Maiesties 
Shippes, and an Armada of the King of ' Sfiaine, was published 
by Raleigh in November, 1 591. 

Raleigh then had Sherborne Castle given to him, but was 
soon afterwards in the Tower, under her Majesty's displeasure, 
for an amour with Elizabeth Throgmorton, a Maid of Honour, 
whom he married after his release. He was in the Parliament 
of 1593, when a bill was brought in for suppression of the 
Brownists — a sect opposed to prelacy, and claiming equality 
and independence of all congregations. " Root them out," 
said Raleigh, " by all means ; but there are twenty thousand 
of them, and if the men are put to death or banished, 
who is to maintain the wives and children?" Raleigh next 
planned an expedition to Guiana, tempted by the fables about 
El Dorado (the Gilded One, priest or king smeared with oil and 
covered with gold dust, an ideal god of wealth, lord of a city 



toa.d. I597-] ■>/£ WALTER RALEIGH. FRANCIS BACON. 463 

fabulously rich), and sailed with a little expedition in February, 
1595, attacked the Spaniards in Trinidad, and destroyed the 
new city of San Jose. He then went up the Orinoco, picked up 
a legend of Amazons, which gave its European name to a great 
river, and, when the rains set in, came home, bringing a young 
cacique with him. Raleigh reached England about the end of 
July, 1595, lived in London in great state, and published, in 1596, 
The Discover ie of the Empyre of Guiana, with a Relation of the 
Citie of Manoa (which the Spanyai'ds call El Dorado), and of 
the Prouinces of Emeria, Arromaia, Amapaia, d^c. Performed 
in the year 1595. 

In the spring of 1596 the Spanish forces, under Cardinal 
Albert, Archduke of Austria, Spanish Governor of the Nether- 
lands, took Calais before English aid could be sent to Henry IV. 
of France. An English fleet, with a Dutch contingent, sailed 
from Plymouth on the 1st of June, under Essex as commander 
of land forces and Lord Howard of Effingham as commander at 
sea, with Sir Walter Raleigh as Rear-Admiral. It entered the 
harbour of Cadiz, scattered and partly destroyed the fleet — the 
Spaniards themselves firing the large vessels — and left the Duke 
of Medina Sidonia to burn the carracks laden with merchandise 
worth millions, while they were engaged in the capture and sack 
of the town. Essex counselled that they should proceed to 
catch the treasure fleet on its way home, but this counsel was 
overruled, and a few days afterwards the Spanish treasure fleet 
sailed unhurt up the Tagus. The popularity of Essex was 
greatly increased, and Bacon wrote him a long letter on the 
text of Martha troubled about many things when one only was 
needful, and that one was — win the queen. It was a letter of 
astute council as to the management of her Majesty. 

85. Francis Bacon having fallen into debt, cherished, in 
1597, a hope of marrying the rich young widow of Sir William 
Hatton, who died in March of that year. In that year, also, 
Bacon was returned to Parliament as member for Ipswich. 
Essex endeavoured to help him in his widow hunt. The lady, in 
November, 1598, married Sir Edward Coke. In 1597 Essex sailed 
with another expedition to the. Azores, where he was joined by 
Raleigh, as Rear-Admiral. Raleigh took the town of Fayal, 
and was accused of breach of discipline ; but nothing more 
came of that expedition, except the chance capture of a few rich 
prizes. When the fleet returned, in October, there had been 
alarm at home of Spanish invasion. A Spanish force had been 



464 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1597 

seen from the coast of Cornwall ; some of its officers had landed 
on the Stilly Islands. But again our loyal English weather had 
confounded the Spaniards, and that danger, the last of its kind, 
had been averted. 

It was in January of this year (1597) that Francis Bacon 
— then thirty-six years old — published, with a dedication to his 
brother, Essay es, Religious Meditations, Places of Perswasion 
a?id Disswasion. The essays in this first edition were only 
ten in number, and they dealt exclusively with the immediate 
relations of a man to life ; his private use of his own mind ; his 
use of it in relation to the minds of others, in relation to the 
interests of others, in relation to his own interests — personally, 
as in case of money, health, and reputation, and also as they 
were mixed up with the business of mankind. Thus the ten 
essays were — 1. Of Study; 2. Of Discourse; 3. Of Ceremonies 
and Respects ; 4. Of Followers and Friends ; 5. Of Suitors ; 
6. Of Expense; 7. Of Regiment of Health; 8. Of Honour and 
Reputation ; 9. Of Faction ; 10. Of Negotiating. The relation 
of man to another world was left designedly beyond the range 
of this first little group of essays ; but that element was sup- 
plied in the same book by twelve essays of another kind — the 
"Religious Meditations" which next followed. These " Medi- 
tationes Sacras"were in Latin; their subjects — 1. The Works 
of God and Man ; 2. The Miracles of our Saviour ; 3. The 
Innocency of the Dove and the Wisdom of the Serpent ; 4. The 
Exaltation of Charity ; 5. The Moderation of Cares ; 6. Earthly 
Hope ; 7. Hypocrites ; 8. Impostors ; 9. Several kinds of Im- 
posture ; 10. Atheism; 11. Heresies; 12. The Church of the 
Scriptures. The third section was formed by a group of what 
may be called ten essays of another kind — " A Table of Coulers, 
or Apparances of Good and Euil, and their Degrees as Places 
of Perswasion and Disswasion ; and their several Fallaxes, and 
the Elenches of them." Colours meant circumstances which are 
likely to produce popular impressions and to sway the judgment 
of a weak man, or of a strong man not fully considering and 
pondering a matter. They persuade to error, and they also 
quicken the persuasion to accept a truth. Therefore, said 
Bacon, " to make a true and safe judgment nothing can be of 
greater use and defence to the mind than the discovery and 
reprehension of these colours, showing in what cases they hold 
and in what cases they deceive : which, as it cannot be done but 
out of a very universal knowledge of the nature of things, so 



a.d. 1597.] FIRST EDITION OF BACON'S ESSAYS. 465 

being performed, it so cleareth a man's judgment and election 
as it is the less apt to slide into error." Elenches are specious 
arguments. Bacon takes a colourable form, such as this — " Let 
us not wander into generalities, let us compare particular with 
particular," submits it to an intellectual analysis, and points out 
where its fallacies may lie ; illustrating his argument with 
images that would themselves have force to persuade or dis- 
suade. Thus the form, " Let us not wander into generalities, 
let us compare particulars with particulars," is met in three 
ways, which are illustrated by these three examples — "The 
blossom of May is generally better than the blossom of March ; 
and yet the best blossom of March is better than the best 
blossom of May." " In many armies, if the matter should be 
tried by duel between two champions, the victory should go 
on one side, and yet if it be tried by the gross it would go of the 
other side." " Generally metal is more precious than stone, and 
yet a diamond is more precious than gold." 

The little book, no bigger than the palm of a man's hand, 
in which Bacon made his first appearance as an essayist, is thus, 
throughout, an illustration of that genius for analysis applied to 
the life of man which he applied in his philosophy to Nature. 
He used the word "essay" in its exact sense. The Latin 
exigere meant to test very exactly, to apply to a standard, 
weight or measure. The late Latin word exagium meant a 
weighing, or a standard weight; thence came Italian saggio, 
a proof, trial, sample ; and assaggiare, to prove or try ; whence 
the French essay, and the English double forms, " assay " and 
"essay." An assay of gold is an attempt to ascertain and 
measure its alloys and to determine accurately its character 
and value. An essay of anything in human nature submitted 
it to a like process within the mind : it was an "essay of" some- 
thing, and not as we write, now that the true sense of the word 
is obscured, an " essay on." Strictly in that sense Bacon used 
the word, and the essays, at which we shall find his work 
running side by side with the development of his philosophy, 
have therefore a definite relation to it. The style of these brief 
essays, in which every sentence was compact with thought and 
polished in expression until it might run alone through the world 
as a maxim, had all the strength of euphuism and none of its 
weakness. The sentences were all such as it needed ingenuity 
to write ; but this was the rare ingenuity of wisdom. Each 
essay, shrewdly discriminative, contained a succession of wise- 

£ £ 



466 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1597 

thoughts exactly worded. Take, for example, the first form of 
the first words of the first essay in this first edition : " Studies 
serue for pastimes, for ornaments, and for abilities. Their chiefe 
use for pastime is in priuateness and retiring ; for ornamente is 
in discourse, and for abilitie is in iudgement. For expert men 
can execute, but learned men are fittest to iudge or censure. To 
spend too much time in them is sloath, to vse them too much 
for ornament is affectation : to make iudgement wholly by their 
rules is the humour of a scholler. They perfect Nature, and are 
perfected by experience. Craftie men contemne them, simple 
men admire them, wise men vse them : For they teach not their 
owne vse, but that is a wisedome without them : and aboue them 
wonne by obseruation. Reade not to contradict, nor to belieue, 
but to waigh and consider." And so forth ; words like these 
being themselves considered by their writer and made more 
weighty in subsequent editions. Small as the book was, the 
quality of Bacon's mind was proved by this first publication of 
his essays. 

86. Elizabeth's faithful Minister, William Cecil, Lord 
Burghley, died in August, 1598 ; Philip II. of Spain died a month 
later. But Spain still threatened England. Hugh O'Neale, Earl 
of Tyrone, aided by Spain, was in arms in Ireland. Sir John 
Norris had died under the fatigues of conflict with him. The 
Earl of Essex — frank and generous, but hot-headed, obstinate, 
and indiscreet — was made Lord- Deputy of Ireland, with large 
power. He left London for Dublin, openly confident of his 
future achievements, at the end of March, 1599. In May he 
marched out of Dublin with 16,000 men. After showy move- 
ments in Munster that seemed purposeless, for his work lay in 
Ulster, he had, early in September, a force in Ulster facing 
that of the rebel army ; but after a conference with Tyrone 
he assented to a six weeks' armistice, and agreed to make 
known to the English Government such conditions of peace 
from Tyrone as a conqueror might have dictated. Then he 
dispersed his army. The queen wrote her disapproval ; Essex 
left his command to hurry to her, and on the 28th of September, 
"about ten o'clock in the morning, alighted at the court-gate 
in post, and made all haste up to the presence, and so to the 
privy chamber, and stayed not till he came to the queen's bed- 
chamber, where he found the queen newly up, with her hair 
about her face .... and he so full of dirt and mire that his 
very face was full of it." He was commanded in the evening 



to a.d. 1601.I FRANCIS BACON. 467 

to keep his chamber. Next day he was examined before the 
Council, and was put under easy restraint— first with the Lord- 
Keeper, then in his own house. Tyrone rose in rebellion again ; 
another lord-deputy was sent, whose action was efficient. Essex 
was then suspended from his offices of Privy Councillor, Lord- 
Marshal, and Master of the Ordnance. In August he was 
released from custody, but forbidden to come to Court. His 
monopoly of sweet wines expired, and Elizabeth would not 
renew the patent. Then his quick temper became rebellious. 
He had been in correspondence with James VI. of Scotland — 
by cypher in the hand of Francis Bacon's brother Anthony — to 
force from Elizabeth, now sixty-eight years old, a recognition of 
her successor. His impulsive dealing with this question perhaps 
introduced the considerations that had paralyzed his Irish 
policy. But Essex now passed into open rebellion. On the 8th 
of February, 1601, he and three hundred gentlemen, including 
Shakespeare's friend, the Earl of Southampton, were at Essex 
House. The queen sent the Lord- Keeper and other officers of 
State to ask the reason of the gathering. Essex contrived to 
lock them up in his library, and then, with his adherents, he 
rode out to raise the Londoners. His object was to surprise the 
Court, seize the queen's person, and compel her to dismiss her 
present advisers and then call a Parliament. But he overrated 
his own influence with the people, and after some lives had been 
lost, retreated by water to Essex House, burnt some papers, and 
was forced to surrender ; that night the Earls of Essex anc ? 
Southampton were prisoners in the Tower. Queen's counsel, 
Bacon one of them, were called upon to inquire into this act of 
treason, by examining the prisoners. They worked for seven 
days, in parties of not more than three, taking the several 
prisons in succession. When Essex was arraigned, the evidence 
against him was produced by Coke, and Coke's way of letting it 
run off into side issues was rather favourable to the accused. 
Then Bacon rose, not being called upon to rise, pointed more 
strongly the accusations against his friend and benefactor, and 
brought the evidence back into a course more perilous to his 
life. " As Cain," said Bacon, " that first murderer, took up an 
excuse for his fact, shaming to outface it with impudency, thus 
the earl made his colour the severing some men and councillors 
from her Majesty's favour, and the fear he stood in of his pre- 
tended enemies, lest they should murder him in his house." 
The evidence proceeded, and Coke's method again gave the earl 

E E 2 



468 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1577 

some advantage. Bacon then rose and said, " I have never yet 
seen in any case such favour shown to any prisoner ; so many 
digressions, such delivering of evidence by fractions, and so silly 
a defence of such great and notorious treasons." And he pro- 
ceeded again to urge the main accusation home against Essex. 
On the 25th of February, 1601, Essex was beheaded, by his own 
wish privately, within the Tower. Upon Lord Southampton 
sentence was not executed, but he remained a prisoner during 
the rest of Elizabeth's reign. Justification of the execution of 
the Earl of Essex was entrusted to the advocate who had 
pressed with most energy the case against him at his trial. 
Materials were supplied in " twenty-five papers concerning the 
Earl of Essex's treasons, &c, to be delivered to Mr. Francis 
Bacon, for Her Majesty's service ;" and Bacon's hand, following 
particular instructions as to the manner of treatment, drew up 
for the public A Declaration of the Practices and Treasons 
attempted and committed by Robert late Earle of Essex and 
his Complices. Before its publication (in 1601) this declaration 
was discussed by councillors and queen, and underwent the 
alterations incident to such discussion. Bacon had been living 
beyond his means, and was still seeking advancement. In 
September, 1598, he had been arrested for debt, but in the 
spring of 1601 his worldly means were somewhat improved by 
the death of his brother Anthony. He obtained a gift of ^1,200, 
the fine of ^ne of the accomplices of Essex, but he obtained no 
higher reward of his services before the death of Elizabeth, on 
the 24th of March, 1603. 

87. Francis Bacon, our first essayist, was preceded in 
European literature only by Montaigne. Montaigne had a 
translator in John Florio. It has been suggested, without 
reason, that in the Holofernes of Love's Labour's Lost, Shakes- 
peare was ridiculing Florio. " Resolute John Florio," as he 
wrote himself, was an active man of Italian descent, born in 
London in Henry VIII.'s reign, who taught Italian and French 
at Oxford, and was in high repute at Court. He published, in 
1578, Florio his First Fruitesj which yeelde familiar speech, 
merie Prouerbes, wittie sentences, and golden sayings. Also, 
a peifect Introduction to the Italia?i and English Tongues. In 
1 59 1 followed Florio's Second Frvtes. To which is annexed his 
Garden of Rec7 r eation, yeelding six thousand ItalioM P?'ouerbs. 
At the end of Elizabeth's reign, in 1603, appeared The Essays of 
Michael, Lord of Montaigne, done into English by John Florio. 



toa.d. 1600.] TRANSLATORS. RICHARD HOOKER. 469 

Upon a copy of this book Shakespeare's autograph has been 
found, and Shakespeare's knowledge of Montaigne is shown in 
the Tempest, where the ideal commonwealth of the old Lord 
Gonzalo (Act ii. sc. i) corresponds closely, in word as well as in 
thought, with Florio's Montaigne. Of course, also, the great 
poems of Ariosto and Tasso were translated. 

Sir John Harington, born at Helston, near Bath, in 
1 561, and educated at Eton and Cambridge, published at the 
age of thirty, in 1591, Orlando Furioso in English Heroical 
Verse. Harington was knighted on the field by the Earl of 
Essex. 

Tasso had in Elizabeth's reign two translators. The first 
was Richard Carew, whose Godfrey of Bulloigne, or the 
Recouerie of Hierusalem appeared in 1594; the second was 
Edward. Fairfax, whose translation appeared with the same 
titles in 1600. It is in the octave rhyme of the original, one of 
the most musical and poetical of all English translations into 
verse. Fairfax was the second son, perhaps illegitimate, of Sir 
Thomas Fairfax, of Denton, in Yorkshire. He lived as a retired 
scholar at Newhall, in Knaresborough Forest, and, later in life, 
educated with his own children those of his brother Ferdinand, 
Lord Fairfax. One of these nephews became famous as the 
Fairfax of the Civil Wars. Edward Fairfax himself lived into 
the reign of Charles I., and died in 1632. 

88. The literature of the Church of England was represented 
in the latter years of Elizabeth's reign by Richard Hooker, 
who was born at Heavitree, near Exeter, about 1553. He was 
to have been apprenticed to a trade, but his aptness for study 
caused him to be kept at school by his teacher, who persuaded 
young Richard Hooker's well-to-do uncle, John, then Chamber- 
lain of Exeter, to put him to college for a year. John Hooker, 
a friend of Bishop Jewel's (§ 14), introduced his nephew to that 
bishop, who, finding the boy able and his parents poor, sent 
him at the age of fifteen to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. 
Edwin Sandys, Bishop of London, heard from Jewel the praises 
of young Richard Hooker, and though himself a Cambridge 
man, sent his son to Oxford that he might have Hooker, whose 
age then was nineteen, for tutor and friend. Other pupils came, 
and Hooker was on the most pleasant relations with them. In 
1577 he became M.A. and Fellow of his college. 

89. A friend of Hooker's at college, about four years older 
than himself, was Sir Henry Savile, who had graduated at 



47° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1579, 

Brazenose and removed on a Fellowship to Merton College. 
Savile afterwards travelled on the Continent. On his return he 
gave lessons to the queen in Greek and Mathematics, and be- 
came Warden of Merton College. In 1581 Savile published, at 
Oxford, a translation of The Ende of Nero and Beginning oj 
Galba, Fower Bookes of the Histo?'ies of Cornelius Tacitus; 
The Life of Agricola. In 1596, Savile added to his office of 
Warden of Merton College that of Provost of Eton, and in the 
same year published Rerum Anglicamm Scriptores post Bedani 
prcecipui — a folio containing the works of some of the old his- 
torians after Bede; namely, William of Malmesbury, Henry of 
Huntingdon, Roger Hoveden, Ethelwerd, and Ingulphus of 
Croyland. The death of his son caused Savile to devote his 
property to the encouragement of learning, and, in the reign of 
James I., in 1619, he founded at Oxford the Savilian professor- 
ship of Astronomy and Geometry. Sir Henry Savile died at 
Eton in 1622. 

90. Richard Hooker, whom we left to follow the career of 
his friend Savile, was appointed, in 1579, to read the Hebrew 
lecture in his university, and did so for the next three years. 
He took holy orders, quitted Oxford, and married a scolding wife. 
He was shy and shortsighted, and had allowed her to be chosen 
for him. Of himself it is said that he never was seen to be 
angry. In 1584 Hooker was presented to the parsonage of 
Drayton-Beauchamp, near Aylesbury ; and there he was found 
by his old pupil, Edwin Sandys, with Horace in his hand, 
relieving guard over his few sheep out of doors, and indoors 
called from his guests to rock the cradle. Sandys reported 
Hooker's condition to his father, who had become Archbishop 
of York. In 1585 the office of Master of the Temple became 
vacant, and Hooker, then thirty-four years old, was, through the 
Archbishop's influence, called from his poor country parsonage 
to take it. 

When, in 1583, good Archbishop Grindal (§ 33) was suc- 
ceeded at Canterbury by John Whitgift, there was a return of 
bitterness against the Nonconformists, with extreme claim of all 
rights of the Church. This intensified the controversies of the 
time. The lecturer at the Temple for evening sermons, when 
Hooker became Master, was Walter Travers, a minister of 
blameless life, a correspondent of Beza's, and a warm supporter 
of opinions cherished by the Puritans. He was popular in the 
Temple, had hoped also himself to be chosen Master, and 



toa.d. 1594.] HOOKER'S ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY. 47 1 

obtain increase of influence for his opinions. In Hooker the 
Temple had a Master who was faithful to the ecclesiastical 
system of the English Church. In the Temple church on 
Sundays Hooker preached in the morning, Travers in the 
evening, and, as it was said, " the forenoon sermon spake Can- 
terbury, the afternoon Geneva." This continued until the Arch- 
bishop forbade Travers's preaching. Petition was in vain made 
to the Privy Council; and this led to discontent. The petition 
was printed privately, and published. Hooker then published 
an Answer to the Petition of Mr. Travers, and was drawn into 
a controversy, which led his pure and quiet mind to the resolve 
that he would argue out in detail his own sense of right and 
justice in the Established Church system of his country, in 
Eight Books of the Law of Ecclesiastical Polity. That he 
might do this he asked for removal to some office in which 
he might be at peace. He wrote to the Archbishop, " My Lord, 
when I lost the freedom of my cell, which was my college, yet I 
found some degree of it in my quiet country parsonage : but I 
am weary of the noise and oppositions of this place; and 
indeed, God and Nature did not intend me for contentions, but 
for study and quietness. My Lord, my particular contests with 
Mr. Travers here have proved the more unpleasant to me, 
because I believe him to be a good man; and that belief hath 
occasioned me to examine mine own conscience concerning his 
opinions." Study had not only satisfied him, but he had 
" begun a treatise, in which I intend a justification of the laws 
of our ecclesiastical polity; in which design God and his holy 
angels shall at the last great Day bear me that witness which 
my conscience now does, that my meaning is not to provoke 
any, but rather to satisfy all tender consciences ; and I shall 
never be able to do this but where I may study, and pray for 
God's blessing upon my endeavours, and keep myself in peace 
and privacy, and behold God's blessings spring out of my 
mother earth, and eat my own bread without opposition; and, 
therefore, if your Grace can judge me worthy of such a favour, 
let me beg it, that I may perfect what I have begun." Hooker 
accordingly was made, in 1591, rector of Boscombe, in Wilt- 
shire, a parish with few people in it, four miles from Amesbury, 
and was instituted also, as a step to better preferment, to a 
minor prebend of small value in Salisbury. At Boscombe 
Hooker finished the Four Books of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical 
Politic, published in 1594, with "A Preface to them that Seeke 



472 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1594 

(as they tearme it) the Reformation of Lawes and Orders 
Ecclesiasticall in the Church of England." These four books 
treated, 1. Of laws in general; 2. Of the use of Divine law con- 
tained in Scripture, whether that be the only law which ought 
to serve for our direction in all things without exception ; 3. Of 
laws concerning Ecclesiastical Polity, whether the form thereof 
be in Scripture so set down that no addition or change is 
lawful ; and, 4. Of general exceptions taken against the Lawes 
of the English Church Polity as being Popish, and banished 
out of certain reformed churches. What Hooker said of 
Travers, Travers had like reason to say of Hooker, for this was 
the work of a good man, in the eyes of thousands whom it may 
not have convinced on points of discipline ; a work perfect in 
spirit, earnest, eloquent, closely reasoned, and in the best sense 
of the word religious. Hooker's opening argument upon the 
origin of laws among men has interest from its close relation to 
the later arguments of Hobbes and Locke upon the origin and 
nature of the rights of kings. After reasoning that we derive 
our knowledge from experience and reasoning, and that the 
two principal fountains of human action are knowledge and 
will, he says that we find out for ourselves laws, by reason, to 
guide the will to that which is good, and further to supply those 
defects and imperfections which are in us living singly and 
solely by ourselves, we are naturally induced to seek com- 
munion and fellowship with others. " Thus arose political 
societies among men naturally equal. Men reasoned that strifes 
and troubles would be endlesse, except they gave their common 
consent all to be ordered by some whom they should agree upon, 
without which consent there were no reasons that one man 
should take upon him to be lord or iudge over another ; because 
although there be, according to the opinion of some very great 
and iudicious men, a kinde of naturall right in the noble, wise, 
and vertuous, to governe them which are of servile disposition ; 
neuerthelesse for manifestation of this their right, and men's 
more peaceable contentment on both sides, the assent of them 
who are to be governed seemeth necessary." 

In 1595 Richard Hooker left Boscombe for tne rectory of 
Bishopsbourne, three miles from Canterbury, where he spent 
the rest of his life. In 1597 appeared the fifth book of his 
Ecclesiastical Polity, which was longer than all the other four 
together. He died in 1600, having, while his health failed, 
desired only to live till he had finished the remaining three 



toa.d. IS99-] RICHARD HOOKER. JOSEPH HALL. 473 

books of the work, for which his life seemed to have been given 
him. His health suffered the more for his labour at them, but 
he did complete the remaining three books, though without 
the revision given to the preceding five, and they were pub- 
lished, some years after his death, in 1618. 

91. There were in Elizabeth's reign two brothers Fletcher, 
Richard and Giles, whose children are more interesting than 
themselves. Richard Fletcher became D.D., and bishop suc- 
cessively of Bristol, Worcester, and London. He attended at 
the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, angered the queen by his 
second marriage, smoked much tobacco, and was the father of 
John Fletcher, in the next reign, friend and fellow- writer, as a 
dramatist, with Francis Beaumont. Richard's brother, Giles 
Fletcher, became LL.D., was employed by Elizabeth as Com- 
missioner in Scotland, Germany, and the Low Countries, was 
sent as ambassador to Russia, and published, in 1591, a book 
Of the Russe Common Wealth, with dedication to the queen. It 
was quickly suppressed, " lest it might give offence to a prince 
in amity with England." Dr. Giles Fletcher thought he had 
found in the Tartars the lost tribes of Israel. He became 
treasurer of St. Paul's, secretary to the City of London, and 
Master of the Court 01 Requests. He had two sons, Phineas 
and Giles Fletcher, afterwards known as poets. These, then, 
were first cousins of John Fletcher the dramatist. 

92. Shakespeare was in his maturity of power, and a new 
generation of dramatists was growing towards manhood, when 
Joseph Hall published his satires. Joseph Hall was born in 
1574, at Bristow Park by Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and educated at 
Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 1597, at the age of twenty- 
three, he published Virgidemiarvm, Six Bookes ; First Three 
Bookes of toothlesse Satyrs: 1. Poeticallj 2. Academically 
3. M or all. In the following year the work was completed by 
Virgidemiarum : the Three Last Bookes of Byting Satyrs. It 
means nothing particular to say that these satires were burnt 
by order of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Whitgift and Ban- 
croft, Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London, as 
censors of the press, distinguished themselves, in 1599, by 
ordering the burning of much literature, Marlowe's Ovid and 
his Satires, Marston's Pygmalion* Hall's Satires, the epigrams 
of Davies and others, the tracts of Nash and Harvey, and 
decreeing that no satires or epigrams should, be printed for the 
future 



474 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1597- 

Censorship of the press by the Church came in with printing. 
The ecclesiastical superintendence introduced in 1479 and 1496, 
was more completely established by a Bull of Leo X. in 151 5, 
which required bishops and inquisitors to examine all books 
before printing, and to suppress heretical opinions. At the 
Reformation this practice was continued, under authority, and 
assumed now by the Crown as part of its prerogative, and 
delegated to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of 
London. Printing was also restrained by patents and mono- 
polies. In Elizabeth's time it was interdicted in all parts of 
England, except London, Oxford, and Cambridge, and the 
presses there were limited in number. 

Joseph Hall's six books, Virgidemiannn, i.e., of rod-harvests, 
stripes or blows, were the work of a clever young man who 
had read Juvenal and Persius and the satires of Ariosto, and 
who, because he was the first to write English satire in the 
manner of Juvenal, ignorantly believed himself to be the first 
English satirist. " I first adventure," he said in his prologue — 

" I first adventure, follow me who list, 
And be the second English satirist." 

The mistake is of no consequence. Hall's satires are in 
rhyming couplets of ten-syllabled lines; he thought English 
rhyme inferior to Latin quantity, but saw that the Latin metres 
could not be applied to English verse, and laughed at Stanihurst 
(§ 53). 

" Whoever saw a colt, wanton and wild, 
Yok'd with a slow foot ox on fallow field, 
Can right areed how handsomely besets 
Dull spondees with the English dactylets. 
If Jove speak English in a thund'ring cloud, 
Thwick thwack, and riff raff, roars he out aloud. 
Fie on the forged mint that did create 
New coin of words never articulate ! " 

Hall laughed at the rising drama, crying — 

" Shame that the Muses should be bought and sold 
For every peasant's brass on each scaffold." 

He laughed at what he called "pot fury of the dramatists." 1 

" One higher pitch'd doth set his soaring thought 
On crowned kings, that fortune hath low brought : 
Or some upreared high aspiring swaine, 
As it might be the Turkish Tamburlaine : 
Then weeneth he his base drink-drowned spright 
Rapt to the threefold loft of heaven hight, 



toa.-d. 1598.] HALL'S SATIRES. SYLVESTER'S DU BARTAS. 475 

When he conceives upon his feigned stage 
The stalking steps of his great personage, 
Graced with huff-cap terms and thund'ring threats 
That his poor hearer's hair quite upright sets." 

But while Hall attacked the " terms Italianate, big- sounding- 
sentences and words of state "upon the stage, he paid homage 
to Spenser. 

" Let no rebel satyr dare traduce 
Th' eternal legends of thy faerie muse, 
Renowned Spenser : whom no earthly wight 
Dares once to emulate, much less dares despight." 

Only he paired in the next line Du Bartas with Ariostor 
" Salust of France and Tuscan Ariost." The satirist in the 
golden time of Elizabethan vigour talked as usual of the good 
old times that were gone, when luxury was not, and our 

" Grandsires' words savoured of thrifty leeks 
Or manly garlicke. 

* * * * * 

But thou canst mask in garish gauderie, 
To suit a foole's far-fetched liverie. 
A French head joyn'd to necke Italian : 
Thy thighs from Germanie, and brest from Spain : 
An Englishman in none, a foole in all : 
Many in one, and one in severall. 
Then men were men ; but now the greater part 
Beasts are in life, and women are in heart." 

If we go back to Occleve (ch. v. § 8), or farther back to 
Gower (ch. iv. § 32), we find that the note has always been the 
same; sound and true in the steady fixing of attention upon 
vices and follies to be conquered (since there is small hope for 
a people that will only praise itself), but with innocent delusion 
of a bygone golden age. Hall's golden age, however, is not 
bygone ; it is to be found in Spain, if the test of it be a relish for 
garlic. Joseph Hall obtained the living of Hawstead, Suffolk, 
but resigned it for the living of Waltham Holy Cross, in Essex. 
This he held for two-and-twenty years, while obtaining, as we 
shall find, after Elizabeth's death, other promotions. 

93. We part, in Elizabeth's reign, from " Salust of France,^ 
at the year 1598, when Joshua Sylvester, then thirty-five 
years old, translated his Diuine Weekes and Works (§ 35, 52). 
Sylvester had begun in 1590, by publishing a translation of the 
poem of Du Bartas upon the Battle of Ivry, A Canticle of the 
Victorie obtained by the French King Henrie the Fourth at 
Yvry. Translated by Josua Siluester, M archant-aduenturer. 



476 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1596 

He had added another piece to that in 1592. There had been 
other translators from the French poet. In 1584, Thomas 
Hudson had published at Edinburgh a translation of his History 
of Judith, made by command of James VI. Another of these 
translators was William Lisle, of Wilbraham, who published a 
part of The Second Week of Du Bartas in 1596, dedicated to 
Lord Howard of Effingham, added the Colonies in 1598, and 
translated, in all, four books. Another of the translators, at the 
end of Elizabeth's reign and beginning of the reign of James 
in England, was Thomas Winter. In verses of praise prefixed 
to Sylvester's translation, Joseph Hall said — 

" Bartas was some French angel, girt with Eayes : 
And thou a Bartas art in English Layes. 
Whether is more ? Mee seems (the sooth to say'n) 
One Bartas speaks, in Tongues, in Nations, twain." 

And Een Jonson wrote (Du Bartas died in 1590) — 

" Behold ! the reverend shade of Bartas stands 
Before my thought and (in thy right) commands 
That to the world I publish for him, This : 
Bartas doth wish thy English now were His. 
So well in that are his inventions wrought, 
As his will now be the Translation thought, 
Thine the Original ; and France shall boast 
No more those mayden glories shee hath lost." 

But it is to be remembered that Du Bartas owed his repute 
with us not only to his skill as a writer according to the 
ephemeral taste of the time, but also as a French Huguenot for 
his accord with the religious feeling of the English people, and 
because his song was always upon sacred themes. 

94. Ben Jonson has just been quoted. In 1598 he had begun 
to write. He was ten years younger than Shakespeare, and in 
the closing year of Elizabeth's reign, when Shakespeare had 
risen to the fulness of his power, Ben Jonson was beginning his 
career. We have now to end the sketch of our literature in 
Elizabeth's reign with some account of the latter years of the 
Elizabethan Drama. To avoid confusion let us take that 
word to mean simply, the English drama during the reign of 
Elizabeth. It falls naturally into two sections, which we may 
call Earlier and Later Elizabethan. The Earlier Elizabethan 
Drama dates from the first plays at the beginning of Elizabeth's 
reign to the date of Spenser's latest publications, the year of the 
second part of the Faerie Queene, 1596. It includes Gorboduc 
and the earliest plays, plays of Lodge, Peele, Lyly, Greene, 



to a.d. iS9%.~] LATER ELIZABETHAN DRAMA. SHAKESPEARE. 4/7 

Marlowe, and the early works of Shakespeare. The Later 
Elizabethan Z)ra7na, from 1596 to 1603, has in its centre Shake- 
speare, become master of his art ; a few of the elder writers who 
add to the number of their works ; with a few younger men, Ben 
Jonson, Marston, Dekker, and Heywood, who began to write 
plays under Elizabeth; and one older man, George Chapman, 
who started later in life as a playwright, and then took his place 
among Later Elizabethan dramatists. With Shakespeare, these 
younger men, and George Chapman, passed as active workers 
into the reign of James the First. But in that reign the number 
of the dramatists was soon increased by poets who had been 
young men or children under Elizabeth. These writers were 
educated more or less by the same influences that had produced 
the great Elizabethan poets. In their writing there was an 
Elizabethan character, but they wrote their plays in the reigns 
of James I. and Charles I. Such were Beaumont and Fletcher, 
Webster, Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. 

95. William Shakespeare (§ 37, 47, 71), in 1596, buried 
at Stratford his only son Hamnet, twelve years old. A grant of 
arms to his father in that year (about which there was another 
note in 1599) indicates that the poet was then prospering. In 
1597, three plays of his were published in quarto, Richard IL y 
Richard III., and Romeo and Juliet. Those plays of Shake- 
speare which were printed in his lifetime were in quarto form, 
and known to students as the early quartos. They were not 
corrected by the author. Even Ariosto, as we have seen (ch. vi. 
§ 40), after the minutest care in writing his Orlando, had no 
oversight of the business of publication. In Easter term of the 
same year, 1597, Shakespeare began to form the home in his 
native town to which he had looked forward. He bought for 
sixty pounds, New Place, the best house in the line of the main 
street of the town, with two barns and two gardens behind, in 
the direction of the Avon. It had been built by Sir Hugh 
Clopton in the time of Henry VII., and it was bought by 
Shakespeare of William Underhill, a man of good position, 
whose home was close by, at Idlicote, but who was himself 
buying land about Stratford, and seeking to establish a family. 
Underhill died a few months after he had sold the house to 
Shakespeare. New Place was in Chapel Street, at the corner 
of a lane, Chapel Lane, leading towards the river. At the 
opposite corner was, and is, a church called the Guild Chapel, 
or Chapel of the Holy Cross, from which the street and lane 



47^ A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1597 

were named, and founded also in the reign of Henry VII. by 
Sir Hugh Clopton. On the other side of the Guild Chapel was 
the grammar school. Thus the church stood between Shake- 
speare and the school. In 1597 also, while Shakespeare was 
establishing this home for himself in Stratford he was helping 
his father and mother, for there was a bill filed in Chancery 
by John Shakespeare and his wife to recover Ashbies (§ 37) 
from John, the son of Edward Lambert. There is also other 
evidence that by this time Shakespeare's prudent management, 
and his success in London, had enabled him — the first man in 
our literature who did so — to save money earned, not indirectly, 
by the free use of his genius. A record, dated October, 1598, 
shows him to have been assessed on property in the parish of 
St, Helen's, Bishopsgate. The plays of his printed in quarto, in 
1598, were Love's Labour's Lost and Part I. of King Henry IV., 
but there is other evidence to show what plays of his had by 
that date been acted. 

John Bodenham published in 1 598 a collection of senten- 
tious extracts from ancient moral philosophers, &c, called 
Politeuphuia {Wits' Commonwealth). It was designed chiefly 
for the benefit of young scholars, was popular, and often after- 
wards reprinted. In the same year, 1598, Francis Meres, 
M.A., published Palladis Taniia {Wits' Treasury, being the 
Second Part of Wits' Commonwealth), i2mo, of 174 leaves, 
euphuistic, as its title indicates, and also designed for instruction 
of the young. This book contained a brief comparison of Eng- 
lish poets with Greeks, Latins, and Italians, and in the course 
of it Meres wrote : " As the soule of Euphorbus was thought 
to live in Pythagoras, so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in 
mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare; witnes his Venus 
and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private 
friends, &c. As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for 
comedy and tragedy among the Latines, so Shakespeare among 
the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage ; for 
comedy, witnes his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love's 
Labor's Lost, his Love's Labour's Wo?ine" [probably a former 
name of A IPs Well that Ends Well], " his Midsummers Night 
Dreame, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard 
the 2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus 
Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet. As Epius Stolo said 
that the Muses would speake with Plautus' tongue, if they 
would speak Latin, so I say that the Muses would speak 



to a.d. 1600.] WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 479 

with Shakespeare's fine filed phrase, if they would speake 
English." 

In 1598 Shakespeare was thirty-four years old; he had 
been at work in London for about twelve years, of which the 
first six had been years of patient upward struggle, and the 
other six had been years of increasing power and prosperity. 
He had written chronicle plays, in which his muse did "like 
himself heroically sound;" had dealt playfully in Love's Labour's 
Lost with the euphuism of his time; had found out the mar- 
vellous wealth of his imagination " glancing from heaven to 
earth, from earth to heaven " in the Midsummer Night's Dream; 
had shown in Romeo and Juliet the innocent beauty of young 
love breathing its harmonies among the petty feuds and hatreds 
of mankind ; and in the Merchant of Venice he had risen to a 
pure expression of that spirit of religion which, for many in his 
time was obscured by passions of the conflict between creed 
and creed. What the Capulets and Montagues meant in 
Romeo and Juliet, the Jew and Christian meant in the Merchant 
of Venice j but in that play the central thought to which every 
scene relates gave prominence to the relation between Shylock 
and Antonio. 

When he had done his 'prentice work, and become master 
of his craft, every play of Shakespeare's became a true poem, 
and had the spiritual unity that is in every great work of art. 
Each play had its own theme in some essential truth of life, 
which is its soul expressed in action, and with which every 
detail is in exquisite accord. 

96. In the Merchant of Venice, for example, Shakespeare 
dealt in his own way with the problem of life. It opens with a 
vague foreshadowing of evil in a merchant with his wealth upon 
the waves. There is rapid advance of the story, the very first 
lines pointing towards the event on which the action of the play 
depends ; but the narrative all springs up naturally in a dialogue 
that represents the cheerful intercourse of life. This genial air 
is, as it were, the atmosphere of the whole play, softens all its 
didactic outlines, and pervades especially its opening and close. 
The dialogue in the first scene, while firm, as it is throughout, to 
the story-telling, abounds chiefly in suggestion of the different 
ways in which men variously tempered take what comes to 
them in life, including those 

" Whose visages 
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond, 



4S0 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. i 59 5 

And do a wilful stillness entertain, 
With purpose to be dress'd in arcopinion 
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit, 
As who should say, ' I am Sir Oracle, 
And when I ope my lips let no dog bark.' " 

The social geniality deepens at the end of the first scene into 
the close intercourse of friendship between Antonio and Bassanio. 
There is here a double purpose answered. It pertains to the 
essence of the play that a firm friendship between man and man 
should be at the root of it, but this friendship unites also the 
two men, who serve as centres to the two parts of the story : 
the old story of the caskets, used by Shakespeare for a solving 
of life's problem from its human side ; and the old story of the 
pound of flesh, through which he added the diviner sense of 
duty. 

Bassanio sought Portia, that lot in life which is the ideal of 
us all : 

" Nor is the wide world ignorant of her worth, 
For the four winds blow in from every coast 
Renowned suitors, and her sunny locks 
Hang on her temples like a golden fleece ; 
Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchos' strand, 
And many Jasons come in quest of her." 

When we pass in the next scene to Belmont the story-telling 
is continued rapidly, and there is the light genial air of playful 
intercourse still softening the firm expression of the main idea. 
Thus the dialogue between Portia and Nerissa plays over the 
conditions of life and temper that affect right search for a good 
life. They, it is lightly suggested, who have a right love for it 
will choose their way in the pursuit of it according to God's 
meaning, and then follow whimsical sketches of some national 
ideas of happiness proper to the Neapolitan, the Bavarian, 
Frenchman, Englishman. The scene ends with mention of 
Bassanio, " a scholar and a soldier," whole worker, mind and 
body, through whom we shall get the solution of this part of the 
problem. 

Still never forgetting that he has a story to tell, and that this 
must not stand still, all thought being expressed in it and none 
merely scattered round about it, Shakespeare then takes up 
the second of the two threads from which the plot is woven, 
advancing rapidly the story of the bond, while he subtly prepares 
the mind of spectator or reader for the reverse of Antonio's 
fortune and for the antagonism to come. Then Jew and 



toa.d. 1600.] SHAKESPEARE'S " MERCHANT OF VENICE." 481 

Christian are brought face to face, and there is strong marking 
of the enmity of each to each. Wrongs suffered by Jews at the 
hands of Christians are, in Shylock's speech beginning, " Signor 
Antonio, many a time and oft," given as ground for Shylock's 
bitterness. Antonio replies with Christian disdain and in- 
tolerance. He has called Shylock dog, and says, — 

" I dm as like to call thee so again, 
To spit on thee again, and spurn thee too.** 

The first act closes with Antonio's acceptance of the bond, 
suggested in the idleness of malice when there is little or no 
prospect of its enforcement. But the scene opens and closes 
with a pointing of attention to the ships that bear Antonio's 
wealth upon the waves. 

In developing his plot Shakespeare produces a fine climax 
by so interweaving its two threads that the one which leads to 
the human lesson of the way to the true life comes to its end 
in the third act ; the other is ready to add, in the fourth act, 
its diviner lesson, and the fifth act then rises to the height of 
heaven itself in expressing the full thought of the whole play. 

At the opening of the second act we are in Belmont, and the 
vain-glorious Prince of Morocco is to make his choice. Why 
Prince of Morocco ? Because he is to represent the man whose 
choice is of the golden casket, as determined by the outside 
pomp and glory of the world ; and this view of life men associate 
with Eastern splendour. The scene changes to Venice, and 
Lancelot Gobbo, the clown — whose change of service is of great 
use to the story — stands also, in his relation to the inner thought 
of the play, for the raw material of humanity ; good-natured, as 
Shakespeare always felt men and women, on the whole, to be, 
and with the rudiments of two helps to the higher life — conscience 
and natural affections. As Bassanio prepares to depart for 
Belmont, Gratiano will go too ; the genial temper is the right 
companion of earnest effort, but it must be kept within due 
bounds. Among the many sketches of forms and ways of life 
that belong as accessories to the working out of the main 
thought in the Merchant of Venice, Bassanio's counsel to 
Gratiano, w Thou art too wild, too rude, and bold of voice, n 
balances Gratiano's former censure of an affected precision. In 
the next scene, between Lancelot and Jessica, we have again 
Lancelot's natural sympathies, and a suggestion of those cheer- 
less restraints of home which made it not unnatural for Jessica's 

F F 



482 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1596 

quick Eastern blood, nourished in Italy, to urge her beyond rule. 
After this scene, while only a masking is in question, there is 
preparation for the wrong that will stir Shylock's hatred of the 
Christian into fury, just at the time when Antonio's bond is 
forfeit. In the love between Lorenzo and Jessica there is 
Shakespeare's practical suggestion, as in the love between the 
Capulet and Montague, that we all are of one race, and should 
feel our kindred. So when, in Cymbelin'e, Arviragus says 
to Imogen, "Brother, stay here: are we not brothers?" She 
replies — 

" So man and man should be ; 
Eut clay and clay differs in dignity, 
Whose dust is both alike." 

It is the clay in us, and not the nobler part, that makes the 
separation. 

In the scene between Shylock and his daughter, again, there 
are the ungenial home conditions which serve to make her 
conduct less unnatural, and the story is continued to the flight 
of Jessica during Bassanio's parting festivities, and to the rapid 
departure of Bassanio's ship. Then we return to Belmont, and 
see the Prince of Morocco trust his hope of happiness to that 
golden casket, which is inscribed, " Who chooseth me shall gain 
what many men desire." His choice is that of all who place 
the happiness of life in money-making, or in the luxurious en- 
joyment of what money buys. Within the golden casket is a 
carrion death, with the lesson : 

" Many a man his life hath sold 
But my outside to behold." 

Shakespeare takes us back to Venice, shows us the Jew's 
fury at the abduction of his daughter — his own flesh has been 
torn from him, " I say, my daughter is my flesh and blood." His 
claiming of the bond while in the passion of this wrong brings 
within bounds of nature an extravagant fable that had been 
used only as a parable. Suggestion of peril to Antonio in 
Salanio's 

" Let good Antonio look he keep his day, 
Or he shall pay for this, 

is immediately followed by the first indication of the fall of 
the merchant's fortunes, coupled with a fresh suggestion of his 
friendship for Bassanio. 

We pass then to Belmont, and see the silver casket chosen 
Oy the Prince of Arragon. Why Prince of Arragon ? Because 



toa.d. i6oo.] SHAKESPEARE'S "MERCHANT OF VENICE." 483 

the Spaniard was the common type of self-asserting pride, and 
through the silver casket choice was made of a life happy by 
attainment of one's own deserts. He will not choose with those 
whom the gold tempts : 

" I will not choose what many men desire, 
Because I will not jump with common spirits, 
And rank me with the barbarous multitudes." 

But he accepts the condition on the silver treasure-house : 
"Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves." We all 
know the man, not base of mind, who only wants his deserts, 
and loses precious time over lamenting that he has never got 
them. If the critics had been just to his books, or his pictures ; 
if this, and it that, and 

Oh, that estates, degrees, and offices 

Were not derived corruptly, and that clear honour 

"Were purchased by the merit of the wearer." 

But the true life is not so to be won. The silver casket reveals 
only a fool's head, with a legend that reminds the chooser of 
the shadow's bliss of him who was in love with his own shadow. 
The second act ends with the landing of Bassanio at Belmont, 
and again a glancing forward at the hope inspired by him. 

The third act opens with the loss of all Antonio's wealth on 
the waves, whereby the passion of Shylock is suddenly supplied 
. with power of revenge. Let Antonio look to his bond. What 
kindness can he ask ? 

" He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million ; laughed at my losses 
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, 
heated mine enemies ; and what's his reason ? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes ? 
Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions ? fed with the 
same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the 
same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is 
If you prick us, do we not bleed ? if you tickle us, do we not laugh ? if you poison 
us, do we not die? and it you wrong us, shall we not be revenged? If we are like 
you in the rest we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his 
humility ? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be, by 
Christian example ?" 

Shylock is ready to stand upon the letter of the law, and tne 
story is now ripe for a full expression of the innermost thought 
of the play, which, deepening as it goes, continues to the end. 

Bassanio's choice of the leaden casket is preluded with a 
song, ringing the knell of trust in the delight of the eyes only.. 
"Who chooseth me, must give and hazard all he hath." That 
-is the legend on the casket of lead, threatening more than it. 

F F 2- 



484 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1596 

promises, by which alone the true life may be won. The human 
lesson of life summed up in it, is like that of the parable of the 
talents. A man must exert all his powers ; be the best and do 
the best that it is in him to be or do ; give all that he hath, 
and hazard all : not making conditions of reward according to 
desert ; not asking whether he shall be rich, or praised, or 
happy, for the simple hearty doing of his duty ; but doing it and 
taking what may come. So is Portia won, and plighted to 
Bassanio, as Nerissa to Gratiano, with a ring, never to be lost 
or given away. The severe outline of the higher lesson of life 
is here softened again by the pervading atmosphere of genial 
intercourse ; but from the human truth so far expressed, Shake- 
speare passes on at once to the divine truth which is its crown. 
Antonio's letter to Bassanio arrives at Belmont. In Antonio, 
man — subject to fortune, changeful as the waves — is about to 
stand between the two principles of justice and *Hercy, of the 
Old Testament and of the New, as Shakespeare read them. 
Out of the lips of Portia, who has represented, in some sense, 
the natural life, will come most fitly a recognition of the spirit 
which makes earthly power likest God's. In the fourth act 
Shylock holds by the law and by his bond. When asked, " How 
shalt thou hope for mercy, rendering none?" Shylock answers, 
still placing the letter above the spirit, " What judgment shall 
I dread, doing no wrong?" He stands for law; must he be 
merciful? "On what compulsion must I, tell me that?" 
Through Portia's famous answer, Shakespeare sets fortn the 
divine side of his lesson, and 

"Therefore, Jew 
Though justice be thy plea, consider this. 
That, in the course of justice, none of us 
Should see salvation : we do pray for mercy 
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render 
The deeds of mercy." 

But Shylock says, — 

" My deeds upon my head ! I crave the law." 

Saint Paul had said, what Shakespeare is here teaching, " By 
the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified;" and, 
" Now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein 
we were held ; that we should serve in newness of Spirit, and 
not in the oldness of the Letter." Shylock is made to feel that 
even by the strict letter of his bond he cannot stand : his pound 
of flesh must be an exact pound, not a hair's weight more or 



toa.d. 1600.] SHAKESPEARE'S " MERCHANT OF VENICE." 485 

less ; and there must be no blood shed, because the letter of the 
bond does not give him one drop of blood. Shylock is foiled, 
and sentenced ; not harshly, except in the requirement that he 
undergo the form of being made a Christian ; and the genial 
atmosphere again softens the sharp didactic outline. The 
manner of this — the success of the disguised ladies in getting 
from their husbands, as gifts to the learned counsel and his 
clerk, the rings they had vowed never to part with— prepares the 
way for a genial close to the whole play. It will supply means 
for a pleasant, quick, and sure identification ; while the incident 
of the giving of the rings is still, in its own lighter form, in unity 
with the grand scene on which it follows. For its meaning is, 
that in little things as in great — even in little promises — we owe 
allegiance rather to the spirit than to the letter. Bassanio and 
Gratiano, true as they were pledged to be, had yielded, in spite 
of the letter of their pledge, all that was due elsewhere to 
courtesy and friendship. 

The great lesson of life is taught, and the last act of the play 
opens with the Jew and Gentile, representing any two forms of 
bitter antagonism, in embrace of love under the calm expanse 
of heaven. The act opens genially, with playful words of love, 
and rises soon to a sublime earnestness, as Lorenzo looks from 
earth up to God's universe, of which it is a part : 

" Look how the floor of heaven 
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold ; 
There's not the smallest orb that thou behcld'st 
But in his motion like an angel sings, 
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims ; 
Such liarmony is in immortal souls ; 
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay 
Doth grossly close us in, we cannot hear it." 

Then the musicians, who had been sent for, enter, and with soft 
strain represent to the ear, as Shakespeare often in his plays has 
made it represent, immortal harmony. Lorenzo's answer to 
Jessica's " I am never merry when I hear sweet music," " The 
reason is your spirits are attentive," &c, still uses music as type 
of that higher harmony which is within our souls. To want that 
is to be "the man that hath no music in himself, nor is not 
moved with concord of sweet sounds." Because of that want, he 

" Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils ; 
The motions of his spirit are dull as night, 
And his affections dark as Erebus : 
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music." 



486 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1596 

The music, thus associated with the harmony of human souls 
and of the great visible universe under which the lovers sit, 
still plays. Then enters Portia, with Nerissa, and the train of 
thought is continued in their first natural words by an image 
that brings the deeper sense of the play to its fit close. Its 
meaning is, that man's endeavour to establish the kingdom of 
heaven within him shines royally, till it has blended with, and 
is lost in, the supreme glories of eternal love. 

"Portia. That light we see is burning in my hall. 
How far that little candle throws his beams ' 
So shines a good deed in a naughty world. 

" Nerissa. When the moon shone, we did not see the candle. 

"Portia. So doth the greater glory dim the less : 
A substitute shines brightly as a king 
Until a king be by, and then his state 
Empties itself, as doth an island brook 
Into the main of waters. Music ! Hark !" 

And then we pass to the playful end, in unaffected chatting of 
good fellowship — again the kindly air of life encircling'all. 

John Fox, with controversial bitterness, had registered the 
pangs of martyrs, and believed all ill of the opponents of his 
form of faith. Spenser, with sweetness of voice, had expressed 
the fierceness of the conflict from which Shakespeare rose to 
a full sense of the divine harmonies and to a quiet, all-embracing 
charity. But there could have been no Shakespeare without the 
conflict that had stirred men to their depths, or in a country 
yielding no such combatants as those who, in Tudor times, had, 
through infirmities of human character, employed their highest 
energies, given and hazarded all they had, and, zealous to serve 
God, striven day after day to do their duty. 

97. In 1599 appeared an improved edition of Ro?neo and Juliet 
and The Passionate Pilgrim — a small collection of love poems, 
all ascribed on the title page, by an adventurous publisher, to 
Shakespeare, who objected to this use of his name. The volume 
includes, with pieces by Shakespeare, others which it is known 
that he did not write. 

In 1600 the plays of Shakespeare first printed in quarto were 
The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much 
Ado About Nothiiig, and Henry V. 

Shakespeare's father died early in September, 1601. 

The Merry Wives of Windsor was the only play of Shakes- 
peare's printed in 1602. There was a tradition current at the 
beginning of the eighteenth century that this was written at the 



TOA.D. i6o 3 .] WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. GEORGE CHAPMAN. 487 

request of Queen Elizabeth, who was so much pleased with 
Falstaff, in the two parts of King Henry IV, that she com- 
manded a play upon Falstaff in love, being, moreover, in such 
haste for it that it was to be written in fourteen days. This 
may or may not be true. " The Diary of John Manningham," a 
member of the Middle Temple, makes known to us that Shakes- 
peare's Twelfth Night was acted in the Middle Temple on the 
2nd of February, 1602. In that year Venus and Adonis reached 
a fifth edition. 

In May, 1602, Shakespeare continued the investment of his 
earnings in his native place, by buying of William and John 
Combe 107 acres of arable land, in the parish of Old Stratford, 
for ^327 ; and later in the year he made two more purchases, 
one of a cottage and its ground near New Place, the other, for 
sixty pounds, of a messuage with two barns, two gardens, and 
two orchards. He was extending his grounds behind New Place 
towards the river. 

It seems to have been in the earlier part of this year, 1602, 
that Shakespeare's Hamlet was first acted. It was entered by a 
bookseller on the Stationers' Register on the 26th of July, 1602, 
to be published " as it was latelie acted." Thus, by the date of 
the death of Elizabeth, March 24, 1603, Shakespeare had risen 
to the full height of his genius. 

98. Of the new dramatists rising around him one, George 
Chapman, was as old as Elizabeth's reign ; and he was not a 
dramatist only. He was born in 1557 or 1559, at Hitchin, in 
Hertfordshire. He was called afterwards by William Browne, 
" The Shepherd of fair Hitching Hill." About 1574 he was 
sent to Trinity College, Oxford, where he fastened with especial 
delight on the Greek and Roman classics. After two years at 
Oxford, he left without a degree. Nothing is known of him as 
a writer before 1594, when he published 'Xkio.vvktos, The Shadow 
of Night: containing two poetical hy tunes devised by G. C, Gent. 
In the next year, 1595, this was followed by Ouid's Banquet of 
Sence, a Coronet for his Mis tress e Philosophic, and his amorous 
Zodiacke. In 1598 appeared the first section of the main work 
of George Chapman's life, his translation of Homer in Seaven 
Bookes of the Iliades of Hofnere, Prince of Poetes, translatea 
according to the Greeke. in Judgment of his best Commentaries, 
by George Chapman, Gent. The seven books were the first and 
second, and the seventh to the eleventh. They are in the four- 
teen-syllabled measure, to which he adhered throughout the 



4-85 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.v. 1590 

Iliad and Odyssey; but there was a separate issue by him of a 
version of The Shield of Achilles, in 1598, in ten-syllabled 
verse. 

Chapman had now also begun his career as a dramatist, and 
in 1 598 appeared his first printed comedy, the Blind Beggar of 
Alexandria, which had been acted sundry times by the Earl of 
Nottingham's servants. The same company acted his second 
comedy, printed in 1 599, An humerotis Dayes Myrth. At the 
end of Elizabeth's reign, Chapman was at work still on his 
Homer, but had not yet issued another section of it. 

99. Thomas Heywood was a native of Lincolnshire and a 
Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He joined the players, and 
was a young man when writing for them in 1596. In 1598 he 
produced War without Blows a?id Love without Suit, and imme- 
diately afterwards Joan as good as my Lady. Heywood passed 
into the next reign as one of the most prolific playwrights of the 
time. Of about the same age as Heywood was 

Thomas Middleton, a gentleman's son, born in London 
in 1570. He was admitted of Gra/s Inn in 1593, and published 
in 1597 the Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased ; probably he was 
also the author of Microcynicon, six snarling Satires, published 
in 1599. In the same year he joined William Rowley in 
writing his first play, the Old Law. In 1602, Middleton wrote 
the tragedy of Pandall Earl of Chester, without help, and the 
Two Harpies in partnership with others ; in 1602, also, his 
Blurt, Master Constable, or the Spaniard's Night Walk was 
printed. 

Thomas Dekker, who was also born about 1570, began 
to write in the days of the later Elizabethan drama. His 
Phaeton was acted in 1597 ; other plays rapidly followed. His 
comedies of Old Forhmatus and the Shoe?naker's Holiday were 
printed in 1600, and his Satiromastix, presently to be spoken 
of, in 1602. 

John Marston, who was educated at Oxford, began in 
1598 as a satirist with the Scourge of Villanie, three Books of 
Satires, and the Metamorphoses of Pigmalion's Image, and 
certaine Satyres, one of the books burnt by Whitgift and Ban- 
croft (§ 92) when they forbade the writing of more satire. 
Marston wrote a tragedy, Antonio and Mellida, which had a 
sequel, Antonio's Revenge, and these plays were both printed in 
1602. 

100. But foremost among these writers of the later Elizabethan 



TOA.D. i6o 3 .] OTHER DRAMATISTS. BEN JONSON. 489 

drama, was Ben Jonson. He was of a north country family, 
son of a gentleman who was ruined by religious persecution in 
the reign of Mary, who became a preacher in Elizabeth's reign, 
and who died a month before the poet's birth, in 1573. Ben 
Jonson's mother took a bricklayer for second husband, and at 
some time during Ben's childhood she was living in Hartshorn 
Lane, near Charing Cross. The boy was first taught in the 
parish school of St. Martin's, and then owed to the kindness of 
William Camden (§ 82) an admission to Westminster School. 
He is said to have tried his stepfather's business for a little while, 
before he went to fight against Spain as a volunteer in the Low 
Countries. When he came home he joined the players and 
married. In 1597, when he was twenty-four years old, he was 
a sharer in the company of the Rose at Bankside. In these 
early days Ben Jonson acted the old Marshal Jeronimo in 
Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, and enriched the play with 
an effective scene between mad old Jeronimo and a painter, in 
the manner of the earlier Elizabethan drama. In 1596 Ben 
Jonson's comedy, Every Man i7i his Humour was produced, 
with Italian characters and a scene laid at Florence. He then 
revised it, made the characters all English, and laid the 
scene in and between Coleman Street and Hoxton. In this, its 
present shape, it was performed in 1598 by the company to 
which Shakespeare belonged, the name of Shakespeare himself 
standing at the head of the list of actors. Every Man in His 
Humour is a true comedy carefully constructed. Its action, 
contained within a single day, opens at six in the morning and 
ends with a supper. The course of time is unobtrusively but 
exactly marked as the story proceeds, and the plot is not only 
contrived to show varieties of character, each marked by a special 
humour or predominance of one peculiar quality, but the inci- 
dents are run ingeniously into a dramatic knot which the fifth 
act unties. But Ben Jonson's next three plays were of another 
character ; they were not so much true comedies as bright 
dramatic satires, based on a noble sense of life and of the poet's 
place in it. Every Man out of his Humour, produced in 1599, 
Cynthia! s Revels, in 1600, and the Poetaster, in 1601, were 
annual satires, the first touching especially the citizens, the 
second the courtiers, and the third the poets, in as far as any 
of these lived for aims below the dignity of manhood. Ben 
Jonson was at that time of his life tall, meagre, large-boned, 
with a pock-marked face and eager eyes ; a poet and keen satirist, 



49° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1599 

with a true reverence for all that was noble, a lofty sense of the 
aims of literature, and a young zeal to set the world to rights, 
with a bold temper and an over-readiness for self-assertion. In 
Cynthia! s Revels he jested scornfully at the euphuisms and shal- 
low graces of the Court, at lives spent in the mere study of airs 
and grimaces. " Would any reasonable creature/' he asked 
through one of his characters, " make these his serious studies 
and perfections, much less only live to these ends, to be the 
false pleasure of a few, the true love of none, and the just 
laughter of all ? " He urged for the Court idlers, in words 
characteristic of the mind that made him, next to Shakespeare, 
foremost among English dramatists, — 

' That these vain joys in which their wills consume 
Such powers of wit and soul as are of force 
To raise their beings to eternity, 
May be converted on works fitting men ; 
And for the practice of a forced look, 
An antic gesture, or a fustian phrase, 
Study the native frame of a true heart, 
An inward comeliness of bounty, knowledge, 
And spirit that may conform them actually 
To God's high figures, which they have in power. 

When Dekker and Marston considered themselves to have been 
pointed at in the Poetaster, they resolved to give a taste of his 
own whip to the too ardent satirist, whose vivid impersonations 
of the follies of society were looked upon as personal attacks by 
all the men in whom such follies were conspicuous. Dekker 
wrote his Satiro7nastix (whip for the satirist), and it was acted 
as a retort on Jonson's Poetaster. But although Ben Jonson's 
own admirable bully, Captain Tucca, was reproduced and let 
loose upon him to abuse him roughly, yet through the characters 
of Demetrius and Crispinus, by whom Dekker and Marston held 
themselves to have been attacked, and who were also reproduced, 
the retort was made in a tone that showed the quarrel to be, as 
a Latin motto to the printed book expressed, among friends 
only. The motto said, " I speak only to friends, and that upon 
compulsion." One passage will serve as sufficient evidence of 
this. Ben Jonson, as Horace Junior, is made to plead for his 
satires of citizens and others : — 

" Horace. What could I do, out of a just revenge. 
But bring them to the stage ? They envy me, 
Because I hold more worthy company. 

" Detnetrius. Good Horace, no. My cheeks do blush foi thme 
As often as thou speaks't so. Where one true 



to a.d 1603.] BEN JONSON. DEKKER. MARSTON. 49 1 

And nobly virtuous spirit for thy best part 
Loves thee, I wish one ten with all my heart. 
I make account I put up as deep share 
In any good man's love which thy worth earns 
As thou thyself. We envy not to see 
Thy friends with bays to crown thy poesie. 
No, here the gall lies, we that know what stuff 
Thy very heart is made of, know the stalk 
On which thy learning grows, and can give life 
To thy (once dying; baseness, yet must we 
Dance antics on your paper 

"Horace. Fannius 

" Crispinus. This makes us angry, but not envious. 
No, were thy warpt soul put in a new mould, 
I'd wear thee as a jewel set in gold." 

In that spirit Dekker resolved to let his eager, positive friend 
Ben feel in his own* person how he liked being held up to the 
town as the butt of satire. Jonson replied with an Epilogue to 
his Poetaster, and urged, as he had always urged, that his books 
were taught "to spare the persons and to speak the vices." 
But, in fact, he generously yielded, and said, 

" Since the comic Muse 
Hath proved so ominous to me, I will try 
If tragedy have a more kind aspect. 
Her favours in my next I will pursue, 
When, if I prove the pleasure of but One, 
So he judicious be, he shall be alone 
A theatre unto me." 

Thus it happened that Ben Jonson's last work in Elizabeth's 
reign was upon his first tragedy Sejanus. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

FROM ELIZABETH TO THE COMMONWEALTH. 

A. — REIGN OF JAMES I. 

I. When Elizabeth died, on the 24th of March, 1603, and 
James VI. of Scotland became James I. of England, Shake- 
speare was thirty-nine years old and Bacon forty-two. Spensei 
had been dead about four years, Richard Hooker three. Robert 
Greene had been dead about eleven years and Christopher 
Marlowe ten. George Peele was dead, and Thomas Nash had 
been dead a year or two. Thomas Sackville, the author of our 
first tragedy (ch. vii. § 8), now Lord Buckhurst, aged seventy- 



49 2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1603 

six, was one of those who, after the queen's death, administered 
the affairs of the kingdom and proclaimed King James. A year 
later Sackville was created Earl of Dorset, and he died in 1608. 
John Lyly, author of Euphues (ch. vii. § 20), was living at the 
accession of James I., fifty years old, and had three years to 
live. Gabriel Harvey (ch. vii. § 24), also aged fifty, lived 
throughout James's reign, a Doctor of Civil Law, practising as 
advocate in the Prerogative Court. Thomas Lodge (ch. vii. § 42), 
aged forty-eight, lived on, as a physician in good practice. John 
Stow (ch. vii. § 82) was seventy-eight years old, and "as a 
recompense for his labours and travel of forty-five years, in 
setting forth the chronicles of England and eight years taken up 
in the survey of the cities of London and Westminster, towards 
his relief now in his old age," he asked for, and obtained, the 
king's letters patent empowering him " to gather the benevolence 
of well-disposed people within this realm of England ; to ask r 
gather, and take the alms of all our loving subjects." He lived 
only till 1605 on this boundless reward of his enthusiasm. 

Among men who had written in the past reign there also 
were still alive : Richard Stanihurst (ch. vii. § 53), aged about 
fifty-eight, he died in 161 8; William Camden (ch. vii. § 82), fifty- 
two; Sir Walter Raleigh (ch. vii. § 84), fifty-one; Anthony 
Munday (ch. vii. § 54), forty-nine, he lived on until 1633; George 
Chapman (ch. vii. § 98), forty-six ; William Warner (ch. vii. § 65), 
forty-five, he died in 1609; Samuel Daniel (ch. vii. § 79), forty- 
one; Michael Drayton (ch. vii. § 80), forty; Joseph Hall(ch. vii. 
§ 92), twenty-nine; Ben Jonson (ch. vii. § 100), twenty-nine; and 
Marston, Middleton, Heywood, Dekker (ch. vii. § ioo), of about 
Ben Jonson's age. 

Among the dramatists born in the reign of Elizabeth who 
began to write under the Stuarts there were, at the accession of 
James I., John Fletcher, twenty-seven years old; Francis Beau- 
mont, seventeen; John Webster, perhaps t wenty- three ; Cyril 
Tourneur, perhaps twenty; Philip Massinger, nineteen; John 
Ford, seventeen; James Shirley, nine. These were Stuart 
dramatists, and not Elizabethan. But they were born in Eliza- 
beth's reign, and their plays retain much of the Elizabethan 
character. 

2. We have given the name of Elizabethan Drama tists 
only to those who wrote in the reign of : Elizabeth ; and we 
have seen these divided into two sections, the Earlier and Later 
Elizabethan (ch. vii. § 94). That part of the work of any of 



to a.d. 1606.] AT THE ACCESSION OF JAMES I. 493 

them which was done under the Stuarts we may now place in 
a third section and call it Stuart- Elizabethan. Thus Marlowe's 
plays are Earlier Elizabethan ; Shakespeare's, except his 'prentice . 
work in the Earlier Elizabethan time, rank with the Later 
Elizabethan if written before March, 1603; after that date they 
are Stuart-Elizabethan. 

Next to these will come the dramatists who wrote all their 
works under the Stuarts. The oldest of them, those who were 
born under Elizabeth, form a distinct class of Elizabethan- 
Stuart Dramatists. Those who were also born and bred 
under the Stuarts are the Stuart Dramatists : the Common- 
wealth dividing Earlier from Later Stuart. Thus the division 
becomes : — 

I. Elizabethan, a. Earlier; b. Later; c, Stuart- Eliza- 
bethan. 

II. Elizabethan-Stuart. 

III. Stuart, a. Earlier; b. Later. 

3. Among writers with their work before them wno were 
men or children at the accession of James I., were Lancelot 
Andrewes, thirty-eight years old; John Donne, aged thirty; 
Robert Burton, twenty-seven; George Sandys, twenty-six; 
Edward Herbert of Cherbury, twenty-two ; James Usher, 
twenty-three; Richard Corbet, twenty-one ; John Selden, nine- 
teen; Phineas and Giles Fletcher, twenty-one and perhaps 
nineteen ; William Drummond of Hawthornden, eighteen ; 
George Wither, fifteen; Thomas Hobbes, fifteen; Thomas 
Carew, about fourteen ; William Browne, thirteen; Robert 
Herrick, twelve; Francis Quarles, eleven; George Herbert, 
ten; and Izaak Walton, ten. For so many years had each 
received his training while Elizabeth was queen. 

4. Shakespeare was the great living writer at the accession 
of James L, when his company became that of the King's 
Players instead of the Lord Chamberlain's. The children of 
the chapel, who had acted Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels and 
the Poetaster at the Blackfriars' Theatre, became at the same 
time Children of his Majesty's Revels, and usually acted at 
Blackfriars when the King's Servants were at the Globe. The 
plays produced by Shakespeare in the reign of James I., and 
their probable dates, were Othello, perhaps ; — it was played at 
Court November 1, 1604; — and Measure for Measure, performed 
in December, 1604; Macbeth, early in 1606; King Lear, acted 
before James, December 26, 1606 (first printed, 1608) ; Pericles 



'494 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1603 

(on work by another hand), 1607 or 1608 (first printed, 1609) ; 
Antony and Cleopatra, 1608 [in this year Milton was born]; 
Troilus and Cressida, early in 1 609 (two editions were printed 
in that year, one of them before the play had been acted). 
There were no more of Shakespeare's plays printed in quarto 
during his life. Cy?nbeline was probably first acted about 1609; 
Coriolanns and Timon of Athens, 16 10. The earliest notice of 
a performance of the Tempest vs, of 161 1. It is one of Shake- 
speare's latest plays, perhaps his last, and there may be a 
reference to this in Prospero's breaking of his wand, burning of 
his books, and departure from the magic island. The notion of 
the play is, indeed, that man, supreme in intellect, master of 
the powers of earth and air, yet yearns for and needs the natural 
life with its affections. Bad as the world might be, and ill as it 
had used him, Prospero brought it to his island, with all its 
incidental treacheries and all its incidental grossness, bound 
himself with it again, and went home to it. Shakespeare felt 
only more keenly than his neighbours all the ties of home and 
kindred. He had been using the profits from his art to make 
himself a home at Stratford, and while he had still power to 
enjoy the home life that he had denied himself in part while he 
was earning, he broke his magic rod, and went home finally to 
his wife and children when his age was about forty-eight. King 
Henry VIII. was the play being acted when the Globe Theatre 
was burnt down, June 29, 1613, by the discharge of " chambers'" 
in Act i. sc. 4. Because Sir Henry Wotton speaks of the 
play then acted as " a new play, called All is True" some 
think that Shakespeare's career closed with the production of 
Henry VIII. , in 161 3. It has been said also that Shakespeare's 
versification falls into three periods : an early period, in which 
he seldom took liberties with the metre of his ten-syllabled line ; 
a second period, in which eleven-syllabled lines are more 
frequent; and a late period, in which he used much greater- 
freedom. In Henry VIII. extra syllables are more frequent 
than in any other play, and so distinctly marked, that they are- 
not seldom monosyllables. This peculiarity was introduced 
deliberately. It is strongly marked in the most characteristic 
passages, as in the speech of Buckingham before his execution, 
and in Wolsey's farewell to his greatness. The pomp of the 
heroic line is broken at its close, and falls succeed each other 
making a sad music, in harmony with the feeling of the scene 
and of the play. For the whole play is a lesson on the changing. 



to a.d. 1616.] WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 495 

fortunes of men and their one trust in God. Henry VIII. stands 
in the centre as the earthly Fortune, by whose smile or frown 
earthly prosperity is gained or lost ; scene after scene shows rise 
and fall of human fortunes as of waves of the great sea, and each 
fall — Buckingham's, Katherine's, Wolsey's — leads to the same 
thought — 

" Farewell 
The hopes of Court! My hopes in heaven do dwell." 

The play is as true as any sermon could be to such a text on the 
world and its pomps as this from the 39th Psalm, " Man walketh 
in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain : he heapeth 
up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them. And now,. 
Lord, what is my hope : truly my hope is even in thee." 

Shakespeare had prepared for retirement by an investment 
which would cause him to draw even a main part of his income 
from his native place. This was the purchase, in 1605, of a 
moiety of a lease granted in 1544 for 92 years — therefore, with 
53 years yet to run — of the tithes, great and small, of Stratford, 
Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe. The price paid 
for this was ^440, and the tithes would produce him ^60 a 
year, an income with the buying power of, say ^300 or ^400 a 
year at the present value of money. In 1607, on the 5th of 
June, Shakespeare married his elder daughter, Susanna, to John 
Hall, a prosperous medical practitioner at Stratford. In 
February, 1608, the birth of Mrs. Hall's only child, Elizabeth, 
made Shakespeare a grandfather; and in September of that 
year his mother died. In 161 2, at which time probably Shake- 
speare had retired to New Place, he was engaged in a lawsuit 
arising out of his share of the tithes. His brother Richard died 
in February, 161 3. A month afterwards he bought a house 
near the Blackfriars Theatre for ^140, paying £%o and mort- 
gaging for the rest, then paying the mortgage off, and leasing 
the house to John Robinson. In June of the same year, 1613, 
the Globe Theatre was burnt down while Henry VIII. was 
being acted, but he seems then to have had no share in the 
property. In 16 14 Shakespeare was active, with others of his 
neighbourhood, in protecting the rights to common lands near 
Stratford against an enclosure scheme. In 16 15 he was still 
interested in the enclosure question. In 161 6, he married his 
other daughter, Judith, to Thomas Quiney, a vintner and wine 
merchant at Stratford, who was four years younger than herself. 
Shakespeare had given directions for his will in the preceding 



496 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1603 

January, but it was executed on the 25th of March. He died on 
the 23rd of the following April, 1616, aged fifty-two. An after- 
thought of a bequest to his wife of " the second best bed " has 
been weakly taken as evidence of want of affection. It would 
be at least as reasonable to say that, as the best bed in most 
houses is that of the guest chamber, the second best becomes 
that of the husband and wife, and the special bequest was, 
therefore, dictated by a feeling of domestic tenderness. 

Shakespeare's wife survived until 1623. That was the year 
in which his plays were first collected in a folio, as Mr. William 
Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Published 
according to the True Originall Copies. The other three folios 
appeared in 1632, 1663 (with Pericles and six spurious plays 
added, namely, The London Prodigal, The History of Thomas 
Lord Cromwell, Sir John Oldcastle Lord Cobham, The 
Puritan Widow, A Yorkshire Tragedy, and the Tragedy of 
Locrine), and 1685 (also including the spurious plays). 

Shakespeare's Sonnets, mentioned by Meres in 1598 (ch. vii. 
§ 95), were first published in 1609. They are 154 m number, 
and their chief theme is friendship. Various attempts have 
been made to build sentimental theories upon the sonnets of 
Shakespeare, as upon those of Surrey (ch. vi. § 46) and of 
Sidney (ch. vii. § 61). From what has been said in former 
chapters of the character of sonnet writing, from its origin to the 
Elizabethan time, it will be understood that I have here nothing 
to do but endorse (dropping its " well-nigh ") the opinion arrived 
at by one of the most thorough Shakespeare students of our 
time, Mr. Dyce, who says, " For my own part, repeated perusals 
of the Sonnets have well-nigh convinced me, that most of them 
were composed in an assumed character on different subjects, 
and at different times, for the amusement, if not at the sugges- 
tion, of the author's intimate associates (hence described by 
Meres as ' his sugred sonnets among his private friends ') ; and 
though I would not deny that one or two of them reflect his 
genuine feelings, I contend that allusions scattered through the 
whole series are not to be hastily referred to the personal cir- 
cumstances of Shakespeare." They are exquisite little pieces, 
not in the true sonnet measure (ch. vi. § 46), but with a form of 
their own ; for each of them consists merely of three four-lined 
stanzas of alternate rhyme with a couplet added. Spenser's 
sonnets keep to the five rhymes, and although they have their 
own method of interlacement, it is one in full accord with the 



toa.d. 1616.] SHAKESPEARE. BEN JONS ON. 497 

nature of this kind of poem. In a sonnet of Shakespeare's there 
are seven rhymes. It is in fact simply a little poem in three 
four-lined stanzas and a couplet. 

5. The "Mermaid" was a tavern by Cheapside, between 
Bread Street and Friday Street, accessible from either ; and 
here Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have established a club, at 
which Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and other 
wits of the time met. The club founded by Raleigh is mythical, 
but the "Mermaid" was a famous tavern, and that the wits of 
the time frequented it we have witness in Beaumont's lines to 
Jonson, which recall — 

"What things we have seen 
Done at the ' Mermaid !' Heard words that have been 
So nimble and so full of subtile flame, 
As if that every one from whom they came 
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, 
And had resolved to live a fool the rest 
Of his dull life." 

Ben Jonson, under James I., gradually became the con- 
vivial centre of a group of men of genius, and owed his pre- 
dominance to a real intellectual power. The playhouse audience 
was losing its old national character. Secession. of those men 
who might have said " Amen " at the close of the Looking-glass 
for London a?td England (ch. vii. § 70), meant the gradual loss of 
a main element in the audience — that part of it on which a 
dramatist who is intensely earnest can rely for sympathy. The 
shallowness of the king's character made his patronage of the 
stage no remedy for this. Fewer men came to the playhouse 
with their souls ready to answer to the touch of genius. The 
range of Shakespeare's plots was wide as humanity, and in the 
true Elizabethan drama there is throughout variety of motive 
for the action of the dramas. But we have not gone far into the 
reign of James I. before we find this range becoming narrowed. 
The lower standard of the audiences for whom the playwright 
worked limited the expression of his highest power. In the 
Elizabethan-Stuart drama the plots nearly all turn upon animal 
love. Ben Jonson did not stoop to this. His plays had variety 
of theme, and through their wit and humour a vigorous mind 
was often uttering its wisdom to the deaf. He and his hearers 
were out of accord. He spoke of them and to them with an 
arrogant disdain, which they in part deserved ; and at last, after 
years of impatient service, while their degradation had been 
steadily proceeding, he turned from them with bitter words of 

G G 



49*5 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. i6o* 

loathing. Ben Jonson's self-assertion went too far ; but that which 
provoked it was a real change in the character of the dramatist's 
public. The growth of Puritanism outside the theatre with- 
drew, as has been said, an important element from the play- 
house audience. Plays were then written to please the class of 
men who were left as patrons of the stage, and the change thus 
made in the plays would quicken the defection of the better sort 
of playgoers. But while Ben Jonson disdained the judgment of 
these later audiences, there was no disdainful spirit in his 
dealing with true men. He looked up to Shakespeare, and the 
fittest eulogy of Shakespeare's genius that any Englishman had 
written came from Ben Jonson. In his later life young men of 
genius gathered about him and looked up to him ; he called 
them heartily his sons, and had frank pride in their achieve- 
ments. Of Shakespeare it was Ben Jonson who sang, 

" How far thou didst our Lyly outshine, 
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line. 
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek, 
From thence to honour thee I will not seek 
For names : but call forth thundering zEschylus, 
Euripides, and Sophocles to us, 
Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova, dead 
To live again, to hear thy buskin tread 
And shake a stage ; or, when thy socks were on. 
Leave thee alone for the comparison 
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome 
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. 
Triumph, my Britain ! thou hast one to show, 
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe. 
He was not of an age, but for all time ! 
And all the Muses still were in their prime 
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm 
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm. 
Nature herself was proud of his designs, 
And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines.** 

Ben Jonson's tragedy of Seja?ius, produced in 1603, with 
work in it from another hand, was not very successful, but it 
succeeded better after he had recast it in part and made it all 
his own. It was printed in 1605, and the small criticisms of a 
pedantic age Ben Jonson forestalled with footnotes citing the 
authority for all that he had worked into a harmonious and 
very noble play. Because the footnotes were there, and looked 
erudite, the superficial thing to do was to pronounce the play 
pedantic. But it is not pedantic. Jonson was no pedant; he 
had carried on for himself the education received at Westminster 
School, was a good scholar, delighted in his studies, and accu- 



A.D. i6o 3 .] BEN yONSON'S "SEJANUS." 499 

mulated a good library, which, in the latter part of his life was 
burnt. But he was true poet and true artist. His lyrics rank with 
the best of a time when nobody wrote dramas who was not poet 
enough to produce musical songs. No man can be a dramatist, 
in any real sense of the word, who cannot produce good lyrics. 
The greater includes the less. As dramatist Jonson had not 
Shakespeare's wealth of fancy, his sense of kindred with all 
forms of life — one source of that more than insight into cha- 
racter, of that power of being in imagination all that man can 
be, which caused his character painting to stand quite alone in 
the world's literature. Nobody but Shakespeare ever made men 
speak as from within, and one might say, betray themselves, 
as men and women do in real life, so that in his mimic world the 
persons are as variously judged and tried by as many tests as if 
one were discussing words and deeds of living people. All other 
dramatists have painted men and women as they saw them and 
we see them, from without ; not reproducing life, but drawing 
pictures of it. 

Ben Jonson judged himself aright, and wrote only two 
tragedies. But each of them has a clear artistic structure, with 
dignity in its main thought, and vigorous dramatic scenes from 
which, though it be tragedy, the humour of the satirist is not 
entirely absent. Sejanus rises by base arts ; he spurns the gods, 
but has within his house a shrine to Fortune. He scorns the 
spiritual aims of life, works grossly for material success, and 
from his pinnacle of state falls to be dashed in pieces. 

*' Let this example move the insolent man 
Not to grow proud and careless of the gods." 

There is a scene at the opening of the second act in which 
Eudemus, the physician, is painting the cheeks of Livia. The 
dialogue blends meanest frivolity v/ith a light planning of the 
most atrocious crime, and shows how Ben Jonson, following his 
own bent, could join a stern sense of the tragic in life with the 
humour of the comic poet. There is a very light touch of the 
spirit of comedy, suggesting the relation of small men to great 
events, in the fidgetty movements of Consul Regulus, who has 
been called out of his bed, in the third scene of the fifth act. 
In some character of a rough, honest censor, Ben Jonson him- 
self often walked abroad through his own plays. Thus, in 
Sejanus, he may be said to have embodied himself in the part 
of Arruntius. 

G G 2 



500 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d 1603 

In these first years, also, of James's reign there was so little 
of the ill-will of small minds following the stage controversy 
raised by Marston and Dekker in Saiircmastix (ch. vii. § 100), 
that Jonson and Dekker were working together, in 1603, at a 
masque for the City of London on his Majesty's accession ; and 
one of Marston's best plays— the Malcontent, written probably 
in 1603, and certainly published in two editions in 1604 — was 
dedicated to Ben Jonson as his liberal and cordial friend. In 
1605, when Sejanus was printed, Marston's friendship for Ben 
Jonson appeared in the front of it ; and in that year also (1605) 
Ben Jonson was fellow-worker with Marston and Chapman in 
the play of Eastward Hoe. The play contained a sentence — 
afterwards expunged — that offended the king and brought the 
writers into trouble; but its whole character of Sir Petronel 
Flash was a satire upon his Majesty's great cheapening of the 
honours of knighthood. The play itself, with some freedom of 
detail, was supremely moral in its design, being a contrast 
between the careers of the Idle and Industrious Apprentice. 

Ben Jonscn, who had many friends among the abler men of 
rank at Court, began at the outset of James's reign to find 
employment as a writer of Court Masques. In this form of 
writing — which had been untouched by Shakespeare — he was 
in his own day easily the first. But his true strength was in a 
form of comedy exclusively his own, broad and deep, generous 
in its aim, with scorn for all that is base, lively in its painting of 
a great variety of characters, each with some one predominating 
feature which he called its humour, and strong throughout with 
a manly vigour of thought that gives a bracing sense of intel- 
lectual energy to every scene. The reader's mind, after a ramble 
through Volpone or the Alchemist, feels as his body might after 
a wholesome walk in the sea breeze. Ben Jonson, about thirty 
years old at the accession of James I., was about thirty-two when, 
after Sejanus, he produced Volpone; or, the Fox, in 1605 ; then 
followed two more of his masterpieces, Epicene ; or, the Sile?it 
Woman, in 1609, and the Alchemist, in 1610. His other tragedy 
came next, the Catiline, in 161 1. For twelve years, during this 
earlier part of his life, Ben Jonson had been a Roman Catholic ; 
but he had by this time rejoined the Church of England, In 1613 
he was in France as companion and tutor to Sir Walter Raleigh's 
son. When he came home he poured scorn upon the outside 
show of Puritanism in his Bartholo7new Fair, and produced, in 
161 6, the year of Shakespeare's death, a comedy called The Devil 



to a.d. 1619.] BEN JONSON. BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 501 

is an Ass, in which the imp Pug, having obtained a holiday on 
earth, went back a lost fiend as to his character, for said Satan 
to him : 

" Whom hast thou dealt with, 
Woman or man, this day, but have outgone thee 
Some way, and most have proved the better fiends.'* 

Each party in the rising controversy of the day had its mean 
rout of camp-followers, serving the times for their own advantage. 
If Zeal-in-the-Land Busy in Bartholomew Fair represented one 
of the untruths of the time, the truth he parodied was in the 
good men of all parties. It was in Ben Jonson among the rest, 
and he uttered it in his own way as a comedian, very distinctly 
in this play, which followed next after " Bartholomew Fair." In 
the same year, 1616, Ben Jonson published a folio as the 
first volume of his Works, including not plays only, but epigrams 
and miscellaneous poems gathered under the title of The Forest. 
In this year of Shakespeare's death, Jonson ceased to write for the 
playhouse. He continued to produce Court Masques, but wrote 
no more plays for the public stage until after the death of James I. 
The degree of M.A. was conferred on him in 1619, by the 
University of Oxford ; and, at the cost of some trouble, Ben 
Jonson escaped being knighted by King James. 

6. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, whose plays 
belong entirely to the reign of James I., first appeared together 
as friends of Ben Jonson, each of them furnishing verses prefixed 
to the first publication of Volpone, in 1607. John Fletcher, the 
elder of the two friends, was born at Rye, in 1579, when his 
father — ten years afterwards a bishop (ch. vii. § 91) — was vicar 
there. He was educated at home and at Benet College, Cam- 
bridge ; afterwards came to London, and began his career as a 
dramatist, at the age of about twenty-seven, with The Woman 
Hater and Thierry and Theodoret, both perhaps written before 
he entered into literary partnership with Beaumont. 

Francis Beaumont was five years younger than Fletcher. He 
was the third son of Sir Francis Beaumont, Justice of the Com- 
mon Pleas, was born in 1584, admitted in his thirteenth year a 
gentleman commoner of Broadgate Hall (now Pembroke College), 
Oxford, left the University without a degree, and at the age of 
about seventeen was entered of the Inner Temple. Before he was 
nineteen he published a paraphrase of Ovid's tale oiSalmacis and 
Hermaphroditns j and in 1607, when he was twenty-three and 
Fletcher twenty-eight, he wrote his lines in praise of Ben Jonson's 



502 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1603 

Volfione. Thenceforth, until the year of Shakespeare's death, 
Beaumont and Fletcher, close friends, worked together for the 
players. Beaumont had private means, and married. Fletcher 
depended on his earnings. Beaumont died a few weeks before 
Shakespeare, in March, 1616; all plays, therefore, that are 
the joint work of Beaumont and Fletcher, were produced 
during the ten years between 1606 and 161 6. John Fletcher 
was not only five years older than Beaumont, but he sur- 
vived him nine years, and was sole author of many of the 
plays known as Beaumont and Fletcher's. Beaumont, as 
dramatist, wrote probably no work that was all his own, 
except in 161 3 a masque on the marriage of the Princess Eliza- 
beth. Fletcher wrote a play or two of his own before the part- 
nership began ; probably four plays wholly his own were produced 
during the partnership ; and he continued to write during the 
nine or ten years between Beaumont's death, in March, 1616, and 
his own death by the plague, in August, 1625. Omitting a few 
doubtful works, about forty plays were written entirely by John 
Fletcher, and thirteen were the joint work of the partners. These 
were Philaster, The Maid's Tragedy, A King a?id 710 King, The 
Knight of the Burning Pestle, Ctipid's Revenue, The Coxcomb, 
Four Plays in One, The Scornful Lady, The Honest Man's 
Fortune, The Little French Lawyer, Wit at Several Weapons, 
A Right Woman, and The Laws of Candy. In verses " On 
Mr. Beaumont, written presently after his death," by his friend 
John Earle, then a young man, credit is given to Beaumont for 
the first three plays named in this list. Francis Beaumont and 
Ben Jonson were hearty friends. The elder poet wrote of the 
younger, 

" How I do love thee, Beaumont, and thy Muse, 
That unto me dost such religion use ! 
How I do fear myself, that am not worth 
The least indulgent thought thy pen drops forth ! " 

Tradition, dating from their own time, gave pre-eminence to 
Fletcher for luxuriance of fancy and invention, and to Beaumont 
for critical judgment, to which it was said that even Ben Jonson 
submitted his writings. The wit and poetry of these plays were 
spent chiefly on themes of love. Their authors, capable of higher 
flights, so far accommodated their good work to the lower tone 
of the playhouse as to earn praise for having " understood and 
imitated much better than Shakespeare the conversation of 
gentlemen whose wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in 



toa.d. 1616.] BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 503 

repartees no poet can ever paint as they have done. Humour, 
which Ben Jonson derived from particular persons, they made it 
not their business to describe ; they represented all the passions 
very lively." So Beaumont and Fletcher were praised by Dryden 
in the time of Charles II., when their plays were "the most 
pleasant and frequent entertainments of the stage, two of theirs 
being acted through the year for one of Shakespeare's or 
Jonson's." We shall see how in that later Stuart time The Maid's 
T?'agedy was dealt with. As first produced, in 1609, it ended 
tragically for a king of Rhodes, and its last words were : 

" On lustful kings 
Unlook'd for sudden deaths from Heav'n are sent 
But curst is he that is their instrument." 

Here was the good Elizabethan sense of common right and 
duty, guarded by aline in recognition of the sacredness of royal 
persons. The Faithful Shepherdess, by Fletcher alone, pro- 
duced early in 1610, was above the playhouse standard of taste 
and morality, being a pastoral play in praise of maiden inno- 
cence, daintily versified and most pure in its design, although 
its moral is sometimes enforced by scenes which, as men now 
judge, depict too freely the evil they condemn. That is a ques- 
tion only of change in conventional opinion ; the true mind of 
the play is absolutely pure. 

7. The Knight of the Burning Pestle, by Beaumont and 
Fletcher, was a lively burlesque on the taste for high-flown 
romances, which Cervantes had attacked only six years before in 
his "Don Quixote." A citizen, speaking from among the audience, 
stops the actors at their prologue, says there shall be a grocer in 
the play, and he shall do admirable things. The citizen's wife says 
he shall kill a lion with a pestle ; and their man, Ralph, is the 
man to do it. Ralph, being thus forced on the players, burlesques 
the taste for Palmerin of England, appears, with squire and 
dwarf, as a knight, who swears by his ancestor Amadis of Gaul, 
has an inn described to him by his squire as an ancient castle 
held by the old knight of the most holy order of " The Bell," 
who has three squires — Chamberlino, Tapstero, and Ostlero 
— and when the tapster answers a lance-knock at the door, 
addresses him in this fashion : 

" Fair Squire Tapstero, I, a wandering knight, 
Hight of the Burning Pestle, in the quest 
Of this fair lady's casket and wrought purse, 
Losing myself in this vast wilderness. 



5©4 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1603 

Am to this castle well by fortune brought, 
Where hearing of the goodly entertain 
Your knight of holy order of ' The Bell' 
Gives to all damsels and all errant knights, 
I thought to knock, and now am bold to enter." 

This earliest burlesque in our dramatic literature was evidently 
following the lead of " Don Quixote." It was in 1605, at a time 
corresponding to the second year of the reign of James I. in 
England, that CERVANTES published the first part of his Don 
Quixote; the second part, still better than the first, was published 
in 161 5. Beaumont and Fletcher's burlesque on the affected 
forms into which tales of chivalry had degenerated, appeared in 
1611. 

In the conflict that brought Spain and England into opposition 
and that touched all Europe to the quick, the two great centres of 
activity were London and Madrid. The quickened energies 
developed in each city a vigorous intellectual life, and the 
Spanish drama rose at the same time with ours to its full height. 
The great developer of Spanish drama, Lope de Vega, was but 
seventeen months older than Shakespeare. He sailed in the 
great Spanish Armada, he exulted in a poem of ten cantos — the 
" Dragontea " — upon the death of Drake, and he called Queen 
Elizabeth the " Scarlet Lady of Babylon." Lope de Vega lived 
till 1635, and was writing throughout the reign of James I., 
while Calderon, the next great Spanish dramatist, born at the 
end of Elizabeth's reign, was growing up to manhood. 

8. During the best years of Shakespeare's life as a dramatist, 
William Alexander, of Menstrie, afterwards Sir William 
Alexander and first Earl of Stirling, wrote four weak plays — 
Darius, first printed in 1603 ; Croesus, in 1604; the Alexandrian, 
in 1605, and Julius Ccesar, in 1607, when the series was pub- 
lished together as The Monarchic Tragedies. William Alexander 
was then a Gentleman of the Chamber to Prince Henry, and a 
Scotchman in much favour with King James. 

Cyril Tourne"iir, a dramatic poet with real tragic power, 
of whose life little is known, and whose remaining plays are The 
Revenger's Tragedy, The Atheist's Tragedy, saidThe Nobleman, 
wrote only in the reign of James I. 

William Rowley, who during the last three years of 
Shakespeare's life was at the head of the Prince of Wales's com- 
pany of comedians, wrote, or took part in writing, many plays, 
chiefly comedies, during the reign of James I. He published 
also, in 1609, a lively picture of London life, called A Search 



toa.d. 1625.] OTHER DRAMATISTS UNDER JAMES I. 505 

for Money ; or, the Lamentable Co?nftlaint for the Losse of the 
Wandering Knight, Monsieur P Argent. 

Thomas Middleton (ch. vii. § 99) was a dramatist through- 
out the reign of James I., whom he did not long survive. He 
died in July, 1627. 

Thomas Dekker (ch. vii. § 99) remained throughout the 
reign of James I. an active dramatist and pamphleteer. He lived 
on into the next reign, and died an old man, not earlier than 1637. 

Nathaniel Field was one of the Children of the Revels 
who, in 1601, played in Ben Jonson's " Poetaster." He became 
known as a very good actor in the Blackfriars company, also as a 
dramatist. Before 161 1 he wrote two plays of his own, Woman 
is a Weathercock, and a second part, called Amends for Ladies. 
He lived, and so did that busiest of playwrights, Thomas 
Hey wood (ch. vii. § 99), until about 1641. 

9. John Webster and Philip Massinger, true poets both, and 
dramatists of higher mark than those just named, were nearly 
of like age. Philip Massinger was born at Salisbury, in 1584. 
His father was in the household of Henry Earl of Pembroke. 
In the last year of Queen Elizabeth's reign, Massinger became a 
commoner of St. Alban's Hall, Oxford ; but the death of his 
father, in 1606, obliged him to leave the University and support 
himself as he could. Many of his plays are lost, and there is no 
record of work of his earlier than 1622, when The Virgin Martyr 
was printed. The Duke of Milan was printed in 1623. In 
December, 1623, Massinger's name first appeared in the office 
book of the Master of the Revels, when his Bondman was acted. 
That play was first printed in 1624. Twelve of Massinger's 
plays were printed in his lifetime, but only these three in the 
reign of James I. Massinger remained an active dramatist 
during fifteen years of the reign of Charles I. 

John Webster, a master poet in the suggestion of tragic 
horror, produced in the reign of James I. two of his finest plays, 
The White Devil; or, Vittoria Corombona, printed in 1612 ; and 
The Duchess of Malfi, first acted about the time of Shakespeare's 
death, but printed in 1619. Webster also wrote in the reign of 
Charles I. He lived on into the time of the Commonwealth, 
and died about 1654. 

10. George Chapman, during the reign of James I., was 
an active dramatist. In 1606, besides Eastward Hoe (§ 5), in 
which he had a hand, his comedy of All Fools was printed ; in 
1606 Monsieur d' "Olive and The Gentleman Usher j in 1607 his 



506 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. j6io 

tragedy of Bussy d'Ambois, which kept the stage for some time 
after his death. Other tragedies and comedies followed. But 
his chief work was still at the translation of Homer (ch. vii. § 98), 
on which he was engaged throughout the reign of James I. 
Twelve books of Homer's Iliad, translated by George Chap- 
man, appeared about 1610 ; and in the following year, the whole 
twenty-four books of The Iliads of Homer, dedicated to Prince 
Henry, who died in November, 161 1. This was followed by the 
twelve first books of the Odyssey, about 1614, and in 161 5, the 
whole twenty-four books of Ho7ner's Odysses, translated accord- 
ing to the Greek. About the year of Shakespeare's death (Chap- 
man's folios are not dated), Chapman's " Iliad " and " Odyssey " 
appeared together as The Whole Works of Homer, Prince of 
Poets. Chapman proceeded then to translate the Homeric Hymns, 
and "Battle of the Frogs and Mice, ' ascribed to Homer. This 
translation appeared at the end of the reign of James I., as The 
Crown of all Homer's Workes, Batrachomyomachia, his Hymns 
and Epigrams, translated by George Chapman. Because of the 
vigour of the Elizabethan time, and the fact that Chapman was 
a poet, this translation is the crown of the works of Chapman. 

" He leapt upon the sounding earth, and shook his lengthful dart, 
And everywhere he breathed exhorts, and stirr'd up every heart. 
A dreadful fight he set on foot. His soldiers straight turned head. 
The Greeks stood firm. In both the hosts the field was perfected. 
But Agamemnon foremost still did all his side exceed, 
And would not be the first in name unless the first in deed." 

Thus sang George Chapman, who was himself the Agamemnon 
of the host of the translators of Homer. 

11. Another good translator of this time was George 
Sandys, second son of the Sandys, Archbishop of York, whom 
Aylmer succeeded in the Bishopric of London. George Sandys 
was born at Bishopsthorpe, in 1577, and educated at Oxford. In 
1610 he set out upon the travels of which he published an 
account in 161 5, as A Relation of a Journey begun A.D. 1610. 
Four Books containing a description of the Turkish Empire, of 
Egypt, of the Holy Land, of the Remote Parts of Italy, and 
Islands adjoining. He then worked at his translation of Ovid's 
Metamorphoses j The first Five Books appearing in the reign of 
James I. Sandys' travels are told gracefully, in a style less 
laboured than that of Richard Knolles' General History oj 
the Turks, which first appeared in the year of King James's 
accession. 



TO A.D. 1618.] CHAPMAN'S HOMER. SANDYS. CAMDEN. $°7 

12. Apart from their direct value as record, there is the 
charm also of an unaffected method in William Camden's 
Latin annals of the reign of Queen Elizabeth — Annates Rerum 
AngUcarum et Hibernicarum regnante Elizabetha — of which 
the first part, ending at 1589, was first published in 161 5, and 
the second part early in the reign of Charles I., in 1627. An 
English translation, as The Historie of the Life and Reigne of the 
most renowned and victor ious Princesse Elizabeth, late Queen 
of England. . . . Composed by way of Annates by the most 
learned Mr. William Camden, was published 1630. The work 
had been suggested to Camden, the most fit man living, by Lord 
Burghley, who, says the annalist, " set open unto me first his own 
and then the Queen's rolls, memorials, records, and thereout willed 
me to compile in a historical style the first beginnings of the reign 
of Queen Elizabeth." He studied carefully to carry out this design, 
procured access to charters, letters patent, letters, notes of con- 
sultations in the council chamber, instructions to ambassadors ; 
looked through Parliamentary diaries, acts, and statutes, and 
read over every edict or proclamation ; for the greatest part of 
all which he was beholden, he said, to Sir Robert Cotton, "who 
hath with great cost and successful industry furnished himself 
with most choice store of matter of history and antiquity ; for 
from his light he hath willingly given great light unto me." 
Camden chose to take, for clearness and simplicity, the form of 
Annals for his work ; but endeavoured so to tell his facts that 
their relation to each other might be understood, for he liked, 
he said, that saying of Polybius, " Take from history, why, how, 
and to what end, and what hath been done, and whether the 
thin done hath succeeded according to reason, and whatsoever 
is else will rather be an idle sport than a profitable instruction : 
and for the present it may delight, but for the future it cannot 
profit.' 5 Samuel Daniel (ch. vii. § 79) wrote also as Annals, but 
in English, his Collection of the History of England, first pub- 
lished in 1613 and 161 8. It begins with Roman Britain, and 
ends with the reign of Richard III. 

13. Robert Eruce Cotton, born at Denton, Huntingdon- 
shire, in 1570, and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, 
was knighted by James I. In 161 1, when his Majesty had in- 
vented the rank of baronet, and began to trade in the new 
article, Sir Robert Cotton became one of his first customers. 
King James was aided in his controversies by Sir Robert 
Cotton's learning, and the treasures of literature rescued by him 



508 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A THEE. [a.d. 1603 

from the scattered waste of the monasteries, were at the service 
of all who could make good use of them. It was in the reign of 
James I, that an older man, Sir Thomas Bodley, founded the 
Bodleian Library at Oxford. He was born at Exeter, in 1544, 
the son of that John Bodley who, in exile at Geneva, had been 
a chief promoter of the translation known as the Geneva Bible 
(ch. vii. § 15). Thomas Bodley had come to England at 
Elizabeth's accession, entered at Magdalene College, Oxford, 
became Fellow of Merton, had been employed by the queen on 
embassies, was for nine years ambassador at the Hague, but in 
1597 he retired from public life, and made it the work of his 
last years to give to the University of Oxford a library in place of 
that which it had lost. In 1602 he refitted the dismantled room 
which had been used for the library founded by Humphrey Duke 
of Gloucester, and furnished it with ten thousand pounds' worth 
of books. In July, 1610, he laid the foundation-stone of a new 
library building; and died in 161 2, about a year before the 
building was completed. 

14. The development of England at a time when men felt 
they were living history, and the lively controversy upon ques- 
tions in which authority of the past was being constantly 
appealed to, gave great impulse to historical research. John 
Stow was followed by another patriotic tailor chronicler, John 
|V^* Speed, born in 1555, at Farington, in Cheshire, who, with 
little education, became enthusiastic in the study of the anti- 
quities of his own country. In 1608 and 1610 he published 
fifty-four maps of England and Wales. In 161 1 he published, in 
royal folio, his Chronicle, as The History of Great B?'itaine tender 
the Conquests of the Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans. In 
161 1 appeared, in folio, his Theatre of the Empire of Great 
Britainej and in 1616 the religious side of bis English character 
was shown by the publication of A Cloud of Witnesses j and 
they the Holy Genealogies of the Sacred Scriptures, confirining 
unto us the truth of the histories of God's most holie Word. Speed 
married when young, had eighteen children, and passed his 
golden wedding-day, his wife dying in 1628, and he in 1629. 

There were two brothers, William and Robert Burton, of 
Lindley, in Leicestershire, who both went to school at Sutton 
Coldfield, and to college at Brazenose, Oxford. William 
Burton became a lawyer, gave his mind to antiquities, and 
published, in 1622, in folio, a Description of Leicestershire : 
containing Mattel's of Antiquity e, Histoiye, Armory e, and 



to a.d. 1621.] COTTON. BODLEY. SPEED. BURTON. RALEIGH. 509 

Ge?iealogy. Eobert Burton became a clergyman, and had 
the livings of St. Thomas, Oxford, and Segrave, in Leicester- 
shire ; but he still lived a quiet scholar's life at his college, 
and in 1621, published the Anatomy of Mela?icholy, by 
De?nocritus Junior. This discussion of ail forms of melan- 
choly, and their remedies, is very quaint and ingenious in 
thought and expression, and so crammed with pleasant erudite 
quotations that the book has been to many later writers, who 
desired to affect knowledge of books they had never seen, the 
storehouse of their second-hand learning. Although an original 
book, its manner was in the fashion of the time, and it is said 
to have made the fortune of its Oxford publisher. It went 
through five editions before its author's death, in 1639. 

History moralised in the Mirror for Magistrates, remained 
popular after the accession of James I. The last edition of that 
work appeared in 16 10, edited by Eichard Kiccols, newly 
enlarged with a last Part, called a Winter Nighfs Vision, being 
an addition of such Tragedies, especially famous, as are exempted 
in the former Historie, with a Poem annexed, called England's 
Eliza. This final edition contained ninety-one legends. 

15. There was a poet's mind in Sir "Walter Baleigh, 
though he shone most as a man of action. Spenser had taken 
pleasure in his verse. A poet's sense of the grand energies of 
life was in Raleigh's conception of a History of the World, to 
keep his busy mind astir during imprisonment. Raleigh's 
good fortune was at an end when James I. became king. In 
November, 1603, he was tried at Winchester — there being the 
plague then in London — and unjustly found guilty of participation 
in an attempt to place Arabella Stuart on the throne, and of a 
secret correspondence with the King of Spain. Raleigh was 
sentenced to death, but reprieved. His personal property, for- 
feited by the attainder, was also restored, and he was detained a 
prisoner in the Tower, where his wife obtained permission to 
live with him, and where his youngest son was born. It was 
during these twelve years in the Tower that Sir Walter Raleigh 
wrote his fragment of a History of the World, which fills a sub- 
stantial folio. It contains five books of the first part of the 
History, beginning at the Creation and ending with the Second 
Macedonian War. The theme of its opening chapter is " Of 
the Creation and Preservation of the World," and the argument 
of its first section, " that the Invisible God is seen in His 
creatures." Raleigh even discusses fate, foreknowledge, and 



$10 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1607 

free-will, before he begins the story of man's life on earth, and 
proceeds with historical detail that includes reasonings upon 
the origin of law and government. This folio was published in 
1614, and in 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death, Raleigh, by 
bribing the king's favourite, and exciting other hopes of gain, 
obtained liberty without any formal pardon, and a patent under 
the Great Seal for establishing a settlement in Guiana. The 
expedition failed, and Raleigh was too faithful to the old tradi- 
tions of his life. He returned in July, 161 8, having lost his eldest 
son in an attack on the new Spanish settlement of St. Thomas ; 
and to oblige Spain, James I. then caused him, at the age of 
sixty-six, to be executed, without trial, by carrying out of the 
fifteen-year-old sentence, on the 29th of October, 161 8. English 
regard for the Elizabethan voyagers was maintained in this 
reign by the Rev. Samuel Purchas, vicar of Eastwood, in 
Essex. The Rev. Richard Hakluyt's manuscripts came into his 
hands, and he resigned his vicarage to his brother, to devote 
himself to a continuation of the work of Hakluyt. His first 
volume appeared in folio in 161 3, and it was continued with 
four volumes in 1625, as Hakluytus Posthumus ; or, Purchas 
his Pilgrimes. 

Descriptions of strange lands suggested to Joseph. Hall 
(ch. vii. § 92) his Latin satire, first published at Hanover in 
1607, Mundus Alter et Idem. Another world and the same, 
which places in the Southern region hitherto unknown, the 
imagined continent about the south pole, a satirical image of the 
hitherto known world which occupies the other half of the 
author's map. In that mirrored southern world there is a Holy 
Land said to be still unknown, a Crapulia divided into Pampha- 
gonia, the land of gluttons ; with whimsical subdivision into 
provinces, an account of its laws, religion, and manner of elect- 
ing a chief; and Yvronia, the land of drunkards, described in 
like manner. The lard of women is described as Viraginia. 
Moronia, the land of fools, with its subdivisions, covers a large 
space. The other region is Lavernia. the land of thieves. The 
piece has the fault of all i^tire that dwells exclusively upon 
the baser side of human life. I 

16. History and antiquities were much studied by the con- 
troversial writers in the reign of James. At the beginning of 
the reign there was some revival of the old controversy as to the 
relation of the pope to kings ; and this was quickened by the 
discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, in November, 1605. In 1608, 



toa.d. i6i8.] PURCHAS. HALL. LANCELOT. ANDREWES. 511 

Cardinal Bellarmin, under the name of his secretary, Matthew 
Tortus, answered King James's Triplici nodo, triplex Cunausj 
or, an Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance against the two 
Breues of Pope Pavlvs Qvintvs, and the late Letter of Cardinal 
Bellarmi?ie to C. Blackwel, the Arch Priest (1607). Robert 
Bellarmin, an Italian Jesuit, born in Tuscany, in 1542, was 
the great controversialist on the side of Rome. He had 
taught divinity at Louvain, and read lectures at Rome on points 
of controversy, had been sent also as legate to France, when, 
in 1599, he was made cardinal, and, in 1602, Archbishop of 
Capua. In 1605 he resigned the archbishopric that he might 
be near the pope, and do battle for the papacy on the great ques- 
tions of the day. He was learned, acute, and so honest in avoid- 
ing misrepresentation of the arguments he sought to answer, that 
his works, in three folio volumes, put very fairly upon record 
the positions of his opponents as well as his own. In these 
controversies the men of the Reformed Church had hitherto 
allowed citations of authority to weigh against them. They had 
not matched their antagonists in knowledge of Church history 
and of the writings of the fathers ; but a great demand for know- 
ledge of this kind was now producing the supply of it. Lancelot 
Andrewes, on whom the king called for an answer to Bel- 
larmin, and who produced as answer his Tortura Torti (16C9), 
was in this way the most learned Churchman of the days of 
James I. He was born in London, in 1555, educated at Mer- 
chant Taylor's School, sent for his ability to Pembroke Hall, 
Cambridge (Spenser's College), obtained a fellowship, studied 
and taught divinity with great success, and was consulted as a 
profound casuist. Henry Earl of Huntingdon took him to the 
North of England, and there he persuaded some Roman Catholics 
to change their faith. Sir Francis Walsingham gave him the 
Parsonage of Alton, in Hampshire, and he was then successively 
vicar of St. Giles's, Cripplegate, Prebendary of St. Paul's — 
where he read divinity lectures three times a week in term time — 
Master of Pembroke Hall, Chaplain in Ordinary to Elizabeth, 
and Dean of Westminster. The queen would not raise him 
higher, because his ecclesiastical view of the rights of bishops 
forbade him to alienate episcopal revenues. James I. delighted 
in his preaching, which was that of a religious man strongly 
tinged with the pedantry of the time, and made him, in 1605, 
Bishop of Chichester. He was promoted afterwards through 
the bishopric of Ely to that of Winchester, in 161 8, and he died 



512 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1603 

in 1626, aged seventy-one. Ninety-six Sermons of his were 
published by command of Charles I., in 1631. 

17. James Usher, twenty-five years younger than Bishop 
Andrewes, succeeded to his repute as a theologian, and excelled 
him in learning. Usher was born at Dublin, in 1580, son to one 
of the six clerks in chancery. He was taught to read by two 
aunts, who had been blind from their cradle, but who knew 
much of the Bible by heart. Trinity College, Dublin, owes its 
existence to a grant made by Queen Elizabeth, in 1591, of the 
Augustine monastery of All Saints. The first stone was laid on 
New Year's-day, 1593. It began work in the same year, and 
James Usher was one of the first three students admitted. He 
had delight in history, made chronological tables as a boy, and, 
as a youth, when the Church controversies became interesting 
to him, he resolved to read for himself the whole works of the 
fathers whose authority was so continually cited. He began 
at the age of twenty, and, reading a portion daily, finished at the 
age of thirty-eight. Usher's father died when he was about to 
be sent to London to study law. He then abandoned to his 
brothers and sisters his paternal inheritance, reserving only 
enough for his own support at college in a life of study, obtained 
a fellowship, at the age of twenty-one took holy orders, argued 
and preached against the Catholics, and opposed toleration of 
them. At the accession of James I. James Usher was twenty- 
three years old. He came to London to buy books for the library 
of the new college at Dublin, and found Sir Thomas Bodley 
(§ 13) buying books for Oxford. While he was in London 
Usher's mother became Roman Catholic, and all his contro- 
versial skill failed afterwards to reconvert her. In 1606, and 
afterwards at regular intervals of three years, Usher was again 
book-buying in England. In 1607, he was made — aged twenty- 
seven — Professor of Divinity at Dublin, and Chancellor of St. 
Patrick's Cathedral. In 161 2 he became Doctor of Divinity. 
In 161 3, he published in London, and dedicated to King James 
his first book, in Latin, continuing from the sixth century the 
argument of Jewel's Apology (ch vii. § 14), to prove that the 
tenets of the Protestants were those of the primitive Christians. 
In the same year Usher married the well-dowered daughter of 
His old friend and associate in book-buying, Luke Chaloner. In 
161 5, a convocation of the Irish clergy drew up by Usher's 
hand a set of 104 articles for the Irish Church. Their theology 
was Calvin's, and they included an injunction to keep holy the 



to a.d. 1624.] JAMES USHER. S l 3 

Sabbath-day : for this and his strong opposition to the Roman 
Catholics, it was represented to King James that Usher was a 
Puritan. A correspondent of Usher's at this time observed 
how easily the king could be set against a clergyman by styling 
him a Puritan, " whence it were good," he said, " to petition His 
Majesty to define a Puritan, whereby the mouths of those scoffing 
enemies would be stopt ; and if His Majesty be not at leisure, 
that he would appoint some good men to do it for him." His 
Majesty hated a Puritan as one who did not bow down to the 
divine right of rule in bishops and archbishops, and, therefore, 
would have but a weak faith in the divine authority of kings. 
James had spoken his own mind as a " free king," with weak 
notions of freedom in a people, when, in 1598, he published The 
True Law of Free Monarchies j or, the Reciprock and Mutual 
Dutie betwixt a Free Kiiig and his Nattirall Subjectes, and he 
had a sufficiently shrewd sense of the tendencies of Puritan 
opinion. When Usher came to England next, in 1619, he 
found it necessary to bring with him a certificate of orthodoxy 
from the Lord Deputy and his Council, and he had to submit to 
the infliction of a private theological examination, with his most 
conceited Majesty for the examiner. But Usher was a strong 
and conscientious supporter of authority in Church and State, 
and passed his examination so well that the king gave him the 
bishopric of Meath. As bishop, Usher was still active against 
Catholicism, and he published, in English, in 1622, A Discourse 
on the Religion Anciently Professed by the Irish and British, 
to show that Protestant opinions were those of the ancient faith, 
and point out how at successive times the practices of the Church 
of Rome had been introduced. This work caused King James 
to command that Bishop Usher should produce a larger work, 
in Latin, on the antiquities of the British Church, with leave of 
absence from his diocese for consultation of authorities. He 
was a year in England, returned to Ireland in 1624, and, in 
reply to William Malone, published an Atiswer to a Challenge 
of a Jesuit in h-eland to disprove uniformity of doctrine in the 
Roman Catholic Church; thus giving more evidence of his 
knowledge of ecclesiastical antiquities. He then returned to 
England, and as the Archbishop of Armagh died at that time, 
King James, in the last year of his reign, gave the archbishopric 
to Usher. 

18. The accusation of Puritanism made at one time against 
Usher was, as we have seen, partly grounded on the Calvinism 

H H 



5 14 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1003 

of the articles drawn up by him for a convocation of the Irish 
Church. The Established Church of England was in Eliza- 
beth's time chiefly Calvinist in doctrine; under the Stuarts it 
was chiefly Arminian. Puritans held generally by the faith 
of Calvin, but by each road England went the way to her 
own liberties. Arminius was the Latinised name of Jacob 
Harmensen, who was born in 1560, at Oudewater, in South 
Holland, where his father was a councillor. Left early an 
orphan, Arminius was helped by friends to study at Leyden, 
Marburg, Geneva, and Basle. He went also to Padua and 
Rome before he returned to Holland, and preached in pulpits 
of the Reformed Church. In 1588 he became pastor at Am- 
sterdam. Some clergy at Delft then published a volume against 
Calvin's doctrine of predestination. Arminius was asked to 
refute their book, examined its arguments, was convinced, and 
ended not merely by accepting but by developing and enforcing 
its opinions. Great controversy then arose, but the chair of 
theology vacant at Leyden by the death of Francis Junius 
(ch. vii. § 26) was offered to Arminius. There he had to meet 
the assaults of a Calvinist colleague, Francis Gomarus, and 
the two parties formed were called Arminians and Gomarists. 
The good man's life was embittered by this controversy, and he 
died in 1609, leaving many disciples, who, in 1610, set forth by 
five articles the opinions of their founder in a Remonstrance to 
the Estates of Holland. This gave them the name of The 
Remonstrants. They had freedom of opinion until 161 8, when 
it was taken from them by their religious and political enemies 
at the Synod of Dordrecht, and was not recovered again till the 
death of Maurice, Prince of Orange, in 1625, the year also of 
the death of James I. 

19. John Seidell was born in December, 1584, at Salvington, 
about two miles from Worthing, in Sussex. His father was a 
musician, who sent him to the free school at Chichester, whence 
he was sent by the master's advice to Hart Hall, Oxford. In 
1602 he became a member of Clifford's Inn; and a year after the 
accession of King James, being then aged nineteen, he removed 
to the Inner Temple. John Selden had a strong body, able ta 
sustain incessant studies; he had also a wonderful memory. 
He practised little at the bar, but was consulted for his know- 
ledge ; gathered many books, inquired through them freely, and 
wrote on the front leaf of most of them, as his motto, in a Greek 
sentence, "Above all, Liberty." He very soon became solicitor 



toa.d. i6i8.] JOHN SELDEN. 515 

and steward to the Earl of Kent, and found also a good friend 
in Sir Robert Cotton, to whom he dedicated his first book, 
finished in 1607, but not published till 161 5, the Analecton 
Anglo-Britannicon Libri Duo, two books of collections, giving 
a summary chronological view of English records down to the 
Norman Invasion. In 1610, besides two little treatises, one 
Latin and one English, on the antiquities of English law, he set 
forth some results of his reading in a short piece on The Duello, 
or Single Combat, extra-judicial and judicial, but chiefly judicial, 
with its customs since the Conquest. In 1614, Selden produced 
his largest English work, Titles of Honour, a full study of the 
history of the degrees of nobility and gentry, derived from all 
ages and countries, but applied especially to England. In 1617 
appeared, in Latin, Selden's treatise on the gods of Syria — De 
Deis Syris — a learned inquiry into polytheism, mainly with 
reference to that of Syria, for special study of the false gods 
named in the Old Testament. This book and the Titles of 
Ho7iour had raised and extended beyond England Selden's 
character for learning, when, in 161 8, his way of research crossed 
dangerous ground, for he then highly offended James I., by 
publishing The History of Tithes. The churchmen who dwelt 
most upon obedience to authority, whom, therefore, the king 
preferred, had upheld a divine right of tithes, inherited by the 
Christian from the Jewish priesthood. Selden's book was not 
written, he said, to prove a case on either side ; it was not " any- 
thing else but itself, that is, a mere narrative, and the history of 
tithes." But in his dedication of it to Sir Robert Cotton he had 
rightly said that study of the past is to be cherished only for its 
fruitful and precious part, " which gives necessary light to the 
present ; " and condemned " the too studious affectation of bare 
and sterile antiquity, which is nothing else than to be exceeding 
busy about nothing." When, therefore, it appeared that Selden 
had carefully marshalled and verified authorities on both sides, 
and that, although he himself gave no opinion, his facts against 
the theory of a divine right of tithes outweighed his facts in 
favour of it, there was outcry, and His Majesty had argument 
with Mr. Selden, who was introduced to him by two friends, one 
of them Ben Jonson. Selden was called also before members of 
the High Commission Court, who compelled him to a declara- 
tion in which he did not recant anything, but was sorry he spoke. 
He admitted error in having published " The History of Tithes,'' 
in having given " occasion of argument against any right of 

H H 2 



5l6 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1603 

maintenance, jure divino, of the ministers of the gospel," and 
expressed grief at having incurred their lordships' displeasure. 
Selden's book was prohibited ; all men were free to write against 
it. Richard Mountagu, afterwards Bishop of Norwich, was 
encouraged by the king to confute Selden, to whom His Majesty- 
said, " If you or any of your friends shall write against this 
confutation I will throw you into prison." Dr. Mountagu had 
it all his own way when, in 162 1, he issued his Diatribe upon the 
First Part of the late History of Tithes. Selden confined 
himself to private comments, and sent to Edward Herbert, 
afterwards Lord Herbert of Cherbury, some notes on the work 
of one of his antagonists. He sought also to appease His 
Majesty by giving him three tracts, to make amends for his 
inadvertent rudenesses, i. His Majesty concerned himself 
about the number of the Beast, and Selden had spoken 
slightingly of the attempts to calculate it. In one of the 
three tracts he now restricted his censure, and spoke 
respectfully of a most acute deduction of His Majesty's. 2. 
Selden had spoken of Calvin's confession that he could not 
interpret the Book of Revelation as " equally judicious and 
modest." But King James was a confident interpreter, and was 
not he also judicious and modest? Selden explained that all 
men had not ignorance to confess, and that King James's ex- 
planations were " the clearest sun among the lesser lights." 
3. Selden had referred in his " History of Tithes " to the want of 
evidence that Christmas-day was a true anniversary. " This," 
said King James, " countenances Puritan objection to our way of 
keeping Christmas." To please the king, Selden in his third 
tract produced evidence to support the date of the anniversary. 
It was at the close of James's reign, in 1624, that John Selden 
first entered Parliament, as member for Lancaster. 

20. The keen spirit of inquiry that formed part of the new 
life of England made, in Edward Herbert (afterwards known 
as Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury), a bold stride towards 
denial of all revelations in religion. Edward Herbert was born 
at Montgomery, in Wales, educated at Oxford, visited London 
in 1600, went abroad, joined English auxiliaries in the Nether- 
lands, was an intrepid soldier, was knighted on the accession of 
James I., was sent in 1616 as ambassador to France, was re- 
called for a bold saying, sent back again, and in 1624 published 
' at Paris a Latin treatise upon Truth — De Veritate — in which he 
denounced those who did not hold his own five fundamental 



toa.d. 1624.] ADVANCE OF SCIENCE. 517 

truths of natural religion. He argued that heaven could not ' 
reveal to a part only of the world a particular religion. Yet he 
said that, to encourage himself to oppose revelation, he asked 
for a sign, and was answered by a loud yet gentle noise from 
heaven. 

21. The rising spirit of inquiry was now active also for 
advance of science. John Napier, of Merchistoun, used the 
same mind which had spent its energies, in 1593, upon "A Plaine 
Discovery of the whole Revelation of St. John," upon the dis- 
covery of the use of Logarithms, and set forth his invention, in 
1614, as Mirifici LogaritJwiorwn Cano?iis Descriptio. In the 
following year, 161 5, William Harvey first brought forward, 
in lectures at the College of Physicians, his discovery of the 
Circulation of the Blood, afterwards more fully established and 
set forth in a small book, early in the reign of Charles I. 
Harvey lost practice by his new opinions, and his doctrine was 
not received by any physician who was more than forty years 
old; but he was made, in 1623, Physician Extraordinary (which 
is less than Ordinary^ to James I. 

22. Advance of scientific inquiry is a marked feature in the 
literature of the Stuart times, and it was aided greatly by 
Francis Bacon (ch. vii. § 85), who during the reign of James I. 
set forth his philosophy. Bacon now prospered. He was made 
Sir Francis by his own wish, in July, 1603, that he might not 
lose grade, because new knights were multiplying, and there 
were three of them in his mess at Gray's Inn. Essex had been 
active for James. Bacon told the Earl of Southampton that he 
"could be safely that to him now which he had truly been 
before ;" and adapted himself to the new political conditions by 
writing a defence of his recent conduct, as Sir Francis Bacon 
his Apologie in certain Imputations concerning the late Earle of 
Essex. To the first Parliament of King James, Bacon was 
returned by Ipswich and St. Albans. He was confirmed in his 
office of King's Counsel in August, 1604 ; but when the office of 
Solicitor-General became vacant again in that year, he was not 
appointed to it. In 1605, about the time of the discovery of 
Gunpowder Plot, there appeared, in English, The Twoo Bookes 
of Francis Bacon. Of the Proficience and Aduauncement of 
Learning, Diuine and Humane. To the King. These two books 
of the Advancement of Learning — which, in 1623, towards the 
end of his life, reappeared in Latin, expanded into nine books, 
De Atigmentis Scientiarum, Libri IX.— form the first part, or 



518 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d 1605 

the groundwork of his Instauratio Magna, or " Great Recon- 
struction of Science." It was dedicated to King James, as from 
one who had been "touched, yea, and possessed, with an extreme 
wonder at those your virtues and faculties which the philo- 
sophers call intellectual ; the largeness of your capacity, the 
faithfulness of your memory, the swiftness of your apprehension, 
the penetration of your judgment, and the facility and order of 
your elocution." Of the "universality and perfection" of His 
Majesty's learning, Bacon said, in this dedication, " I am well 
informed that this which I shall say is no amplification at all, 
but a positive and measured truth ; which is, that there hath not 
been since Christ's time any king or temporal monarch which 
hath been so learned in all literature and erudition, divine and 
human." His Majesty stood " invested of that triplicity which 
in great veneration was ascribed to the ancient Hermes ; the 
power and fortune of a king, the knowledge and illumination of 
a priest, and the learning and universality of a philosopher," It 
was fit, therefore, to dedicate to such a king a treatise in two 
parts, one on the excellency of learning and knowledge, the other 
on the merit and true glory in the augmentation and propagation 
thereof. In his first book Bacon pointed out the discredits of 
learning from human defects of the learned, and emptiness of 
many of the studies chosen, or the way of dealing with them. 
This came especially by the mistaking or misplacing of the last 
or furthest end of knowledge, as if there were sought in it " a 
couch whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit ; or a 
terrace for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down 
with a fair prospect ; or a tower of state for a proud mind to 
raise itself upon ; or a fort or commanding ground for strife and 
contention ; or a shop for profit or sale ; and not a rich store- 
house for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate." 
The rest of the first book was given to an argument upon the 
Dignity of Learning ; and the second book, on the Advance- 
ment of Learning, is, as Bacon himself described it, " a general 
and faithful perambulation of learning, with an inquiry what 
parts thereof lie fresh and waste, and not improved and con- 
verted by the industry of man ; to the end that such a plot 
made and recorded to memory may both minister light to any 
public designation and also serve to excite voluntary endeavours." 
Bacon makes, by a sort of exhaustive analysis, a ground-plan of 
all subjects of study, as an intellectual map, helping the right 
inquirer in his search for the right path. The right path is that 



-to a.d. 1614.J FRANCIS BACON. 519 

by which he has the best chance of adding to the stock of know- 
ledge in the world something worth labouring for, as labour for 
'" the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate." 

In May, 1606, Bacon, aged forty-six, married Alice Barnham, 
daughter of a London merchant who was dead, and whose 
widow had taken in second marriage Sir John Packington, of 
Worcestershire. The lady had ,£220 a year, which was settled 
on herself. In June, 1607, Sir Francis Bacon became Solicitor- 
General. While rising in his profession he was still at work on 
writings that set forth portions of his philosophy. In 1607 he sent 
to Sir Thomas Bodley his Cogitata et Visa — a first sketch of the 
Novum Qrganum. In 1608 — the year of John Milton's birth — 
Bacon obtained the clerkship of the Star Chamber, worth ,£1,600 
or ,£2,000 a year, of which the reversion had been given him 
in 1589. In 1612 appeared, in November or December, Bacon's 
Second Edition of the Essays j there had been, since the first, 
two unauthorised editions, in 1598 and 1606. In Bacon's own 
second edition the number of the essays was increased from 
ten to thirty-eight, and those formerly printed had been very 
thoroughly revised. The range of thought, also, was widened 
(ch. vii. § 85), and the first essay was " Of Religion." The 
purpose of dedicating this edition to Prince Henry was stopped 
by the prince's death, on the 6th of November. In February, 
1 61 3, Bacon contrived, for the gentlemen of Gray's Inn and the 
Inner Temple, a Masque of the Marriage of the Thames and 
the Rhine, on the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth to the 
Elector Palatine. In October, 161 3, Bacon was made Attorney- 
General. The dispassionate mind that his philosophy required 
Bacon applied somewhat too coldly to the philosophy of life. 
Without hatreds or warm affections, preferring always a kind 
course to an unkind one, but yielding easily to stubborn facts in 
his search for prosperity, Bacon failed as a man, although he 
had no active evil in his character, for want of a few generous 
enthusiasms. Seeking to please a mean master, who was the 
dispenser of his earthly good, in 1614 Bacon was official pro- 
secutor of Oliver St. John, a gentleman of Marlborough, who 
had written a letter to the mayor of his town on the illegality of 
the king's act in raising money by benevolences. In December 
of the same year the Rev. Edmund Peacham, a clergyman 
seventy years old, rector of Hinton St. George, Somersetshire, 
was deprived of his orders by the High Commission for accusa- 
tions against his diocesan. In searching his house a manuscript 



520 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1614 

sermon was found, which had been written but not preached. 
It censured acts of the king — as sale of Crown lands, gifts to 
favourites— and seems to have suggested that the recovery of 
Crown lands to the people might cost blood. The old clergyman 
was, by the king's desire, accused of treason, and was twice put 
to the rack, that accusation of himself or others might be wrung 
from him. As Attorney-General, Bacon, serving his master, dis- 
cussed privately with the judges in furtherance of the king' 1 * 
desire that Peach am might be convicted of treason for the com- 
position of the sermon without any act of publication. They 
would not see with the king's eyes, or follow Bacon, who wrote 
to the king of his foregone conclusion as the truth, and expressed 
his hope of the judges that " force of law and precedent will 
bind them to the truth ; neither am I wholly out of hope that my 
Lord Coke himself, when I have in some dark manner put him 
in doubt that he shall be left alone, will not continue singular." 
As nothing could be done in London, the old clergyman was 
sent to Taunton assizes, where a conviction was secured in 
August, 161 5 ; but the sentence of death was not carried out, 
because many of the judges were of opinion that Peacham's 
offence was not treason. He died, in 1616, a prisoner in Taunton 
gaol. In 1 6 16 — the year of Shakespeare's death — Bacon was 
made a Privy Councillor. While the Attorney-General was thus 
obedient to his master, he was suitor for the office of Lord- 
Keeper, which the bad health of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere 
would probably soon cause him to resign. This office Bacon 
obtained in March, 161 7. In January, 161 8, he became Lord 
Chancellor; six months afterwards he was made Baron Verulam. 
In October, 1620, he presented to the king his Novum Organum, 
a fragment on which he had worked for thirty years, and which 
formed the second and main part of his " Instauratio Magna." 
Three months later he was made, on the 27th of January, 1621, 
Viscount St. Albans, and had reached his highest point of great- 
ness. Then came his memorable fall. 

On the 15th of March the report of a Parliamentary Com- 
mittee on the administration of justice charged the Lord Chan- 
cellor with twenty-three specified acts of corruption. Bacon's 
final reply was : " Upon advised consideration of the charge, 
descending into my own conscience, and calling my memory to 
account as far as I am able, I do plainly and ingenuously confess 
that I am guilty of corruption, and do renounce all defence, and 
put myself on the grace and mercy of your lordships." He then, 



to a. d. 1626. ] FRA NCIS BA CON. 5 2 1 

as he had been required to do, replied upon each case, and 
pleaded guilty to each. The Lords sent a committee of twelve 
to the Chancellor, to ask whether he had signed this, and would 
stand by his signature. He replied to the question : " My lords, 
it is my act, my hand, and my heart. I beseech your lordships 
to be merciful to a broken reed." He was sentenced by the 
House of Lords, on the 3rd of May, 1621, to a fine of ,£40,000, 
which the king remitted ; to be committed to the Tower during 
the king's pleasure, and he was released next day ; thenceforth 
to be incapable of holding any office in the State, or sitting in 
Parliament. It was decided by a majority of two that he should 
not be stripped of his titles. Of worldly means there remained 
what private fortune he had, and a pension of £1,200 a year 
that the king had lately given him. The rest of his life Bacon 
gave to study, only applying, unsuccessfully, in 1623, for the 
provostship of Eton. In 1622 he published, in Latin, as the 
third part of his " Instauratio Magna," his Natural and Experi- 
mental History — Historia NaUiralis et Experimentalis, and his 
His tor ie of the Raigne of K. Henry VII., dedicated to Charles, 
Prince of Wales. In 1623 appeared, in Latin, his History of 
Life and Death, as well as the Latin expansion into nine books 
of " The Advancement of Learning," as a first volume of his 
works. In 1625, Bacon published his own Third Editio7i of the 
Essays, with their number increased to fifty-eight, and again 
with revision and rearrangement of the earlier matter. The first 
essay in this final edition was " Of Truth ;" and the Essay " Of 
Religion," with its title changed to " Of Unitie in Religion," was 
much enlarged and carefully modified, to prevent misconception 
of its spirit. On the 9th of April, 1626, ten years after Shake- 
speare, Francis Bacon died. 

Bacon arranged his writings for the " Instauratio Magna" into 
six divisions : — 1. The books on the "Dignity and Advancement 
of Learning" — the ground-plan. 2. The " Novum Organum," of 
which only the first part was executed, showing what was the new 
instrument, or method of inquiry, which he substituted for the old 
instrument, the " Organon" of Aristotle. 3. The "Experimental 
History of Nature ; or, Study of the Phenomena of the Universe." 
In this division Bacon's most complete work was the Silva 
Silvancm ; or, Natural History in Ten Centuries. Then came 
the science raised on these foundations, in, 4, the Scala Intel- 
lects ; or, Ladder of the Understanding, which leads up from 
experience to science, 5. The Prodromi; or, the Anticipations 



522 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1614 

of the Second Philosophy — provisional anticipations founded on 
experience, which the investigator needs as starting-points in his 
research ; and, 6, Active Science — experiment in the fair way to 
such gains of knowledge as may benefit mankind. 

Bacon opposed to the " Organon " of Aristotle, which only 
analysed the form of propositions, his " New Organon," which 
sought a method of analysis that would attain discoveries 
enlarging the dominion of man. "Human science," he said, 
" and human power coincide." Invention must be based upon 
experience ; .'experience be widened by experiment. Bacon's 
highest and purest ambition was associated with his life-long 
endeavour to direct the new spirit of inquiry into a course that 
would enable men "to renew and enlarge the power and 
dominion of the human race itself over the universe. . . • 
Now the dominion of men over things depends alone on arts 
and sciences; for Nature is only governed by obeying her." 
Bacon had no sympathy whatever with research that consists 
only in turning the mind back on itself. For him the mind was 
a tool, and nature the material for it to work upon. The only 
remaining way to health, he said, " is that the whole work of 
the mind be begun afresh, and that the mind, from the very 
beginning, should on no account be trusted to itself, but con- 
stantly directed." All knowledge comes to men from without, 
and the laws to which we can subject natural forces are to be 
learnt only from the interpretation of nature. In former days 
invention had been left to chance, and science had been 
occupied with empty speculations. A way of inquiry should be 
used that will lead — be inductive — from one experience to 
another, not by chance, but by necessity. Hence Bacon's method 
has been called inductive ; but the second and main part of his 
philosophy was, after arriving by this method at a truth in 
nature, to deduce therefrom its uses to man. Having found, for 
example, by inductive experiment, a general truth about elec- 
tricity, the crowning work of the Baconian philosophy would be 
to deduce from it the Atlantic cable. 

Bacon taught that the inquirer was to take as frankly as a 
child whatever truths he found. He compared human know- 
ledge with divine, of which it is said, " Except ye become as 
little children ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." 
And he too said, " Little children, keep yourselves from idols." 
" The idols," Bacon said, " and false notions which have hitherto 
occupied the human understanding and are deeply rooted in it, 



to a.d. 1626.] BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. $2$ 

not only so beset the minds of men that entrance is hardly open 
to truth, but even when entrance is conceded, they will again 
meet and hinder us in the very reconstruction of the sciences, 
unless men, being forewarned, guard themselves as much as 
possible against them." He therefore classified the common 
forms of false image within the mind to which men bow down. 
They are Idols (i) of the Forum or Market-place {Idola Fort), 
when we take things not for what they are, but for what the 
common talk, as of men in the market-place, considers them to 
be ; they are Idols (2) of the Theatre {Idola Theatri), when we 
bow down to authority, or fear to differ from those who have 
played great parts on the world's stage ; Idols (3) of Race or 
Tribe {Idola Tribus) are "founded," says Bacon, "in the very 
tribe or race of men. It is falsely asserted that human sense is 
the standard of things," for the human intellect, blending its 
own nature with an object, distorts and disfigures it. There are 
Idols also (4) of the Cave or Den {Idola Species) ; these are the 
accidental faults and prejudices of the individual inquirer. 

On his guard against these idols, the philosopher who follows 
Bacons teaching trusts to pure experience. Everything in 
Nature appears under certain conditions. Comparative experi- 
ments can be made to determine which of these conditions are 
essential and which accidental. Thus we may advance from 
fact to fact, till, by successive testings and comparisons of facts, 
we reach one of the laws by which the course of nature is 
determined. So we ascend, by the method of induction, from 
the experiment to the axiom. But experiment may seem to 
have found a law with which some fact — some "negative in- 
stance " — is at odds. This contradiction must not be put out of 
sight, but taken simply as against acceptance of the law till it 
be reconciled with it. Nay, more, the investigator must use all 
his wit to invent combinations able to disprove his fact, if it be 
no fact; he must seek to invent- negative instances, acting as 
counsel against himself until assured that his new fact will stand 
firm against any trial. " I think," said Bacon, " that a form of 
induction should be introduced which from certain instances 
should draw general conclusions, so that the impossibility of 
finding a contrary instance might be clearly proved." When so 
assured that it stands firm, the inquirer may announce his new 
truth confidently, and either deduce from it himself or leave 
others to deduce its use to man. 

In this philosophy Bacon did no more than express formally, 



524 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1603 

distinctly, and with great influence over the minds of others,, 
what had always been the tendency of English thought. His 
namesake, Roger Bacon, in the thirteenth century, had pursued 
science very much in the same spirit, and had nearly anticipated 
Francis Bacon's warning against the four idols, in his own four 
grounds of human ignorance (ch. iii. § 33). We must not forget, 
also, when we find feebleness in the scientific experiments of 
Bacon and his followers, with the retention of much false 
opinion about nature, that what Bacon professed was to show, 
not grand results, but the way to them. He bade his followers 
" be strong in hope, and not imagine that our ' Instauratio ' is 
something infinite and beyond the reach of man, when really it 
is not unmindful of mortality and humanity ; for it does not 
expect to complete its work within the course of a single age, 
but leaves this to the succession of ages ; and, lastly, seeks for 
science, not arrogantly within the little cells of human wit, but 
humbly, in the greater world." 

23. We finish the sketch of our literature in the reign of 
James I. with a glance at some of the poets who were not 
dramatists. Michael Drayton (ch. vii. § 80) wrote, at the 
king ; s accession, To the Majestie of King James : a Gratulatore 
Poem, but turned from the king disappointed ; published, in 
1604, his fable of The Owle ; and in 1607 the Legend of Great 
Cromwell, which appeared again in 1609 as The Historie of the 
Life and Death of the Lord Cromwell, some time Earl of Essex 
and Lord Cha?icellor of England. In 1613 appeared his Poly- 
olbion (the word means Many-ways-Happy), a poetical de- 
scription of his native land, in nearly a hundred thousand lines 
of Alexandrine verse, with maps of counties, and antiquarian 
notes by the author's friend, John Selden. This poem was 
another illustration of the quickened patriotism of the English. 
Thus Drayton sang when he came to his own county of War- 
wick, that he and Shakespeare loved : 

"My native country, then, which so brave spirits hast bred, 
If there be virtues yet remaining in thy earth, 
Or any good of thine thou bredst into my birth, 
Accept it as thine own, whilst now I sing of thee, 
Of all the later brood the unworthiest though I be." 

William Browne, born in 1590, at Tavistock, in Devon- 
shire, studied at Exeter College, Oxford, then went to the Inner 
Temple, and in 161 3, the year of the appearance of Drayton's 
" Polyolbion," produced, at the age of twenty-three, the first 



to a. D. 1625.] DRAYTON. W.BROWNE. G.FLETCHER. 525 

part of his BritannicCs Pastorals, partly written before he was 
twenty. The Shepherd's Pipe, in seven eclogues, followed in 1614. 
In 1 6 16, the year of Shakespeare's death, appeared the second 
part of Browne's Britannia! s Pastorals. The two parts were 
published together about the end of James's reign, and about 
the same time their author went back to Exeter College as tutor 
to Robert Dormer, Earl of Carnarvon. His pleasant pastoral 
strain touched but lightly upon the realities of life. The rustic 
manner showed the influence of Spenser, but in James's reign 
this influence was greatest on Giles Fletcher. 

24. Giles Fletcher (ch. vii. § 91), was at Trinity College, 
Cambridge, when he contributed a canto on the death of Queen 
Elizabeth to the collection of verses Sorrow's Joy, on the death 
of Elizabeth and accession of James, published by the printer 
to the University in 1603. He took the degree of B.D. at 
Trinity College, and held the living of Alderton, in Suffolk, till 
his death, in 1623. It was not until after the death of Giles 
that his elder brother, Phineas, appeared in print as a poet, 
though at the close of his own early poem Giles spoke of his 
brother as young Thyrsilis, the Kentish lad that lately taught 

" His oaten reed the trumpet's silver sound" 

Giles Fletcher's poem was published at Cambridge, in 1610, 
when the author's age was about six-and-twenty. It was a devout 
poem on Christ's Victory and Triumph in Heaven and Earth 
over and after Death, in an original eight-lined stanza, suggested 
by Spenser's, but not happily constructed. For five lines the 
stanza followed Spenser, and then came a triplet, of which the 
last line was an Alexandrine, as in the Spenserian stanza. Thus : 

"At length an aged sire far off he saw 

Come slowly footing ; every step he guess'd 
One of his feet he from the grave did draw ; 

Three legs he had, that made of wood was best ; 
And all the way he went he ever blest 

With benedictions, and with prayers store ; 
But the bad ground was blessed ne'er the more : 
And all his head with snow of age was waxen hoar." 

Christ's Victory in Heaven heralded the work of Christ with 
long personifications and speeches of Justice and of Mercy, to 
whom finally all bowed ; the Victory on Earth painted Christ 
in the wilderness, approached by Satan (the aged sire above 
mentioned) in the guise of an old Palmer, who so bowed " that 
at his feet his head he seemed to throw," who led Christ to 



526 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. ^d. 1603 

echoes of Spenser to the cave of Despair, which he would 
entice him to enter ; to the top of the Temple, also, where per- 
sonified Presumption tempted in vain ; and then to Pangloretta, 
on the mountain top, where Giles Fletcher faintly recalled notes 
from Spenser's bower of Acrasia. The other two books on the 
Triumph over Death and the Triumph after Death were in like 
manner. 

Joshua Sylvester (ch. vii. § 93), about 1620, gratified His 
Majesty, who had published in 1604 a Counterblaste to Tobacco, 
with a poem of his own, called Tobacco Battered and the Pipes 
Shattered {about their Ears that idlely Idolise so Base and 
Barbarous a Weed ; or at least-wise Over-love so Loathesome 
Vanitie), by a Volley of Holy Shot thundered from Mount 
Helicon. This poem was as wise as its title, and suggests the 
form into which Euphuism degenerated in the time of James I. 

25. Strain for ingenious alliteration, and for unexpected 
turns of phrase or thought, losing much of the grace and strength 
it had in the Elizabethan time, became more pedantic in the 
wise, more frivolous in the foolish, often obscure by the excess 
of artifice and the defect of sense. There was the same 
degeneration everywhere of the Earlier Euphuism, bright with 
fresh invention and poetical conceits, into the Later Euphuism 
that had to a great extent lost freshness of impulse, and was 
made obscure by poets who, with less to say than their prede- 
cessors, laboured to outdo them in ingenuities of thought and 
speech. There is no reason in or out of metaphysics why the 
Later Euphuistic poetry, of which Donne's verse is a type, should 
be called " metaphysical." It was so called in an age that knew 
little or nothing of the character of English poetry before the 
Commonwealth. There is as little reason for the assertion 
that a change for the worse was made in our literature by 
the influence of Donne. He only represented change, and he 
was popular because he followed cleverly the fashion of his day. 
Precisely what has been said of Donne, in his relation to our 
English literature, has been said also of Gongora, who died in 
1627, and of Marino, who died in 1625 — men who went with 
the same current of literature, one in Spain, the other in Italy, 
during the reign of James I. in England. In Spain the writers 
corresponding to our Earlier and Later Euphuists are known 
as the Conceptistas, or " Conceited School," and the Cultos, who 
cherished what they called a " Cultivated Style " in poems and 
romances. Our later Euphuism was English cousin to the 



TOA.C i62 S .] JOSHUA SYLVESTER. JOHN DONNE. S 2 7 

cultismo of Spain, and to the style called, after Marino, by- 
Italians the stile Marinesco. Here, also, we are at the beginning 
of the history of the false worship of diction. 

26. John Donne was born in 1573, the son of a London 
merchant. He was taught at home till, in his eleventh year, he 
was sent to Hart Hall, Oxford. At fourteen he left Oxford for 
Cambridge, where he remained till he was seventeen, but took 
no degree, because his family was Roman Catholic, and would 
not let him take the required oath. He left Cambridge for 
London, and studied law at Lincoln's Inn. His father died at 
that time, leaving him three thousand pounds. His mother 
sought to bring him to the faith of his parents ; and unsettlement 
of mind caused him to make a special study of the controversies 
of the time between the Roman Catholics and the Reformers. 
As a storehouse of opinion on the controversy, young Donne 
fastened upon the works of Cardinal Bellarmin (§16). He 
went with the expeditions of the Earl of Essex, in 1596 and 
1597, and spent afterwards some years in Italy and Spain, 
returned to England, and became chief secretary to Lord 
Chancellor Ellesmere. He held that office five years, during 
which he fell in love with Anne More, a niece of Lady Elles- 
mere, who lived in the family. Her father, Sir George More, 
heard of this, and carried away the young lady to his house in 
Surrey ; but a secret marriage was effected. When this was 
told to Sir George, he caused Lord Ellesmere to dismiss his 
secretary, whom apparent ruin could not keep from a play on 
words, according to the fash : on of the time ; for in writing the 
sad news to his wife he added to his signature the line, "John 
Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done." Donne was imprisoned for a 
time, and when he was free his wife was kept from him. He 
sued at law to recover her. She came to him when his means 
were almost gone, and a family grew fast about the young 
couple, who were living in the house of a kinsman, Sir Francis 
Woolly, of Pirford, Surrey. It was then urged upon Donne 
that he should take orders in the Church, but he hesitated, and 
preferred study of civil and canon law. Sir Francis Woolly died,, 
but before his death he had persuaded Donne's father-in-law to 
cease from wrath and pay a portion with his daughter, at the 
rate of £%o a year. Donne remained very much dependent on 
the liberality of friends, and was still studying points of con- 
troversy between the English and the Romish Church, when a 
home was given to him in the house of Sir Robert Drury, in 



528 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1608 

Drury Lane. Donne came now into contact with King James, 
discussed theology with him, and wrote, at his request, a book 
on the taking of the oaths of supremacy and allegiance, called 
Psendo Martyr, published in 1610. This pleased the king so 
much that he required Donne to be a clergyman. Donne made 
what interest he could to have the king's good-will shown in the 
form of secular employment ; but James had made up his mind 
that Donne should be a preacher, and, in spite of himself, he was 
forced into the Church as the only way by which he was allowed 
a chance of prospering. When Donne had at last taken orders, 
King James made him his chaplain, and in the same month 
called on Cambridge to make him Doctor of Divinity. In this 
first year of his prosperity Donne's wife died, leaving him with 
seven children. Outward prosperity increased. He became a 
famous preacher and a fashionable poet, was lecturer at Lincoln's 
Inn till he was joined in a mission to Germany, and about a 
year after his return was made by the king, in 1623, Dean of St. 
Paul's, while the vicarage of St. Dunstan's in the West, and yet 
another good thing, fell to him almost at the same time. Donne 
survived King James, and died in the year 1631. His lighter 
occasional poems were not published until after his death. In 
James's reign he, like other poets, published in 16 13 "An Elegy 
on the Untimely Death of the Incomparable Prince Henry." A 
severe illness of his own led also to the publication in 1624 of 
his Devotions upon Emei'gent Occasions, and Seuerall Steps in 
Sickness j and in 1625 he published a poem upon mortality, 
since that was not out of harmony with his sacred office. It 
was called An Anatomy of the World, wherein, by the untimely 
Death of Mrs. Elis. Drury, the Frailty and Decay of this 
whole World is represented. From this poem we take, for 
specimen of artificial diction, a passage that contains by rare 
chance one conceit rising in thought and expression to the 
higher level of Elizabethan poetry : 

" She, in whose body (if we dare preferre 
This low world to so high a marke as shee) 
The Western treasure, Easterne spicery, 
Earope, and Afrique, and the unknowne rest 
Were easily found, or what in them was best ; 
And when we have made this large discoverie 
Of all, in her some one part then will bee 
Twenty such parts, whose plenty and riches is 
Enough to make twenty such worlds as this ; 
Shee, whom had they knowne, who did first betroth 
The tutelar angels, and assigned one, both 



toa.d. 1625.3 DONNE. COR VAT. JOHN TAYLOR. $2<) 

To nations, cities, and to companies, 

To functions, offices, and dignities, 

And to each several man, to him, and him, 

They would have given her one for every limbe ; 

Shee, of whose soule, if we may say, 'twas gold, 

Her body was th' Electrum, and did hold 

Many degrees of that ; wee understood 

Her by her sight ; her pure and eloqzcent blood 

Spoke in her cheekes, and so distinctly wrought 

That one might almost say, her body thought. 

Shee, shee, thus richly and largely hous'd, is gone." 

Unreality of a style that sacrifices sense to ingenuity is 
most felt in Bonne's lighter poems. The collection of the verse 
of the late Dean of St. Paul's published in 1635, as Poems by 
J\ D., with Elegies on the Author's Death, opens with an inge- 
nious piece, of which the sense is, so far as it has any, that a 
woman's honour is not worth a flea. Donne was unquestionably 
a man with much religious earnestness, but he was also a poet 
who delighted men of fashion. 

27. The literary affectations of the time were reduced to 
absurdity by Thomas Coryat, and John Taylor, the Water Poet. 
Thomas Coryat, son of George Coryat, rector of Odcombe, 
Somerset, and educated at Gloucester Hall, Oxford, lived a 
fantastic life at court for the amusement of Prince Henry. In 
1608 he travelled on foot for five months in France, Italy, and 
Germany, walking 1,975 miles, and more than half the distance 
in one pair of shoes, which were only once mended. The shoes, 
when he came home, were hung up in Odcombe Church, and kept 
there as the "thousand mile shoes" till 1702. The travel in 
them was described in a book published in 161 1, as Cory a? s 
Crudities hastily Gobbled Up in Five Months' Travel in France, 
&>c. Introduced by A 71 Odcombian Banquet of nearly Sixty 
Copies of Verses, which were praises written in jest by nearly all 
the poets of the day. This book was followed by Coryat s 
Crambe j or, his Colewort Twise Sodden, and now Served with 
other Macaronicke Dishes as the Second Course to his Crudities. 
In 161 2, Coryat gathered the people of Odcombe at their 
market cross, and took leave of them for a ten years' ramble. 
He visited Greece, Egypt, India, and died at Surat, in 161 7. 
There was the English love of sturdy enterprise and adventure 
underlying Coryat's endeavour to delight his public. 

John Taylor was a poor man's son from Gloucestershire, 
who became a Thames waterman, after he had served under 
Elizabeth in sixteen voyages ; he was with Essex at Cadiz and 

I I 



53° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1612 

the Azores. He read many books, and he wrote sixty-three 
booklets to amuse the public with their oddities. He made 
presents of his little books to customers and courtiers, and took 
whatever they might give in return. One of his books told 
how he won a bet that he would row in his boat to the Continent 
and back again within a certain time. It appeared as Taylor's 
Travels in Germaniej or, Three Weekes Three Dales and Three 
Hours' Observations and Travel from London to Hamburg. 
. . . Dedicated for the p7-esent to the absent Odcombian 
knight erra?it, Sir Thomas Coriat, Great Britain's Error 
a?id the World's Mirror. This appeared in the year of 
Coryat's death at Surat. Another of Taylor's freaks was a 
journey on foot from London to Edinburgh, " not carrying 
any money to and fro, neither begging, borrowing, nor asking 
meat, drink, or lodging." This yielded, in 161 8, a book, The 
Penny les Pilgrimage j or, the Money lesse Perambulation of John 
Taylor, alias the King's Majestie's Water Poet, from London to 
Edenborough on Foot. Another of his adventures was a voyage 
from London to Queenborough in a paper boat, with two stock- 
fish tied to two canes for oars. It was celebrated, in 1623, by 
The Praise of Hempseed, with the Voyage of Mr. Roger Bird 
and the Writer hereof, in a Boat of Brow?i Paper, froin London 
to Quinborough in Kent. As also a Farewell to the Matchless 
Deceased Mr. Thomas Coriat. Concluding with Coinmendaiions 
of the famous River of Thames. All this was a little tract of 
twenty-four leaves. So we come down from Elizabeth to James I. ; 
from Frobisher, and Drake, and Raleigh, to poor Tom Coryat 
and John Taylor, His Majesty's Water Poet. But although the 
court lost dignity, the spirit of the people was unchanged. 

28. George Wither was born in 1588, at Bentworth, near 
Alton, in Hampshire. At the beginning of the reign of James I. 
he was sent to Oxford, but was soon recalled to attend to the 
Hampshire farm land. In 16 12, Wither first appeared as a poet 
by joining in the lament for Prince Henry, adding to his Elegies 
a " supposed interlocution between the ghost of Prince Henry 
and Great Britaine;" and in 161 3, being then twenty-five years old, 
he spoke out boldly for England in Abuses Stript a?id Whiptj or, 
Satirical Essayes, by George Wyther, divided into Two Bookes. 
The successive satires are under the heads of human passions, 
as Love, Lust, Hate, Envy, Revenge, and so forth : 

" What ? you would fain have all the great ones freed. 
They must not for their vices be controll'd ; 



toa.d. 1625.] GEORGE WITHER. 531 



Beware ; that were a sauciness indeed ; 
But if the great ones to offend be bold, 
I see no reason but they should be told." 

Wither was bold in condemnation as others in offence. 
While he continued the attack upon self-seeking of the higher 
clergy, he maintained the office of the bishop, and gave high 
praise to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London. 
The Satires, although sharp, were generous ; their style was dif- 
fuse, but simple, earnest, often vigorous, for Wither had the 
true mind of a poet. He would tell what he knew, 

"And then if any frown (as sure they dare not) 
So I speak truth, let them frown still, I care not." 

The great ones did frown, and Wither was locked up in the 
Marshalsea. But he was not to be silenced. He sang on in 
his cage, and sang plain English, contemning the pedantry of 
fashion. Wither translated in his prison a Greek poem on " The 
Nature of Man," besides writing the most manly pastorals pro- 
duced in James's reign, The Sheftheards* Hunting : being certain 
Eclogues written during the time of the Author's Imprisonment 
in the Marshalsey, and a Satire to the King, in justification of 
his former Satires. In the " Shepheard's Hunting," we learn 
how Wither, as Philarete (lover of Virtue), had hunted with ten 
couple of dogs (the satires in " Abuses Stript and Whipt ") those 
foxes, wolves, and beasts of prey that spoil our folds and bear 
our lambs away. But wounded wolves and foxes put on sheep'b 
clothing, complained of the shepherd's hunting, and caused his 
imprisonment. In his prison, Philarete talked with his friends, 
kept up his spirit, and was comforted by song. Wither 's Motto, 
Nee habeo, nee careo, nee euro (" I have not, want not, care 
not") — a line in it says, " He that supplies my want hath took 
my care" — was published in 1618. In 1622 Wither's poems 
were collected as Juvenilia j and in the same year he published 
Faire- Virtue, the Mistresse of Philai'ete, written by Hiiii-selfe. 
Virtue is here described as a perfect woman, mistress of Phila- 
rete (lover of Virtue). This long poem, in seven-syllabled 
verse, is musical with interspersed songs, including the famous — 

" Shall I, wasting in despair, 
Die because a woman's fair ?" 

and delicately playful with the purest sense of grace and 
beauty. George Wither takes his own way still, saying : 

I 1 2 



532 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1608 

" Pedants shall not tie my strains 
To our antique poets' veins, 
As if we in latter days 
Knew to love, but not to praise. 
Being born as free as these, 
I will sing as I shall please, 
Who as well new paths may run 
As the best before have done." 

Wither remained an active writer in the reign of Charles I. ; 
and Francis Quarles, who was four years younger than 
Wither, produced his best work after the death of James L 
Quarles was born in 1592, at Romford, in Essex, educated at 
Christ's College, Cambridge, and at Lincoln's Inn. He was 
cupbearer to James's daughter, the Queen of Bohemia, and 
afterwards served in Ireland as secretary to Archbishop Usher 
(§ j 7). His first publication was in 1620, A Feast for Wormes 
in a Poem on the History of Jonah, with Pe?italogiaj or, the 
Quintessence of Meditation. In 1621 followed Hadassaj or, the 
History of Queen Esther, these histories being in ten-syllabled 
couplets, and, in the same measure, Argalus and Parthenia, 
a poem in three books, founded on a part of Sidney's " Arcadia '* 
(ch. vii. §44). Then came in 1624, Job Militant, with Medita- 
tions Divine and Moral j also S ion's Elegies, wept by Jeremie 
the Prophet ; and, in 1625, Sion's Sonnets, sung by Solomon the 
King, and periphrased. The writing of Quarles in the reign 
of James I. consisted, then, of Argalus and Parthenia, and 
those pieces which were collected into one volume, in 1630, as 
Ouarles's Divme Poems. 

29. William Drummond, M.A. of Edinburgh, after four 
years in France, inherited, in 16 10, at the age of twenty-five, his 
paternal estate of Hawthornden, gave up the study of law, took 
his ease, and wrote poetry. He joined in the lament for the 
death of Henry, Prince of Wales ; published at Edinburgh, 
in 1616, Poems: Amorous, Funerall, Divme, Pas tor all, in 
Sonnets, Songs, Sextains, Madrigals, by W. D., the Author 
of the Teares on the Death of Meliades, (Meliades was the 
anagram made for himself by the prince from " Miles a Deo ") ; 
and in 1617, upon James's visit to Scotland, published Forth 
Feasting: a Panegyric to the King's Most Excellent Majestie. 
During the greater part of April, 1619, Drummond had Ben 
Jonson for a guest, and took ungenial notes of his conversation. 
In 1623 he published Flovvres of S ion, to which is adjoyned his 
Cypresse Grove. His sonnets were true to the old form of that 



to A. D. 1625.] QUARLES. DRUMMOND. OVER BURY. 533 

kind of poem, and they were not all of earthly love and beauty, 
for sonnets in the spirit of Spenser's Hymns of Heavenly Love 
and Beauty (ch. vii. § 77) are among the spiritual poems in 
Drummond of Hawthornden's " Flowers of Sion." 

Sir Thomas Overbury was murdered in 161 3, when but 
thirty-two years old. As a follower of the king's favourite, Carr, 
he opposed his marriage with the Countess of Essex. The king, 
wishing to send Overbury out of the way, offered him an embassy 
to Russia. He refused it, and was committed to the Tower for 
contempt of the king's commands. There, by the connivance of 
Lady Essex, Overbury died of poison ten days before the judg- 
ment of divorce ; and this was followed, as the year closed, by 
the creation of Carr as Earl of Somerset, and his marriage to 
the Countess in the Chapel Royal. Bacon devised a masque at 
Gray's Inn in honour of the marriage. He also took part, in 
May, 1 6 16, in the trial of the earl and countess for the murder 
of Sir Thomas Overbury. The victim of this crime was in 
repute among the writers of his day for a poem on the choice 
of a wife, called A Wife now a Widowe, published the year 
after his murder, in 16 14, and reprinted in the same year with 
the addition of twenty-one characters. To write compact 
and witty characters of men and women was a fancy of the 
time, derived in the first instance from Theophrastus, and 
associated with the quick growth of the drama. Such pithy 
character writing had been prefixed formally as " The Character 
of the Persons * to Ben Jonson's " Every Man Out of his 
Humour ; " and the dialogue of the second act of his " Cynthia's 
Revels," produced in 1600, is chiefly made up of such character 
writing as that in which Sir Thomas Overbury showed his 
skill in 1614, and John Earle showed his in 1628. It was the 
manner of this character writing that suggested to young 
Milton his lines on the death of Hobson, the University 
carrier. 

30. John Milton was seventeen years old at the end of 
James's reign, and we may now pass with him into the reign of 
Charles I. He was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, on the 
9th of December, 1608. His father, also a John Milton, was 
son to a Catholic, of Oxfordshire, perhaps a husbandman, per- 
haps an under-ranger of Shotover Forest, who had cast him off 
for changing his religion. Thus the poet's father had settled in 
London as a scrivener, and prospered. He had a taste for 
music. In 1601 he had been one of twenty-two musicians wko 



534 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1608 

published twenty-five madrigals, as The Triumphs of Oriana. 
In 1614, when the poet son was about six years old, the musician 
father was joined with others in providing music to the Tears and 
Lavmitations of a Sorrowful Soul. Seven years later, as con- 
' tributor to a book of Psalms, he furnished the tunes still popular 
as " Norwich" and " York." Of the tenor part of York tune, it 
has been said that at one time " half the nurses in England were 
used to sing it by way of lullaby." Thus the poet's father had 
musicians among his friends, as well as men like himself earnest 
in religious feeling. One of these, Thomas Young, of Loncarty, 
in Perthshire, afterwards a minister in Suffolk, and a man of 
note among the Puritans, was the boy's first teacher. In 1622, 
Young, aged thirty-five, went to be pastor of the congrega- 
tion of English merchants at Hamburg; his pupil had then 
been for a couple of years at St. Paul's School (ch. vi. § 10), 
where Mr. Gill was head master, and his son, Alexander Gill, 
taught under him. Milton was a schoolboy at St. Paul's from 
1620 until a few months before the close of the reign of James I. 
His father too readily encouraged the boy's eagerness for study ; 
he had teaching at home as well as at school, suffered headaches, 
and laid the foundation of weak sight by sitting up till midnight 
at his lessons. 

At St. Paul's School Milton found a bosom friend in Charles 
Diodati. The friendship outlasted their boyhood, only death 
interrupted it. Charles was the son of Theodore Diodati, a 
physician in good practice in London, who had been born in 
Geneva, the son of Italian Protestants. His younger brother, 
Giovanni, uncle of Milton's friend, was still at Geneva, professor 
there of theology, and had published translations of the Bible 
into Italian and French. Of such a household came the friend 
to whom young Milton spoke his inmost thoughts. Charles 
Diodati left school more than two years before Milton, and 
went to Trinity College, Oxford, where, in November, 1623, he 
joined in writing Latin obituary verse upon the death of William 
Camden. But John Milton and Charles Diodati had their 
homes in the same town, and their friendship was easily main- 
tained by visits and correspondence. There is a Greek letter 
written in London from Diodati to Milton, hoping for fine 
weather and cheerfulness in a holiday the two friends meant to 
have next day together on the Thames. The surviving children 
in Milton's home were Anne, the eldest ; John; and Christopher, 
seven years younger than John. Towards the close of 1624 



to a.d.i 625.] JOHN MILTON. BEN JONSON. 535 

Milton's sister. Anne, married Mr. Edward Phillips, of the Crown- 
Office in Chancery. 

In February, 1625, John Milton was admitted at Christ's 
College, Cambridge, aged two months over sixteen ; but he had 
returned to London before the end of the term, and was there on 
the 26th of March, writing to his old tutor, Thomas Young, an 
affectionate letter : " I call God to witness how much as a 
father I regard you, with what singular devotion I have always 
followed you in thought." The next day, March 27, 1625, was 
the day of the death of James I. 

B. — REIGN OF CHARLES I. 

31. Charles I. came to the throne at the age of twenty-five. 
Ben Jonson was then fifty years old, Milton not seventeen, and 
Bacon sixty-four, with but another year to live. Francis Beaumont 
(§ 6) died five months after the accession of Charles I. 

At the accession of Charles I., Dr. Donne (§ 26) was fifty-two 
years old, and he lived until 1631; George Chapman (ch. vii. 
§ 98, ch. viii. § 10) was sixty-eight years old, and lived till 1634. 
John Marston (ch. vii. § 99, 100) died about the same time as 
Chapman. Thomas Dekker and Thomas Hey wood (ch. vii. 
§ 99), who continued to write plays, lived on till about 1641. 
Heywood had " an entire hand or a main finger " in 220 plays. 
John Webster (§ 9) lived throughout the reign of Charles I., and 
died under the Commonwealth, about 1654. 

32. Ben Jonson (ch. vii. § 100, ch. viii. § 5), after the death 
of James I., was driven to the stage again by poverty. The 
town did not receive his play, The Staple of News, produced 
in 1625, with much favour, and at the close of that year the 
poet had a stroke of palsy. He had bad health during 
the rest of his life. His play of The New Inn, acted in 
January, 1630, was driven from the stage; and it was then 
that Jonson turned upon the playhouse audiences with an 
indignant ode. At the end of 1631 a quarrel with our first 
great architect of the Renaissance, Inigo Jones, who invented 
the machinery for the court masques, deprived Jonson of all 
court patronage, and in 1632 and 1633 he was compelled to 
write feebly for the public stage his last plays, The Magnetic 
Lady and The Tale of a Tub. But after this, court favour 
and city favour, which also had been withdrawn, were re- 
gained for him. He had a pension from court of ,£100 and 
a tierce of canary. The favour of all the good poets of the 



37 2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1578" 

it to the queen to decide, after hearing their contest in song, 
which of the shepherds was to be preferred. Then came the 
rural songs. When the queen was to give judgment, an old 
shepherd and a forester intervened with argument in comic 
prose whether the estate of shepherds or of foresters were the more 
worshipful. Rombus, the schoolmaster, interposed again with 
his pedantry, and was about to judge for the queen, when the 
May Lady again stopped him. The queen gave what judgment 
she thought best, the masquers all struck up their music, the one 
who was declared victor by Her Majesty expressed his joy in 
song, and the May Lady spoke a little epilogue. 

In July, 1578, Philip Sidney was one of the men of mark who 
followed Queen Elizabeth to Audley End, and received honours 
of verse from Gabriel Harvey in the " Walden Gratulations." 
But Sidney was weary of idleness at court. His friend, Fulke 
Greville, returning from a foreign mission, received on his way 
from William of Orange a message for Elizabeth, craving leave 
of her freely to speak his knowledge and opinion of a fellow- 
servant of his who lived unemployed under her. He had had 
much experience, had seen various times and things and persons, 
but he protested that Her Majesty had in Mr. Philip Sidney one 
of the ripest and greatest statesman that he knew of in all Europe. 
If Her Majesty would but try the young man, the prince would 
stake his own credit upon the issue of his friend's employment 
about any business, either with the allies or with the enemies of 
England. And this was said, not without reason, by William the 
Silent of a young man of four-and-twenty, who seems to have 
been the type of what was noblest in the youth of England 
during times that could produce a Shakespeare. 

31. This was said of Sidney at the time when Edmund 
Spenser came to London, and after he had been abroad on 
Leicester's errand, and finished his " Shepheardes Calender n 
where he had Sidney for companion. The little book was 
published anonymously, with a dedication to the noble and 
virtuous gentleman, most worthy of all titles, both of learning 
and chivalry, Master Philip Sidney. The Shepheardes Calender: 
conteyning Twelve sEglognes proportionable to the Twelve 
Monethes, and dedicated to Philip Sidney, was introduced by 
" E. K." — Edward Kirke, an old college friend of Spenser's and 
Harvey's — with a letter to Gabriel Harvey, in which " the new 
poet" was said to have begun with eclogues, "following the 
example of the best and most ancient poets, which devised this 



toa-d. I579-] SPENSER'S "SHEPHEARDES CALENDER." 373 

land of writing, being so base for the matter and homely for the 
manner, at the first to try their abilities," and to have other works 
by him sleeping in silence, " as his ' Dreams,' his 'Legends,' his 
* Court of Cupid,' and sundry others." " E. K." added a post- 
script, urging Gabriel Harvey to give to the world also his own 
" gallant English verses." A " glosse," of small value, was added 
by " E. K." to each eclogue. 

In his "Shepheardes Calender," Spenser derived from Skelton 
the name of Colin Clout, which he applied to himself also in later 
poetry. The Colin Clout of Skelton (ch. vi. § 23) was a homely 
Englishman, who felt that many wrongs were waiting to be 
righted, and especially condemned luxury and self-seeking of the 
higher clergy. Spenser was of one mind with Skelton upon this, 
and took his side at once in the Church controversies of the time, 
although in doing so he boldly placed himself beside one who was 
at that time under the Queen's displeasure. In the seventh 
eclogue, Thomalin sees the elevation of Morrell, whose herd is 
astray among rank bushes, and refuses to go up the hill to him. 
Morrell sings in the praise of holy hills, but Thomalin replies : 

" To kerke the narre, from God more farre, 
Has bene an old-sayd sawe, 
And he that strives to touch a starre 
Oft stombles at a strawe. 
" Alsoone may shepheard clymbe to skye 
That leades in lowly dales 
As goteherd prowd that, sitting hye, 
Upon the mountaine sayles." 

Thomalin then enforces the lesson of humility with teaching 
derived from old Algrind : 

" Such one he was (as I have heard 

Old Algrind often sayne), 
That whilome was the first shepheard 

And lived with little gayne ; 
And meeke he was, as meeke mought be, 

Simple as simple sheepe ; 
Humble, and like in eche degree 

The flocke which he did keepe. 

Like one (sayd Algrind) Moses was 
That sawe hys Maker's face." 

Those old true shepherds loved their flocks, and simple was their 
weed, but now 

" They bene yclad in purple and pall, 
So hath theyr God them blist; 
They reigne and rulen over all, 
And lord it as they list." 



376 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1579. 

replied in a letter loyal to the queen, but loyal also to his con- 
science. He argued to her from Scripture that the Gospel should 
be plentifully preached ; met the objections to the prophesyings ; 
declared that Scripture and experience showed them to be profi- 
table ; and said, " I am forced, with all humility, and yet plainly, 
to profess that I cannot with a safe conscience, and without the 
offence of the majesty of God, give my assent to the suppressing 
of the said exercises ; much less can I send out my injunction 
for the utter and universal subversion of the same. I say with 
St. Paul, ' I have no power to destroy, but to only edify ; ' and 
with the same apostle, ' I can do nothing against the truth, but 
for the truth.' If it be your Majesty's pleasure, for this or any 
other cause, to remove me out of this place, I will, with all 
humility, yield thereunto, and render again to your Majesty that 
I received of the same. . . . Bear with me, I beseech you, 
Madam, if I choose rather to offend your earthly majesty, than 
to offend the heavenly majesty of God." In June, 1577, Grindal 
was, for this persistence in what he believed to be his highest 
duty, by order of the Privy Council confined to his house and 
sequestered for six months. Lord Burghley instructed him how 
he was to make formal submission to the queen. He did not 
make it. There was question of depriving him, but for that he 
was too popular with a large section of the clergy and the people. 
Nevertheless, he remained under sequestration, and these were 
the relative positions of Morrell and of the wise Algrind, when 
Spenser's " Shepheardes Calender " appeared. At a Convocation 
in the following year, 1580, the archbishop being still under 
sequestration, Aylmer presided. Some of the clergy were un- 
willing to proceed to business without the archbishop, but a 
petition was sent to the queen, also a letter signed by twelve 
bishops, both without effect. Grindal at this time was becoming 
blind. At last, it has been said, being really blind, more with 
grief than age, he was willing to put off his clothes before he 
went to bed, and in his lifetime to resign his place to Dr. 
Whitgift, who refused such acceptance thereof. And the queen, 
commiserating his condition, was graciously pleased to say that 
as she had made him so he should die, an archbishop ; as he 
did, July 6th, 1583. 

34. In his reference through pastoral forms to the great ques- 
tions that concerned the flocks and shepherds of the Church, 
especially in the fifth and seventh eclogues, Spenser followed 
the example of Clement Marot (ch. vi. § 39) ; indeed, the study 



a.d. 1579.] SPENSER'S "SHEPHEARDES CALENDER." ^>77 

of Marot led Spenser to shape two of his eclogues, the 
eleventh and twelfth, distinctly upon eclogues by the poet of 
France and the French Reformers. Spenser's eleventh eclogue, 
between Colin and Thenot, was a free version of Marot's lament 
between Colin and Thenot for Louise of Savoy, whom Spenser 
transformed into Dido, changing also her son, Francis I., into 
" the great shepherd, Lobbin." Spenser's twelfth eclogue was a 
paraphrase of Marot's upon the course of his own life, called his 
"Eclogue to the King under the names of Pan and Robin." 
Spenser's sincerity in speaking his mind upon Church matters, 
without regard to interest at court, gave value to his poetical 
homage to the queen in the fourth eclogue. The element of love 
was necessary in a set of pastorals, and cruel Rosalind inspired 
the song in the first and sixth eclogues. " E. K." tells us that 
there had been a real Rosalind. Very likely ; Spenser's age was 
twenty-seven. But if there had been no love fancy within his 
experience it would still have been in the poem, since in poetry 
this must needs be one ingredient of a Shepheardes Calender. 
In his English, Spenser here and everywhere set his face against 
all affectation of his time, whether it were the pedantry which 
Sidney ridiculed in Master Rombus (§ 30), or the dainty alliteration 
and antithesis, with ingenuity of simile, for which the taste came 
in from Italy, and wherein Lyly's " Euphues" (§ 22), published in 
the same year as the " Shepheardes Calender," showed mastery. 
Spenser used homely English, and looked back to Chaucer as his 
chief. Homage was paid by the new poet to Chaucer, under the 
pastoral name of Tityrus, in the second, the sixth, and the twelfth 
eclogues ; in the second eclogue also there was place found for an 
attempt at story-telling in Chaucer's manner. The rustic English 
of the shepherds assumed a few forms which had become obsolete 
at court, and which, simple as they were, "E. K." in his " Gloss " 
interpreted ; but here, and in later poetry of Spenser's, much of 
the antique air came from the poet's use of his own north-country 
English, that still retained, as our rustic English even at this day 
retains, what townspeople regard as obsolete words and forms of 
inflection. But there was a direct strengthening of Spenser's 
genius by study of Chaucer. The laboriously small literature of 
Italy, which then set the fashion in England, Spenser disdained ; 
and there was something combative in his upholding of Chaucer, 
and his use of the simplest one and two-syllabled English words 
at a time when the new energies of thought were busy, among 
other things, with the invention of new words derived from 



3/tf A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. f A .D. 1579. 

Greek and Latin. Ten years after 1579, George Puttenham, in 
writing upon English Poesie, cited among new words thus intro- 
duced, placation, assubtiling, numerosity, facundity, implete, 
words which did not take root in the language ; and others which 
did — method and methodical, prolix, compendious, function, 
impression, indignity, penetrate, delineation, dimension, com- 
patible, egregious, audacious. Increasing wealth of thought 
required enlargement of the language. Word -coining of the 
Elizabethan time was not all affectation, although at court there 
was much good breath wasted in that way. Spenser disliked 
it, and opposed it by his practice to the last. Chaucer it was, 
says Colin Clout, " Who taught me, homely, as I can, to make." 
The god of shepherds, Tityrus, is dead— 

" And all hys passing skil with him is fledde, 
The fame whereof doth dayly greater growe; 
But if on me some little drops would flowe 
Of that the spring was in his learned hedde — " 

Such was the first aspiration of the poet who was to make for 
himself a name often to be coupled with Chaucer's, and like his, 
a name "the fame whereof doth daily daily greater grow." 

35. But if Spenser was out of sympathy with the small writers 
of Italy, he took delight in Ariosto (ch. vi. § 40), and there was 
one great poet then living and suffering in Italy, Torquato Tasso, 
with whom he came to feel the fellowship of noble minds. Tasso 
was born in 1544, ten or eleven years after the death of Ariosto. 
He was eight or nine years older than Spenser, and his influence 
on Spenser's, later work was that of one great living poet upon 
another who was some years younger than himself. Tasso died 
in 1595, Spenser in 1599. Torquato Tasso was a poet's son, a 
child with a passion for learning and rare depths of devotional 
feeling ; a youth studying with his father the best writers of his 
own country, for, said the father wisely, men should not so study 
as to become like citizens abroad and strangers at home. In the 
year of Elizabeth's accession Torquato Tasso was fourteen, and 
his father, Bernardo, published a poem on the romance of Amadis 
of Gaul, the " Amadigi." At seventeen Torquato published his 
"Rinaldo;" the son's fame at once rivalled the father's, and 
thenceforth he made poetry his work in life. In 1579, when 
Spenser's " Shepheardes Calender," and Lyly's " Euphues " ap- 
peared, Tasso had written at the court of Ferrara courtly poetry, 
and earned repute in Italy, especially by a pastoral drama called 
Aminta, published in 1573. He had been long engaged on his 



a.d. I579-] EDMUND SPENSER. NORTH'S PLUTARCH. 379 

great poem, which was written but not yet published. For some 
years also the taint of melancholy madness in his nature had made 
itself known, and in that year, 1 579, Tasso was treated by the Duke 
of Ferrara as a confirmed lunatic, in a hospital for madmen. 
Those were dark ages in our social history, so far as concerned the 
treatment of insanity. When Tasso could utter his distress, 
" Alas, alas," he wrote, " I had determined to write two epic 
poems on noble subjects, four tragedies of which I had formed 
the plan, and much in prose, to be eternally remembered of me 
in the world." But what was thirst for immortality when in 
his misery he said he sought no higher happiness than freedom 
to slake that animal thirst by which he was tormented ? He 
yearned, he said, if not for liberty, the right of man, at least for 
the brute's right, " to quench freely in the streams and fountains 
that thirst with which, it soothes me to repeat it, I am burnt up.^ 

In 1579 there had lately appeared in France a poem called 
" La Sepmaine, ou Creation du Monde," by Gtiillaume de Saluste 
du Bart as, a French Huguenot noble, who was born in the same 
year as Tasso, and was educated as a soldier. His religious poem 
on the "Divine Week of the Creation" abounded in those over- 
strained conceits which the example of Italy had introduced into 
the polite language of surrounding countries. For this reason, 
and for its religious spirit, " La Sepmaine" (Semaine) became so- 
famous that it went through thirty editions in six years, and was 
translated into Latin, Italian, German, and English ; generally 
more than once into each language. The name of " Saluste of 
France" became coupled with that of "Tuscan Arioste," and 
remained great until the passing away of the form of taste it 
satisfied. But we shall find in the days of his currency an 
English minor poet seeking immortality as the translator of 
Du Bartas. 

36. In 1579, when Shakespeare was fifteen years old, and 
Francis Bacon was nineteen, Sir Thomas North published 
his translation of Phitarch's Lives. This was not from the 
original Greek, but from the delightful Plutarch in thirteen 
volumes (six for the Lives and seven for the Morals), published 
in and after 1567 by Jacques Amyot, who was in those days the 
prince of French translators. Amyot lived to within a year of 
fourscore, and died in 1593. Sir Thomas North was himself an 
active member of the English band of translators produced by the 
revival of letters. Among his other translations was, in 1570, one 
from the Italian version of a famous Arabian fable book called 



3So A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1561 

" Calilah i Dumnah," as " The Morale Philosophic of Doni." 
But he is here named because it was chiefly in North's Plutarch, 
published in 1579, that Shakespeare, as a playwright, learnt his 
history of Rome. 

37. William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-on-Avon, 
in April, 1 564 ; perhaps on the 23rd of April, for he was baptised on 
the 26th. There is a tradition that he died on his birthday, and 
he died on the 23rd of April, 161 6. His father was John Shake- 
speare, a glover in Henley Street, and probably the son of Richard 
Shakespeare, farmer, at Snitterfield. John Shakespeare was 
living in Henley Street in 1552. In 1556 — the year of the birth 
of Anne Hathaway, the poet's future wife— John Shakespeare 
was sued in the bailiff's court, and described as a glover. In 
that year also the copyholds of a house in Greenhill Street, and 
of another in Henley Street, were assigned to him. In 1557 
John Shakespeare married Mary, the youngest daughter of 
Robert Arden, of Wilmcote, "husbandman." Her father had 
died a month before the marriage, leaving to Mary by his will 
a small property at Wilmcote, called Ashbies, of about fifty-four 
acres, with two houses, and interest in other land at Wilmcote ; 
also two tenements at Snitterfield, and £6 13s. 4d. in cash. That 
was Mary Arden's fortune, and it helped John Shakespeare for 
some years. In 1558 the first child of the marriage was born, a 
girl, Joan, who died. In 1562 another child was born, a girl, 
Margaret, who died. In 1564 another child was born, and that 
was William Shakespeare. His father was not then in want. 
The plague was m Stratford in 1564, and John Shakespeare 
made a fair donation for relief of the poor. In 1566 a second 
son, Gilbert, was born. In 1569 a daughter was born, who lived 
to be married ; she was christened by the name of the first 
daughter, who had died, Joan. In 1 570, John Shakespeare rented 
Ington Meadow, a farm oi fourteen acres. The meadow-land 
would feed sheep ; sheep are shorn for wool, and eaten for mutton: 
hence John Shakespeare, glover, in Henley Street, has also been 
called farmer, butcher, and dealer in wool. He could not live 
by gloves alone, the large coarse gloves used in country work, 
which are still in chief demand at Stratford. In 15/1 another 
girl was born, Anne. In 1573 another boy was born, Richard. 
In 1575 John Shakespeare bought the two freehold houses in 
Henley Street, with garden and orchard. 

In 1576, as we shall see presently, the first theatres were 
built, and one of them was the Blackfriars. In that year William 



toa.d. 1579.] WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. FRANCIS BACON. 38 1 

Shakespeare was a boy of twelve, the eldest of five children, in a 
household from which prosperity was on the point of departing. 

In 1577, John Shakespeare, as an alderman of Stratford, was 
excused half his payment towards furnishing pike and bill men, 
that is to say, half his police rate. Other aldermen paid 6s. 8d. 
he only 3s. 4d. In the following year, 1578, John Shakespeare 
and his wife (John Shakespeare was then, in a deed, styled 
"yeoman") were obliged to mortgage the little property at 
Ashbies for ^40, to Edmund Lambert. Money was raised also 
by selling for £4. to Robert Webbe immediate interest in the 
tenements at Snitterfleld. At this time John Shakespeare was 
defaulter also in the levy for armour and defensive weapons ; and 
while he was thus troubled for want of money, he lost his 
younger daughter Anne, a child of about eight years old. So 
matters stood with the Shakespeares in 1579, when William was 
fifteen years old, and the number of the children was reduced 
to four— three boys and a girl. It is likely that William 
Shakespeare had been taught in the Stratford Grammar School; 
it could not well be otherwise, but there is no direct evidence of 
the fact. There is direct evidence of the poverty of his home 
in 1579, and afterwards, till he himself repaired its fortunes. 

38. Francis Bacon, three years and three months older 
than William Shakespeare, was the son of Queen Elizabeth's Lord 
Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, and was born in London, at York 
House, in the Strand, on the 22nd of January, 1561. Sir William 
Cecil, afterwards Lord Burghley, and Sir Nicholas Bacon, 
married two daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke (§ 1). The sister, 
Anne, married by Sir Nicholas, was his second wife. She was 
an educated woman, with strong religious feeling, who took 
strong interest in the reformation of the Church, and inclined to 
the Puritan side in later questions of its internal policy. It was 
she who translated Jewel's "Apology" into English (§ 14). Sir 
Nicholas Bacon had by his former wife, six children, and by his 
second wife two, Anthony and Francis ; Anthony two years older 
than Francis, who was thus the youngest of eight in a household 
living sometimes in London, at York House, sometimes at 
GorhambuPfc near St. Albans. In April, 1573, when Anthony 
was fourteen and Francis twelve, the two boys were entered as 
fellow-commoners at Trinity College, Cambridge. Of Francis 
Bacon's career at college, ending in his sixteenth year, we have 
only two notes. They are from Dr. Rawley, his chaplain of after 
days. One is that Queen Elizabeth " delighted much then to 



382 A FIRST SKETCf/ OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1562 

confer with him, and to prove him with questions ; unto which 
he delivered himself with that gravity and maturity above his 
years, that Her Majesty would often term him ' the young Lord 
Keeper.' Being asked by the queen how old he was, he answered 
with much discretion, being then but a boy, ' That he was two 
years younger than Her Majesty's happy reign ;' with which 
answer the queen was much taken." The other record is this : 
""Whilst he was commorant in the University, about sixteen 
years of age (as his lordship hath been pleased to impart unto 
• myself), he first fell into the dislike of the philosophy of Aristotle ; 
not for the worthlessness of the author, to whom he would 
ascribe all high attributes, but for the unfruitfulness of the way ; 
being a philosophy (as his lordship used to say) only strong for 
disputations and contentions, but barren of the production of 
works for the benefit of the life of man ; in which mind he con- 
tinued to his dying day." 

In September, 1576, Sir Amyas Paulet went to Paris to 
succeed Dr. Dale as English Ambassador. Francis Bacon, who 
was to be trained for diplomatic life, entered at Lincoln's Inn, 
and proceeded to France, where he was one of the suite of Sir 
Amyas. Those were in France the first days of the League. 
Charles IX. had died less than two months after the Massacre 
of St. Bartholomew. His brother, the Duke of Anjou, licentious 
and effeminate, had become king, as Henry III. In February ? 

1575, the Huguenots, under the Prince of Conde, signed a league 
with the liberal Catholics, under the Marshal de Damville. The 
Duke of Alencon also joined the insurgents in the south ; and in 

1576, Henry of Navarre, afterwards to be Henry IV., escaped 
from the surveillance of Catherine, and joined the conflict. Full 
concession to the Reformers was extorted, and obtained in May, 
1576. This roused the Catholics, who, seeing what had been 
done by the strength of one league, resolved on a combination 
of their own ; and Henry, the young Duke of Guise, who was 
now leader of the Catholics, organised, by means of the association, 
of the clergy and Jesuits throughout the country, a great Catholic 
League, which in a few months enrolled thirty thousand members. 
This was a confederation to maintain the Church in its old form, 
the king's authority, and that of the head of the league, by 
whose ambition the king's authority was threatened. This league 
was just formed, when Francis Bacon, a youth of sixteen, was 
first in Paris with Sir Amyas Paulet. He was in the summer 
and autumn of 1577 with Sir Amyas in the French court at 



toa.d. 1579. J RISE OF THE DRAMA. 383 

Poitiers. After a little more than two years of this training in 
France to diplomatic life, there came a cloud over the prospects 
of Bacon in the year 1579. In the February of that year his 
father died, after a few days' illness, before completing the pro- 
vision he had meant to make for the younger son by his second 
marriage. Francis Bacon, then eighteen years old, came to 
London at the end of March, with commendations to the 
queen from Sir Amyas Paulet, and settled down at Gray's Inn 
to study of the law as a profession. 

In 1579, then, we have Spenser, aged about twenty-seven, 
publishing his first book, The Shepheardes Calender j Lyly, aged 
twenty-five or twenty-six, publishing Etiphiies; Bacon, aged 
eighteen, thrown on his own resources by his father's death, is 
beginning study of law as the profession by which he must live ; 
and Shakespeare, aged fifteen, is eldest of a family of young 
children in a household that begins to feel the pinch of poverty. 

39. In January, 1562, as we have seen (§ 8) " Gorboduc," 
our first tragedy, was presented before Queen Elizabeth by 
the gentlemen of the Inner Temple. A fortnight later, the 
queen saw a play on the subject of Julius Cassar. Companies 
formed for the entertainment of great lords, acted as servants 
of this or that lord, for their own profit and the public enter- 
tainment, in inn yards (§ 8). In 1 563 the plague destroyed in Lon- 
don 21,530. Archbishop Grindal advised Sir William Cecil to 
inhibit all plays for a year, and, he said, if it were for ever it were 
not amiss. In the summer of 1564, Queen Elizabeth visited Cam- 
bridge, and was entertained with Udall's (ch. vi. § 48, 58, 60) play 
of Ezechias in English. In the following Christmas what is 
called a tragedy, perhaps Damon and Pzthzas, by Richard 
Edwards, a musician and writer of interludes, was acted before 
Her Majesty by the children of the Chapel Royal, Richard 
Edwards being then their master. For its happy end and its 
intermixture of farcical matter, as in the shaving of Grim the 
Collier by the court lackeys, that rhyming play is a comedy, but 
it includes a tyrant and a hangman. Edwards was born in 
Somersetshire, and was a student at Corpus Christi College, 
Oxford, before he became attached to the court. That to the 
court he looked for his advancement we may infer from the 
form of his father's blessing, -given in a poem of his in the 
" Paradise of Dainty Devices : " 

" My son, God guide thy way, and shield thee from mischance, 
And make thy just deserts in court thy poor estate advance." 



384 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1561 

In 1 561, Elizabeth made him a gentlemen of the Royal Chapel, 
and master of the singing boys. He was in very high repute 
for his comedies and interludes. On the 3rd of September, 
1566, Edwards's Palamon and Arcyte was acted before Eliza- 
beth, in the hall of Christ Church, Oxford. At the begin- 
ning of the play part of the stage fell in ; three persons were 
killed and five hurt; but the play was acted and the queen 
enjoyed it, giving eight guineas to one of the young actors who 
pleased her much. Dr. James Calfhill's Latin play of Progne, 
acted two days later, was less successful. It was in the same 
year that Gascoigne's Supposes and Jocasta (§ 29), from Ariosto 
and Euripides, were played during the revels at Gray's Inn. 

At court it was the business of the Master of the Revels to 
have plays rehearsed before him, and to choose the best. In 
the course of 1571 the plays acted before the queen were Lady 
Barbara, by Sir Robert Lane's men ; Lphigenia, by the children 
of Paul's ; Ajax and Ulysses, by the children of Windsor ; Nar- 
cissus, by the Children of the Chapel ; Cloridon and Radiama,nta, 
by Sir Robert Lane's men ; Paris and Vienna, by the Children 
of Westminster. 

In 1572 it was enacted that all fencers, bear-wards, common 
players in interludes, and minstrels not belonging to any baron 
of this realm, or to any other honourable personage of greater 
degree, should be treated as rogues and vagabonds if they had 
not the licence of at least two justices of the peace. This 
requirement was renewed twenty-five years later. 

40. In May, 1574, the Earl of Leicester procured, as special 
privilege for his own servants, James Burbadge, John Perkyn, 
John Lanham, William Johnson, and Robert Wylson, the first 
royal patent " to use, exercise, and occupy the art and faculty of 
playing Comedies, Tragedies, Interludes, Stage Plays and such 
other like as they have already used and studied, or hereafter 
shall use and study, as well for the recreation of our loving 
subjects as for our solace and pleasure when we shall think 
good to see them," within the City of London and its Liberties, 
or in any other city, without let ; " provided that the said 
Comedies, Tragedies, Interludes, and Stage Plays be by the 
Master of the Revels (for the time being) before seen and 
allowed ; and that the same be not published or shown in the 
time of Common Prayer, or in the time of great and common 
Plague in our City of London." The city authorities opposed 
the concession of this patent; but in July, 1574, a letter was 



TOA.D. 1 575.] THE THEATRE IN THE INN YARD. 38^ 

written from the Privy Council requiring the Lord Mayor " to 
admit the comedy players within the City of London, and to 
be otherwise favourably used." In 1575 the Common Council 
framed regulations that were in effect prohibitory ; for they 
required not only that a licence should be obtained from the 
Lord Mayor for every exhibition, but also that half the players' 
profits should be given up for charitable uses. 

As yet no theatre had been built. Actors produced their 
entertainments upon scaffolds set up for the purpose in con- 
venient places. In a town there was no place more convenient 
than the inn yard, as the inn yard used to be when there was 
much travelling by coach and on horseback. The large inner 
square of the building, entered by an archway, had, at least on 
the first floor, often on other floors, a gallery round it, into 
which rooms opened. The stage built against one side of the 
yard had close above it a piece of gallery which could be, and 
was, curtained off with it for use. It would serve for a window 
or a balcony, from which a king or a fair lady looked down ; 
it would serve for the battlements of a castle, from which an 
attacking force could be defied ; it would serve for the top of 
his palace, from which David observed Bathsheba. In the 
unenclosed part of the gallery above, on each side of the 
curtains, was the music. The trumpet sounded thrice, and at 
the third sound of the trumpet the curtain before the stage 
was drawn to either side, thus framing it in drapery. Upon 
the stage there was no scenery. A bed, or a table and chair, 
might be produced if necessary, or a god might be let down 
in a chair if the arrangement of galleries and windows in the 
place of performance made it easy to do that ; but the play 
itself was the whole entertainment. The players did their 
best in dressing and in acting ; the poet did his best to enter- 
tain the people and provide the players with effective parts. 
What scenery the poet wanted he could always paint for 
himself in words. A large part of the audience stood on the 
ground in the open yard — groundlings of the original pit, for 
whom at first there were no seats provided. The galleries sur- 
rounding the old inn yard were the first circles of boxes, and 
the rooms of the inn, which could be taken for solace of the 
more luxurious, were the first private boxes. After theatres had 
been built, those boxes were for some time called "rooms." 
The acting was at first on holidays, because on working days, 
when most people were about their business, only the few idlers 

z 



386 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1576. 

could afford to give attention to the play; for there was no 
acting after dark. The play was always over in time to enable 
playgoers to get back home before sunset. Following the old 
usage, in accordance with opinion of the Roman Catholic 
Church that after hours of service sports lawful on other 
days were lawful on Sundays, the afternoon of Sunday 
was at first a recognised time for such entertainments, but 
this was strongly opposed by the Puritans. The Corpora- 
tion of London, Puritan in its tendency, battled against the 
players, and supported its case with various arguments : as, 
desecration of Sabbath and saints' days ; bringing of young 
people together under conditions that would favour the forming 
of unmeet contracts ; temptations from the inns ; chance of 
seditious matter in the plays; idle waste of money 'that, if 
superfluous, should be given to the poor ; hurt of people by 
the fall of scaffolding, and by the weapons and gunpowder used 
in the performances ; chance of diffusing plague, by bringing 
people together in great crowds. In December, 1575, the 
authorities of the City of London prohibited altogether the 
acting of plays within their jurisdiction as ungodly, and made 
humble suit for like prohibition in all places near the city. 
The queen's players then petitioned the Privy Council against 
the procedure of the Corporation of London, and of the justices 
of Middlesex, who also had opposed them. The city argued 
in reply to the players " how unseemly it is for youth to run 
straight from prayer to plays, from God's service to the devil's. 5 * 
Among other of its suggestions, one was that since the death- 
rate, in absence of plague, was forty or fifty a week, acting of 
plays in London should be forbidden wherever the death-rate 
exceeded fifty. The population of London was then about 
150,000. 

In 1576 the city desired that the players should act only in 
private houses, or if elsewhere, then only on condition that the 
death-rate had for twenty days been under fifty ; that they should 
never act on the Sabbath, nor on holy-days till after evening prayer, 
and always early enough to allow the spectators to return home 
before dark ; also, that none but the queen's players should be thus 
licensed, and that not only the number of these, but their names, 
should be specified. If they infringed these regulations there 
was to be an end of toleration. Hostility of the Common Council 
at last drove the actors into parts of London that were not within 
its jurisdiction; and in this year, 1576, James Burbadge bought 



a.d. 1576.] THE FIRST THEA TEES. 387 

and prepared a place for acting in the precinct of the dissolved 
monastery in the liberty of Blackfriars. There the Blackfriars 
Theatre was built, in spite of local opposition. In these contests 
the Earl of Leicester was, among men in power, the most active 
supporter of the players. In the same year, 1576, two other 
theatres were built beyond the jurisdiction of the Mayor and 
Corporation. These were outside the walls, in the fresh air of 
Shoreditch. The Londoner who passed out through the town 
walls at Bishop's Gate had before him a suburban street of good 
houses and gardens, running between the clear green space of 
the Spital Field and the open Finsbury Field, in which were 
three windmills. That line between fields of Bishopsgate Street 
Without the town gate, continuing the line of Bishopsgate Within, 
led to the pleasant country houses of Shoreditch, and these were 
good houses, chiefly in favour with foreign merchants resident in 
London. In Shoreditch, beyond the walls, but with a well- 
inhabited town road — Bishopsgate Street Without — leading 
through the fields to it, were built The Theatre and The 
Curtain. These were the other two of the three theatres which, 
in 1576, first gave a home of its own to the English drama. 
William Shakespeare was at Stratford then, aged twelve. 

41. Among the first writers and actors in these first theatres 
was Stephen Gosson, a young Oxford graduate, born in Kent 
in 1555, who studied at Christ Church. After taking his B.A. 
degree, he came to London in 1576, aged twenty-one, attached 
himself at once to the new theatres, and wrote plays, which are 
now lost — Catiline's Conspiracies ; Captain Mario, a Comedy; 
Praise at Parti7ig, a Moral. Meanwhile the opposition of the 
Puritans continued. A sermon at Paul's Cross, preached by 
T. Wilcocks, on Sunday, Nov. 3, 1577, in a time of plague, 
exhorted the people to " look but upon the common plays in 
London, and see the multitude that flocketh to them and followeth 
them : behold the sumptuous theatre houses, a continual monu- 
ment of London's prodigality and folly. But I understand," said 
the preacher, " they are now forbidden because of the plague. I 
like the policy well, if it hold still ; for a disease is but botched 
or patched up that is not cured in the cause, and the cause of 
plagues is sin, if you look to it well ; and the cause of sin are 
plays : therefore the cause of plagues are plays." Mention is 
made of the Theatre and Curtain by name in the Rev. John 
Northbrooke's Treatise wherein Diceing, Dauncing, vaine Plays 
or Enter hides, with Idle Pastimes, &*c, commonly used on the 

z 2 



300 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1576 

Sabbath-day are reproued by the anthoritie of the Worde of God 
and auncie?it writers. Made Dialogue wise. This was entered 
at Stationers' Hall at the beginning of December, 1577. 

Young Stephen Gosson, who earned credit also as a writer of 
pastorals, was moved by the controversies of the time not only 
to abandon his new calling as a writer for the stage, but to join 
in attack upon the theatres. This he did in 1579, by publishing 
a short prose book called The School of Abuse, containing a 
Plesaunt Invective against Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters, and 
such-like Caterpillers of a Commonwelth j setting up the Flagge 
of Defiance to their mischievous exercise, and overthrowing their 
Bulwarkes, by Profane Writers, Naturall Reason, and Common 
Experience: a Discourse as pleasaunt for Gentlemen that favour 
Learning, as profitable for all that wyll follow Vertue. This 
was entered at Stationers' Hall in July. " Euphues " had been 
published in the spring. There was just time for Gosson to have 
read " Euphues " before writing his own little treatise, which was 
produced under the influence of the same fashion which Lyly's 
book illustrated. The dedication to Sir Philip Sidney might, for 
its style, have been signed " John Lyly " instead of " Your Wor- 
shippes' to command, Stephen Gosson." For example, after 
citing Caligula's great preparation to invade England, where 
he only " charged every man to gather cockles," Gosson says, 
" The title of my book doth promise much, the volume you 
see is very little : and sithens I cannot bear out my folly by 
authority, like an emperor, I will crave pardon for my phrensy, 
by submission, as your worships' to command. The school which 
I build is narrow, and at the first blush appeareth but a dog- 
hole ; yet small clouds carry water ; slender threads sew sure 
stitches ; little hairs have their shadows ; blunt stones whet 
knives ; from hard rocks flow soft springs ; the whole world is 
drawn in a map, Homer's ' Iliad ' in a nut-shell, a king's pic- 
ture in a penny," and so on. Philip Sidney, we learn, was ill- 
pleased with the dedication to him of a book that set out with an 
attack on poetry, and Gosson's "School of Abuse" is believed to 
have prompted Sidney to the writing of his " Apology for Poetry." 
From the poets Gosson went on to the musicians, and then to 
the players. One passage in his attack upon them is worth 
notice. He said it might be urged that, whatever were the 
immoralities of ancient comedy, " the comedies that are exercised 
in our days are better sifted, they show no such bran." After 
comparing the immorality of the old plays with the morality of 



to a.d. 1582.] STEPHEN GOSSON. THOMAS LODGE. 389 

the new ones, he said, " Now are the abuses of the world revealed ; 
every man in a play may see his own faults, and learn by this 
1 glass to amend his manners." But admitting this, he added, 
" If people will be instructed (God be thanked) we have divines 
enough to discharge that, and more by a great many than are 
well hearkened to." So that even in these days of its first 
infancy there was the earnest spirit of the time in the Elizabethan 
drama ; the same earnest spirit that in another form laboured 
for its destruction. Stephen Gosson having left the stage, added 
to his invective a short Apology for the School of Abuse ', and 
went into the country as a tutor. 

42, Thomas Lodge, son of Sir Thomas Lodge, a London 
grocer who was Lord Mayor in 1563, was a fellow-student of 
Gosson's, a young man of his own age. He wrote at once a 
reply to Gosson, "Honest Excuses" on behalf of the stage. 
Early in 1582 the players also defended their calling in their own 
way by acting a Play of Plays. Stephen Gosson then pro- 
duced at once a five-act answer, entitled, Plays Confuted in Five 
Actions, Or^c, proving that they are not to be suffered in a Chris- 
tian Co7nmonwealthj by the way both the cavils of Thomas Lodge 
and the Play of Plays written in their defence, and other objec- 
tions oj Players' friends, are truly set down and directly answered. 

In 1 591, Gosson was made Rector of Great Wigborough, in 
Essex. In 1600, by an exchange of livings, he came to town, 
aged forty-five, as Rector of St. Botolph, Bishopsgate, and 
there he officiated for nearly a quarter of a century, until his 
death in 1624. 

Thomas Lodge made for himself a name of honour among 
the men who were creating a poetical drama when Shakespeare 
began his career in London. Lodge was a Roman Catholic and 
a good scholar. From Oxford he went to Avignon, where he 
graduated as doctor of medicine. On his return he was incor- 
porated at Cambridge; and he became in London not only a 
successful dramatist and poet, but also a thriving physician, with 
a practice chiefly among those of his own religious faith. John 
Lyly, a year or two older than Lodge and Gosson, we shall also 
find to be in the first group of Elizabethan dramatists. Robert 
Greene was a few years younger, perhaps not more than two or 
three years older than William Shakespeare ; and Christopher 
Marlowe was born in the same year as Shakespeare. Two 
other dramatists of this group, Thomas Kyd and Henry 
Chettle, may have been of about the age of Robert Greene. 



39° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1580. 

43. On the 6th of April, 1580, there was a considerable shock 
of earthquake felt in many parts of England. It produced a 
Discourse upon the Earthquake, from Arthur Golding (§ 6), the 
translator of. Ovid ; A Warning on the Earthquake, from Thomas 
Churchyard (§ 10), and with a preface, dated June 19, 1580: ' 
Three proper and wittie familiar letters lately passed betweene 
two University men, touching the earthquake in April last, and 
our English reformed versifying, with the preface of a well- 
wisher to them both. The two University men were Edmund 
Spenser and Gabriel Harvey. As to the earthquake, 
Harvey described the effect of it on minds at Cambridge, and 
protested against the practice of converting natural events into 
Divine warnings, and associating them with predictions. He had 
a strong sense of the emptiness of this part of the supposed 
knowledge of the time, the stronger because one of his brothers 
gave much attention to the study of astrology. The " English 
eformed versifying" meant a fancy of the day among some 
University men who discussed literature together — Harvey, 
Spenser, Sidney, and Sidney's friends and college companions, 
Edward Dyer and Fulke Greville, with others — for the abolishing 
of rhyme and introduction of the Latin system of quantity into 
English verse. They were amusing themselves with English 
hexameters, sapphics, and other forms derived from the old 
Latin poetry. Spenser sent Harvey four lines of hexameter as a 
sample, and asked, " Seem they comparable to those two which 
I translated you extempore in bed the last time we lay together 
in Westminster?" He observed difficulties in accent, and 
desiring a fixed system to work upon, wished Harvey would 
send him " the rules and precepts of art which you observe in 
quantities, or else follow mine that M. Philip Sidney gave me, 
reing the very same which M. Drant devised, but enlarged with 
M. Sidney's own judgment, and augmented with my observations, 
that we might both accord and agree in one, lest we overthrow 
one another and be overthrown of the rest." He said that Dyer 
had liked Harvey's satirical verses, and that he himself was about 
to write Epithalamium Ta?nesis (its idea seems to have been 
worked afterwards into the " Faerie Queene," Book IV., canto 
xi.) ; his Dreams and Dying Pelican were about to be printed ; 
and he was already at work upon The Faerie Queene. The 
Dreams were not published ; perhaps Spenser withdrew them 
because they were exercises of ingenuity, according to a fashion 
of the time with which his own taste as a poet was not in unison. 



a.d. 1580.] EDMUND SPENSER AND GABRIEL HARVEY. 391 

Because they were after the manner of the time they delighted 
Harvey, who was clever and liberal of mind, with a quick-witted 
delight in literature, but who was simply a clever man of his own 
day. Harvey worshipped Euphuism in its sources : " I like your 
' Dreams ' passingly well," he told Spenser, " the rather because 
they savour of that singular and extraordinary vein and invention 
which I ever fancied most, and in a manner admired only in 
Lucian, Petrarch, Aretino, and all the most delicate and fine- 
conceited Grecians and Italians (for the Romans, to speak of, 
are but very ciphers in this kind), whose chief endeavour and 
drift was to have nothing vulgar, but in some respect or other, 
and especially in lively hyperbolical amplification, rare, quaint, 
and odd in every point, and, as a man would say, a degree or 
two above the reach and compass of a common scholar's 
capacity." Spenser had written at this time nine comedies after 
the manner of Ariosto, and these also he probably withheld from 
publication because they had the qualities that caused Harvey 
to write, " I am void of all judgment if your nine comedies 
whereunto, in imitation of Herodotus, you give the names of the 
nine Muses (and in one man's fancy not unworthily) come not 
nearer Ariosto's comedies, either for the finesse of plausible 
elocution or the rareness of poetical invention, than the Elvish 
Queene doth to his ' Orlando Furioso,' which, notwithstanding, 
you will needs seem to emulate and hope to overgo, as you flatly 
professed yourself in one of your last letters." Spenser then had 
begun his " Faerie Oueene,' 5 and begun it with high aspiration. 
He went on with it undaunted by his friend Harvey's warning, 
" If so be the ' Faerie Oueene ' be fairer in your eye than the 
nine Muses" (the comedies) "and Hobgoblin run away with the 
garland from Apollo, mark what I say — and yet I will not say that 
I thought. But there, an end for this once, and fare you well till 
God or some good angel put you in a better mind." It was really 
" fare you well," for in this year Spenser went to Ireland. 

44. At the beginning of 1580, Philip Sidney had ad- 
dressed to the queen a wise and earnest written argument 
against the project of her marriage with the Duke of Anjou. 
His uncle, Leicester, whose secret marriage with Lettice, Countess 
of Essex, had become known, was already under the queen's 
displeasure ; and Sidney, after writing this letter, found it best 
to withdraw from court. Towards the end of March, 1580, he 
went to stay at Wilton with his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, 
whom Spenser afterwards honoured as 



39 2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 158a 

" The greatest shepherdess that lives this day. 
And most resembling both in shape and spright 
Her brother dear ; " 

and upon whose death, when her course was ended, Ben Jonson 
wrote : 

' Underneath this sable herse 
Lies the subject of all verse, 
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother ; 
Death, ere thou hast slain another 
Learn'd and fair and good as she, 
Time shall throw a dart at thee. " 

Sidney's sister became " Pembroke's mother" in that spring of 
1580 when her brother Philip was staying at Wilton. He re- 
mained there about seven months. Brother and sister worked 
together at that time upon a joint translation of The Psalms of 
David into English verse. It was then also that Sidney occu- 
pied hours of his forced idleness by beginning to write for the 
amusement of his sister a long pastoral romance, in prose mixed 
with verse, according to Italian fashion, with abundance of 
poetical conceits — his Arcadia. It was done at his sister's wish, 

and as he wrote to her, " only for you, only to you 

For, indeed, for severer eyes it is not, being but a trifle, and that 
triflingly handled. Your dear self can best witness the manner, 
being done in loose sheets of paper, most of it in your pre- 
sence, the rest by sheets sent unto you as fast as they were done." 
This romance was not published by Sidney. Not long before 
his death he said that he wished it to be burnt. But it belonged 
to his sister, who valued it, and by her it was, after his death, 
prepared for the press, and published in 1590. Much of it was 
written during the summer of 1580, and the rest chiefly, or 
entirely in 1581. Though long, Sidney's "Arcadia" is un- 
finished except by the addition of a hurried close. It is a pas- 
toral of the school of the " Arcadia " of Sanazzaro, and the 
" Diana Enamorada" by George of Montemayor (ch. vi. § 39), 
but its intermixture of verse and prose develops more com- 
pletely a romantic story, and it adds to the pastoral a new 
heroic element. This was suggested partly by the Spanish ro- 
mances of "Amadis" and " Palmerin " (ch. vi. § 40), partly by the 
^Ethiopian Historie of Heliodorus, lately translated from the 
Greek by Thomas Underdown. Heliodorus, Bishop of Tricca, in 
Thessaly, who lived at the end of the fourth century, wrote, under 
the name of "iEthiopica," ten books of romance on the loves of 
Theagenes and Chariclea. Sidney had been enjoying this in 



toa.d. i 5 8i.] SIDNEY'S ARCADIA. 393 

Underdown's translation. In his " Defence of Poesy," written 
in 15S1 (although not published until 1595J, after saying that 
Xenophon had " in his portraiture of a just empire under the 
name of Cyrus (as Cicero saith of him), made therein an abso- 
lute heroical poem ; so," he added, " did Heliodorus in his 
sugared invention of that picture of love in Theagenes and 
CLariclea, and yet both these writ in prose : which I speak to 
show that it is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet, no 
more than a long gown maketh an advocate, who, though he 
pleaded in armour, should be an advocate and no soldier." 
Sidney's Arcadia may be, in this sense, taken as all poet's work ; 
giving a new point of departure for heroic romance grafted upon 
pastoral. As he was writing for his sister a romance after the 
fashion of his day, Sidney, in the " Arcadia," would amuse him- 
self by showing how he also could be delicate and fine conceited. 
This is the groundwork of its story. Two cousins and close 
friends, Musidorus, the elder, Prince of Thessaly, and Pyrocles, 
the younger, Prince of Macedon, are wrecked on the Spartan 
coast. Musidorus is saved and taken to the delicious pastoral 
land of Arcadia. His friend is supposed to have been lost. 
Musidorus is sheltered by Kalander, an Arcadian noble. Pre- 
sently he leads an Arcadian force against Helots of Sparta, 
who have made Kalander's son their prisoner, and at the close 
of combat with a mighty captain of .the Helots, finds him to be 
his lost friend Pyrocles. Peace is made. Kalander's son is re- 
leased, and the two friends begin a course of love adventures. 
Basilius and Gynecia, king and queen of Arcadia, have two 
daughters — majestic Pamela, and sweet Philoclea. To keep 
men away from his daughters, Basilius has built two lodges in a 
forest. In one he lives with his wife and his younger daughter 
Philoclea ; in the other Pamela lives under the care of a clown 
Dametas, who has an ugly wife, Miso, and an ugly daughter, 
Mopsa. The only men who may come near are a priest and 
some shepherds skilled in music. Musidorus now loves Pamela; 
he is disguised as a shepherd, Dorus, and affects passion for 
Mopsa. Pyrocles loves Philoclea ; he is disguised as an 
Amazon, Zelmane, and inspires love in King Basilius, who takes 
him for a woman, as well as in Queen Gynecia, who sees that 
he is a man. Many troubles and adventures, episodes of 
romance, conceited dialogues and songs, including experiments 
in " our English reformed versifying," are built upon this ground- 
work. The king's sister-in-law, Cecropia, desires to set up her 



394 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1580 

son Amphialus as King of Arcadia, that she may rule through 
him. Cecropia carries off Pamela, Philoclea, and Zelmane. 
She fails to bend Philoclea to assent to the love of her son, 
goes to the chamber of Pamela, hoping to prevail over her, 
and hears her praying to heaven for succour. We shall 
meet again with Pamela's prayer. The Arcadian army 
battles for the rescue of the captives, and in the course of this 
contest Amphialus slays Argalus, the husband of Parthenia. 
She afterwards arms herself to avenge her husband, comes as a 
stranger knight, and is herself slain by Amphialus, who suffers 
grief and shame for his victory. The latter part of the 
" Arcadia" is less fully worked out. The princesses and Pyrocles. 
still as the Amazon Zelmane, are again at home. Musidorus 
escapes with Pamela to Thessaly. Pyrocles remains, troubled 
by the affections of the king and queen, but he brings both to 
their senses, they resume their royal duties, and the lovers are 
made happy. 

There is much difference between the style of Sidney's 
" Arcadia," and that of his Apologie for Poetrie, written in 1581, 
although not published until 1595, when Sidney was dead. This 
little treatise, in simple English, maintains against such attacks 
as Gosson's (§41) the dignity of the best literature. The 
" Apologie for Poetrie " is the first piece of intellectual literary 
criticism in our language ; it springs from a noble nature feeling 
what is noblest in the poet's art, is clear in its plan, terse in its 
English, and while all that it says is well said, it is wholly free 
from conceits. The conceited style, indeed, it explicitly con- 
demns, as eloquence disguised in painted affectation, " one 
time, with so far-fetched words, they may seem monsters, but 
must seem strangers to any poor Englishman; another time, 
with coursing of a letter, as if they were bound to follow the 
method of a dictionary ; at another time with figures and 
flowers extremely winter-starved. But I would this fault were 
only peculiar to versifiers, and had not as large possession 
among prose printers ; and (which is to be marvelled) among 
many scholars ; and (which is to be pitied) among some 
preachers. . . . For now they cast sugar and spice upon 
every dish that is served to the table ; like those Indians, not 
content to wear earrings at the fit and natural place of the ears, 
but they will thrust jewels through their nose and lips, because 
they will be sure to be fine." 

45. In 1576, Pope Gregory XIII. had issued a bull depriving 



toa.d. 1581.] SIDNEY. SPENSER. RALEIGH. 395 

Elizabeth of all title to Ireland, and releasing her Irisn subjects 
from allegiance. Sir Henry Sidney had returned to England, 
and resigned his office as Lord Deputy of Ireland in the autumn 
■of 1578. In 1578, James Fitzmaurice, who had been for two 
years seeking aid from the Catholic powers, got from the pope 
some arms, ammunition, and money, sailed to Ireland with 
adventurers, chiefly Spaniards and Italians, commanded by an 
Italian, landed at Smerwick Bay, in Kerry, and began to con- 
struct a fort there, which was called Del Oro. A great part of 
Ireland was in insurrection when the English Government at last 
appointed as successor to Sir Henry Sidney, Arthur Lord Grey 
of Wilton, a strict Puritan, whom we have already met with as 
a patron of the poet Gascoigne (§ 29). He arrived at Dublin 
August, 1580, having with him Edmund Spenser as his 
private secretary. The patronage of Leicester, and the good 
word of Philip Sidney through his father, would suffice as intro- 
duction for a man in himself welcome, since the secretary was 
upon matters of policy of like mind with his chief. On the 
7th of September, Lord Arthur Grey assumed his office. On 
the 14th a fresh force of six or seven hundred Spaniards disem- 
barked, repaired and took possession of the Fort del Oro. The 
Earl of Desmond was ready with his followers to join them and 
act with them if he could. Lord Grey marched promptly on 
Del Oro, Admiral Winter co-operating with him at sea. On the 
2nd of November Lord Grey pitched his camp within eight 
miles of the fort. Within the fort was an advanced guard of 
the power of Spain, seeking through Ireland to oppose the 
heresies of England. Lord Grey had with him his secretary 
Spenser, and in his camp was Captain Walter Raleigh. The 
garrison of the fort was in a few days forced to surrender at 
discretion ; Lord Grey telling its captains, who pleaded obedience 
to authority, that he " would not greatly have marvelled if men 
commanded by natural and absolute princes did sometimes take 
in hand wrong actions ; but that men of account, as some of 
them made show of being, should be carried into unjust, wicked 
and desperate actions, by one that neither from God nor man 
could claim any princely power or empire, but, indeed, a detes- 
table shaveling of the Antichrist and general ambitious tyrant 
over all principalities, and patron of the diabolical faith, I could 
not but greatly wonder." The fori; was given up, and on the 10th 
of November two officers, one of them Captain Raleigh, were 
sent in to massacre the prisoners. " I put in certain bands," 



396 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1580 

wrote Lord Grey, " which straightway fell to execution. There 
were six hundred slain." Spaniards and Italians of rank were 
spared, and distributed among officers, who were to make prize- 
money by their ransoms. Such was the bitterness of the strife 
which Spenser witnessed, and which he was then expressing 
through sweet music of his verse ; sweet music from a soul pure, 
earnest, but strongly sharing in the conflict of its time. To 
Spenser, as to his chief, Catholicism was " the diabolical faith," 
the pope " a detestable shaveling of the Antichrist." 

46. These also were the events which first brought Edmund 
Spenser and Walter Raleigh together. Raleigh had come back 
to London from his service with the Huguenots, and lived for a 
short time in the Middle Temple, where he wrote a poem of 
compliment, prefixed in 1576 to Gascoigne's "Steel Glass" 
(§ 29). In 1578, Sir John Norris crossed to the Low Countries 
with a small force, of which Raleigh was one, to join in the con- 
test against Don John, who, after his triumph over infidels at 
Lepanto, was to master heretics as Governor of the Netherlands. 
Early in 1578 the Netherlander had been banned by the pope 
as unbelievers. There was appeal to arms. The forces of 
Spain had from their Chureh the privileges of crusaders. The 
Spaniards obtained a great victory over the army of the States 
at Gemblours. War went on nevertheless. In Holland and 
Zealand the Reformation was in 1578 formally established by 
civic revolution, that placed Protestants instead of Catholics in 
the magistracy at Amsterdam and Haarlem. Raleigh took part 
in a success of arms on Lammas-day; and Don John died on 
the 1st of October, at a time when Raleigh was busy on another 
enterprise. On the 19th of November he sailed from Plymouth 
with his brother-in-law, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who took seven 
ships and 350 men on an expedition that was foiled. They fell 
in with a Spanish fleet, lost one of their ships, and Gilbert and 
his brother-in-law, Walter Raleigh, came back to England in 
the early summer of 1579, with the wreck of their small force. 
After a few months of London life, Raleigh then sailed for Ire- 
land, in January, 1580. His energy was overbearing, and weak 
leaders did not love the bold, proud, and plain-spoken captain, 
who shone in conflict with the rebels, and in suggestion of policy 
for quelling the rebellion ; until, in December, 1581, he was sent 
back to the Court at London with despatches. 

After the massacre at Del Oro, Spenser returned with 
Lord Arthur Grey to Dublin. In 15S1, Spenser was made Clerk 



toa.d. 1585.] EDMUND SPENSER. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Jf] 

of Degrees and Recognisances in the Irish Court of Chancery, 
and received also a lease of the lands and abbey of Enniscorthy, 
in Wexford county. He transferred the lease within a year ; and 
in 1582, Lord Arthur Grey, "after long suit for his revocation, 
received Her Majesty's letters for the same." Spenser remained 
in Ireland as an English Government official. In 1588 he 
vacated his post in the Irish Court of Chancery, on being ap- 
pointed clerk to the Council of Munster. In 1589 he came to 
London with Sir Walter Raleigh, to present to the queen the 
first three books of The Faerie Queene, which were first pub- 
lished in 1590. Before speaking of this, we trace the other out- 
lines of our sketch from 1579 to 1590. 

47. William Shakespeare (§ 37) was in 1579 fifteen years 
old, and his home had fallen into poverty. In 1580 his father's 
name appeared in a list of gentlemen and freeholders in Barlich- 
way hundred ; but poverty still pressed, and John Shakespeare 
sold his reversionary interest in the Snitterfield tenements for 
^40 to R. Webbe. In the same year, 1580, another son, 
Edmund, was born. The 28th of November, 1582, is the date 
of the preliminary bond with a notary, for marriage licence of 
William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, daughter of Richard 
Hathaway, " husbandman," of Shottery. Her father had been 
dead a twelvemonth. The marriage would have followed im- 
mediately, but before marriage there was, in those days, a more 
binding ceremony of betrothal than is customary now. Thus, 
in a play of George Peele's, " The Old Wives' Tale," there is a 
magic light to be blown out by a woman who is neither maid, 
wife, nor widow. The light is blown out by Venelia, not maid 
because she is betrothed, not wife because she is not married, 
and not widow because he lives to whom she was betrothed. 
Shakespeare's age when he married was eighteen years and 
seven months ; Anne Hathaway was six-and-twenty. There is 
no evidence whatever that this marriage was other than a happy 
one. On the 26th of May, 1583, Shakespeare's first child, 
Susanna, was baptised. On the 2nd of February, 1585, there 
were twins to baptise. They were named Hamnet and Judith ; 
no doubt after Hamnet and Judith Sadler, bakers, friends of the 
Shakespeares. (Hamnet Sadler, when he died, left Shakespeare 
36s. 8d. to buy a ring.) In some way Shakespeare must have 
endeavoured to support his little family ; his father could not 
help him. In 1585, John Shakespeare was arrested for lack of 
goods to distrain on. In 1586, John Shakespeare was twice 



39 S A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [ad. .586 

arrested for debt ; and, on the ground of his constant absence 
from the meetings of the Corporation, he was deprived of his 
alderman's gown. He was an unprosperous man, of at least 
fifty-six, with five children, the youngest six years old. William, 
the eldest, was then about twenty-two, had been four years 
married, and his wife had three babies to feed and train — 
Susanna, three years old; the twins, Hamnet and Judith, two. 
How could he best maintain them ? He was a poet. Players 
had been to Stratford. He would go to London, and would 
seek his fortune by steady work in association with the rising 
power of the stage. 

His wife and babies he would not take with him into the 
unwholesome atmosphere of the great town, or bring into contact 
with the wild life of the playhouse wits. The children would 
be drawing health from the fresh breezes of Stratford ; the wife 
would be living a wholesome life among her old friends, neigh- 
bours, and relations ; while he worked hard for them where money 
could be earned, took holiday rests with them when theatres 
were closed, and hoped that he might earn enough to enable him 
to come home for good before he was very old, and live a natural 
and happy life among the quiet scenes of his birthplace, among 
relatives who loved him, and among the old friends of his child- 
hood and his youth. The man of highest genius is the man also 
of highest sanity. In lower minds unusual excitement of the 
brain may lead to bold or eccentric forms of expression, with 
half-bred resemblance to originality and energy of thought. 
Ephemeral and even lasting reputations may be founded on this 
form of wit ; but the greatest among poets, a Chaucer or a 
Shakespeare, is calm and simply wise. He is greatest of poets 
not because he does not, but because he does feel, and that 
more intensely and more truly than his neighbours, the natural 
ties of life. He has keen happiness in the home circle, in the 
scenes associated with his childhood, in the peaceful fellowship 
of man. His old friends, Judith and Hamnet Sadler, the bakers, 
were more, not less, to the author of "King Lear" than they 
would be to the citizen with less perception of the harmonies of 
life. Of all that it is natural and fit for common men to say 
and do, Shakespeare had, because of his transcendent genius, 
only a simpler, truer sense than any of his neighbours. 

Shakespeare came to London, then, in or about the year 
1 586; and, Shakespeare though he was, he did not leap to instant 
fame, but worked his way to a front place in his profession by 



toa.d. 1589.] WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. FRANCIS BACON. 399 

six years of patient industry. He was so ready to do any honest 
work, that at the end of six years we have the first indication of 
his rise in the complaint of a competitor, that he is a Johannes 
Factotum (Jack of all Trades). This was the position of 
William Shakespeare in 1590, when he was twenty-six years 
old. In studying Shakespeare's life it is needful to distinguish 
firmly between facts of which there is evidence and idle fancies : 
as of Shakespeare having in his youth stolen deer from a park 
in which there were no deer to be stolen ; of his having been a 
butcher, and, when he killed a calf, having done so with a grand 
air ; with other small-talk of dead gossips. 

48. Francis Bacon (§ 38), aged eighteen at the time of his 
father's death in 1579, studied at Gray's Inn, was admitted an 
utter barrister in June, 1582; and about this time, aged twenty- 
one, sketched briefly in a Latin tract, called Temporis Partus 
Maximus (The Greatest Birth of Time), the first notion of his 
philosophy. In November, 1584, Bacon took his seat in the 
House of Commons, as member for Melcombe Regis, in Dorset- 
shire. In the next Parliament, which met in October, 1586, he 
sat for Taunton, and was one of those who presented a petition 
for the speedy execution of Mary Queen of Scots. He was then 
member for Liverpool, active in public affairs, and presented 
to the ministry a wise paper of his own called, An Advertise- 
ment Touching the Co?itroversie of the Church of Engla7id. 
Its topic was the Marprelate Controversy, presently to be 
described, and it contained the germ of his essay " Of Unity in 
Religion." In October, 1589, there was given to Bacon the 
reversion of the office of Clerk of the Council in the Star 
Chamber, with ;£ 1,600 or ^2,000 a year, and the further 
advantage that its work was done by deputy. But for this 
Bacon had twenty years to wait ; the holder of it lived 
till 1608. If that office had fallen to him early in life, Bacon 
might possibly have given up his career as a lawyer, and 
devoted himself wholly to the working out of his philosophy. 

49. Let us turn now to the controversies of the Church, first 
going back a little way to trace events in Scotland. There, as we 
have seen (§ 3), the confession of John Knox was established 
by the Three Estates in 1560 as the confession of the Scottish 
people ; by three Acts the rule of the pope was abolished, and 
the Reformation was established. There was a new sense of 
fellowship between England and Scotland ; the patriotic Scot 
of the Reformed Church no longer looked upon France as his 



AOO A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1560 

country's natural ally; but the Scottish Catholics looked both 
to France and Spain. In 1561 there was a systematic demolition 
of monasteries, and of images and altars in the cathedrals. In 
August of that year, Queen Mary, who had become a widow at 
the end of 1560 by the death of Francis II. of France, returned 
to Scotland, aged nineteen. On the first Sunday after her 
arrival she heard Mass ; and, by the new law of Scotland, that 
was a crime, with penalty for the first offence of confiscation of 
goods, for the second of banishment, and for the third of death. 
At a banquet to the queen and her court in Edinburgh, enter- 
tainment was provided in presentment of a mystery of Korah, 
Dathan, and Abiram, who were destroyed for burning strange 
fire on the altar. It included parody of the Mass, and burning 
of a priest in effigy. The Earl of Huntly, leader of the Roman- 
ist party, stopped the performance. Guises and Frenchmen 
were in Scotland, and the question was raised of Mary's suc- 
cession to Elizabeth upon the throne of England. With this in 
view, Mary served the time, and showed herself well-disposed 
towards the Protestantism of the people. Knox maintained 
his cause in plain words, both in his preaching and in interviews 
with the queen. He wished that she could hear the preaching 
too : " If your grace," he said, " please to frequent the public 
sermons, then doubt I not but ye shall fully understand both 
what I like and mislike, as well in your Majesty as all others." 
And of his bold preaching he said, " Why should the pleasing 
face of a gentlewoman affray me ? I have looked on the faces of 
many angry men, and yet have not been affrayed above measure." 
In May, 1564, about a month after the birth of Shakespeare, 
Calvin died. In July, 1565, Queen Mary married, without advice 
of Parliament, her cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley ; and 
proclaimed her husband King of the Scots. He also was Roman 
Catholic, and the marriage was according to the rites of the 
Church of Rome. In March, 1566, Darnley, with Lord Ruthven 
and others, seized and murdered David Rizzio in the queen's 
rooms. Knox approved the deed in his history, where he said, 
" That great abuser of this commonwealth, that poltroon and 
vile knave, Davie, was justly punished for abusing of the 
commonwealth, and for his other villany which we list not to 
express." With Darnley the queen dissembled, and he meanly 
turned with her against his associates. "As they have brewed," 
he said, "so let them drink." On the 19th of June, 1566, 
Mary's son was born, afterwards to become James VI. of Scot- 



to A.X.. 1572.] SCOTTISH AFFAIRS. JOHN KNOX. 4or 

land and James I. of England. His father was then detested 
by his mother. Soon afterwards there was a gunpowder plot 
against Darnley, directed by the Earl of Bothwell. On the 9th 
of June, 1567, Darnley was murdered. Early in May, Bothwell 
was divorced from his wife, and on the 15th of May, Queen 
Mary married him. The Barons rose ; Bothwell and Mary were 
parted. The queen was brought back to Edinburgh, thence she 
was removed to Lochleven ; and at Lochleven she was compelled 
to sign an abdication in favour of her son, and appoint the 
Earl of Moray regent during the child's majority. Thus James 
Stuart, when not quite a year old, became King James VI. 
of Scotland; and John Knox preached the sermon at his 
coronation. 

In the last years of Knox there was not only political con- 
fusion, but there Avere defections from the cause for which 
he lived, and there were differences of opinion between him and 
his brethren in the General Assembly. In 1568, in an answer 
to a letter written by James Tyrie, a Jesuit, he wrote himself 
"John Knox, the servant of Jesus Christ, now weary of the 
world, and daily looking for the resolution of this my earthly 
tabernacle." In these his latter days, Knox, somewhat palsied, 
went to preach, supported by a staff in one hand, and his 
servant Richard Bannatyne upon the other side. " In church," 
wrote one who knew him then, " he was by the said Richard 
and another servant lifted to the pulpit, where he behoved to 
lean at his first entry ; but ere he had done with his sermon he 
was so active and vigorous that he was like to ding the pulpit 
in blads " (break it in pieces) " and fly out of it." In September, 
1572, he preached in the Tolbooth, then a dying man, upon the 
horror of that year, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. He 
died on the 24th of the following November. John Knox's 
Historie of the Reformation of Religioun within the Realm of 
Scotland first appeared twelve years after his death, in 1584, 
published in Edinburgh, but printed in London, and afterwards 
partly suppressed in 1587 by the seizure and destruction of 
copies, at the order of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The 
whole grim energy of Knox's character animates this recital 
of events in which and for which he lived. 

50. Of the learned men employed in education of the young 
King James of Scotland, there is one, George Buchanan, 
nistorian and poet, who has a place of honour in our literature. 
He was was born at Kellerne, Lennoxshire, in 1506. His father 

A A 



402 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1506 

died, leaving his mother almost destitute, with five boys and 
three girls ; and George was sent by James Heriot, a brother of 
hers, to Paris for his education. There he already wrote much 
Latin verse. His uncle's death, two years afterwards, obliged 
him to come back without health or money. He made a cam- 
paign with French auxiliaries in sharp weather, lost health again, 
was in bed the rest of the winter, went to St. Andrew's to study 
under old John Mair (ch. vi. § 33), with whom he went to Paris. 
There he became Lutheran, was for two years very poor, then 
for two years and a half he taught grammar at the College of St. 
Barbe. He was then in France as tutor and companion for five 
years to the young Earl of Cassillis, and went back with him to 
Scotland. He there acted as tutor to the king's natural son, James, 
afterwards Earl of Moray. But he attacked the monks in Latin 
satires, especially in his Franciscanus and Fratres Fraterri?m, 
was denounced by Beaton, and compelled to leave Scotland again. 
He went to England ; but there, he says, he found Henry VIII. 
burning men of both parties, more intent on his own interests 
than on purity of religion. So being half at home in France — 
though Buchanan carried Scotland about with him wherever he 
went — he went to Paris, found his enemy Cardinal Beaton there 
also in his way, and was invited by a learned Portuguese, Andrew 
Goveanus, who resided at Bordeaux, to teach there. Thus he 
became Professor of the Humanities at Bordeaux, where he had 
Montaigne in his class, and where he wrote two Latin tragedies 
of his own, on Jephthah and John the Baptist, and translated 
into Latin the Medea and Alcestis of Euripides. These were 
written, year by year, as they were required — the translations 
first — to be acted, according to custom, by the students of 
Bordeaux. Goveanus was at last summoned to Portugal by his 
king, and invited to bring with him men learned in Greek and 
Latin, to join in the work of the newly-founded University of 
Coimbra. All Europe was involved in war. Buchanan was 
glad to find in Portugal a quiet corner. There he was very 
happy, with bright associates, and his brother Patrick among 
them, till the death of Goveanus. A persecution then began, 
some teachers were imprisoned; for a year and a half Buchanan 
was worried, and inquired into ; and then he was confined for a 
few months in a monastery. There he occupied himself by 
making his famous poetical paraphrase of the Psalms into 
Latin verse — Paraphrasis Psalmorum Davidis poetica — first 
published at Paris in 1564. When he left Portugal, Buchanan 



to a.d. 1582.] GEORGE BUCHANAN. 403 

came first to England — it was in the time of Edward VI. — then 
he Avent to France ; then was called to Italy by Marshal de 
Brissac, and was for five years with the marshal's son, some- 
times in France, sometimes in Italy. During that time he made 
a special study of the religious controversies of the day. In 
1566, at the age of fifty, Buchanan was made Principal of St. 
Leonard's College, in the University of St. Andrew's. In the 
earliest childhood of James VI., Buchanan became his 
tutor. George Buchanan was the best Latin poet this country 
had produced. He would seek to instil scholarship and theology of 
the Reformed Church into the boy whose father was murdered, 
and whose mother was in England. Mary had escaped from 
Lochleven in 1568, nobles had gathered force to rally round her; 
they had been defeated at Langside by the Regent Moray, 
and the queen then fled across the border into England. There 
Elizabeth detained her. Mary's party and her cause were the 
party and cause of Catholicism. The Scottish Reformers under 
Moray's regency acted with Protestant England, and fell into 
disrepute even of subserviency to England. The question of 
Mary's complicity in the murder of Darnley was in agitation at 
Elizabeth's court, and in the case against her a chief part was 
played by eight letters and some verses cut into lengths of 
fourteen lines, and called sonnets of hers, said to have been 
found on the 20th of June, 1567, in a casket that Bothwell 
left behind him in Edinburgh. After the assassination of the 
Regent Moray in 1670, civil discord between the two parties in 
Scotland rose to an extreme height. The friends of Mary were 
active ; a messenger from the Duke of Alva was in Scotland ; 
and a new Catholic rebellion broke out in the North of England. 
Lennox, next regent, perished in the Scottish turmoil, in 1571 ; 
he was succeeded by young James's governor, the Earl of Mar. 
Then came, in 1572, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, to deepen 
the sense of danger from Catholicism. Sentence of death was 
resolved by Elizabeth's advisers upon Mary of Scotland, as a 
foremost cause of peril to the country. Elizabeth was not to be 
answerable for the act, but Mary was to be returned to Scotland 
with a secret understanding that she was returned for execution. 
Then it was that the Casket Letters were first published to 
the world. George Buchanan published anonymously in Latin, 
an enforcement of the charges against Queen Mary. It was 
published in London, and there appeared immediate translations 
of it into French and Northern English, the latter as Ane Detec- 

AA 2 



404 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1572 

tiottn of the Doingis of Marie Queue of Scottis, twiching the 
Murthir of Mr Husband, g^c, Translatit out of Latin quhilk 
was written be M. G. B. Sanctandrois, be Robe?'t Leckprevik. 
The Latin translation of the Casket Letters is here rendered 
into Scottish dialect ; and there is a rendering of nearly all into 
French. We now have them in no other shape. The originals 
are lost ; it is not an improbable supposition that they were 
destroyed by Mary's son. During the last twelve or fourteen 
years of his life, Buchanan employed his mastery of Latin, 
and his knowledge of events, in writing a Latin History of 
Scotland — Rerum Scoticarujn Historia — in twenty books. It 
connected with the past the life of his own day, gave unity to 
all, and placed at the head of it the sense of nationality. 
It was in his nature to care rather to mark the progress of a 
people than to celebrate the power of a chief. This was dis- 
tinctly shown in a sort of Socratic dialogue, published by him 
in Latin, in 1579, on the law as it relates to government among 
the Scots — Jus Regni apud Scotos — which ends by replying to 
their neighbours who called the Scots seditious, " What is that 
to them ? We make our tumults at our own peril. No people 
were ever less seditious, or more moderate in their seditions. 
They contend much about laws, royal rights, and duties of 
administration ; not for destruction and hatred, but for love of 
country and defence of law." Buchanan's history was first pub- 
lished in 1582, the year of its author's death. 

51. Meanwhile, Buchanan and others had been doing their 
best for the education of young James VI. He was a clumsy 
boy, with ungainliness produced by physical defect, a tongue 
too large for his mouth, and a mind in which all depths that 
there could ever be must be made artificially. Good workmen 
dug and shaped ; the boy was good-tempered, picked up some 
shrewdness, lived a creditable life, had respect for knowledge, 
and good appetite for it, though bad digestion. He had a 
pleasant type of it before him in cheery, impressible George 
Buchanan ; a Presbyterian, austere but half way through, with 
a face like a Scotch Socrates, although more apt than Socrates 
to take offence, familiar with Latin as with his native tongue, 
full of anecdote and good talk, familiar also with languages 
and people round about, and liking Scotland all the better for 
experience in other lands. But for James the horizon did not 
widen as he climbed the hill of knowledge, his heart did not 
swell as he rose to higher sense of harmony and beauty ; he 



toa.d. 1585.] GEORGE BUCHANAN. JAMES VI. 405 

hammered at the big lumps about him, and was proud of 
being so far up. In 1585, when his age was but nineteen, 
he published at Edinburgh The Essay es of a Prentise in the 
Divine Art of Poesie. In preliminary sonnets of compliment, 
the Muses, through various courtly representations, sought to 

" Tell how lie doth in tender yearis essay- 
Above his age with skill our arts to blaise 
Tell how he doeth with gratitude repay 

The crowne he won for his deserved praise. 
Tell how of Jove, of Mars, but more of God 
The glorie and grace he hath proclaimed abrod." 

The " Essayes " opened with twelve sonnets of invocations to 
the gods, namely, Jove, Apollo, each of the four Seasons, Neptune, 
Tritons and their kind, Pluto, Mars, Mercury, and finally, for 
the twelfth sonnet : 

" In short, you all fore named gods I pray 

For to concur with one accord and will 
That all my works may perfyte be alway : 

Which if ye doe, then swear I for to fill 
My works immortall with your praises still : 

I shall your names eternall ever sing 
I shall tread downe the grass on Parnass hill 

By making with your names the world to ring ; 
I shall your names from all oblivion bring ; 
I lofty Virgill shall to life restoirr." 

Buchanan was for three years dead, and there were few left 
who would tell a young king that his works were not " perfyte 
alway.' ; Then followed a translation of EUranie, or "The 
Heavenly Muse, 5 ' from Du Bartas, original and translation 
printed upon opposite pages, with a modest preface in admira- 
tion of "the devine and illuster poete, Salust du Bartas" (§ 35), 
by the " oft reading and perusing " of whom James was moved 
" with a restless and lofty desire to preas to attaine to the like 
virtue." To the level of Du Bartas he could not at all aspire in 
his own verse ; let him, he said, follow imperfectly as a translator. 
This represented only the common admiration of his time 
which Du Bartas enjoyed. In a copy of " Quintilian," anno- 
tated by Gabriel Harvey when the Sepmaine of Du Bartas 
was a new book, Harvey wrote in the margin, beside a mention 
of Euripides, " Euripides, wisest of poets : except now at length 
the divine Bartas." After his version of one of the shorter 
poems of Du Bartas, King James gave for his next essay a 
dim allegory, smoothly versified, in Chaucer's stanza, " Ane 



406 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1580 

Metaphoricall Invention of a Tragedie called Phoenix," with a 
preface of eighteen bad lines, arranged first as shaped verse, in 
the form of a lozenge upon a little pedestal, then as a com- 
pound acrostic. Then followed a short bit of translation out 
of the fifth book of Lucan; and then, lastly, " Ane Schort 
Treatise, containing some Reulis and Cautelis to be observit 
and eschewit in Scottis Poesie." Here we find, among other 
things, that the technical name then given to Chaucer's stanza 
was derived from Chaucer's most popular example of it. It was 
called "Troilus Verse." 

52. We glance abroad to connect the narrative with facts 
in foreign literature which concern our story. Michel de 
Montaigne, who had been among George Buchanan's students 
at Bordeaux, produced the first edition of his Essays in 1580. 
There was a second edition in 1588. This first of the great 
essayists had learnt Latin as a mother tongue, had seen much 
of the world in his youth; and he died in 1592, aged fifty-nine, 
after much enjoyment and half philosophical half gossiping 
discussion of life, at his seat of Montaigne, near Bordeaux. 

In 1 581, when Torquato Tasso was still a prisoner with 
the insane, appeared his great heroic poem in twenty-four books, 
on the First Crusade, and recovery of Jerusalem from the 
Saracens, at the end of the eleventh century. The poem had 
two names, Goffredo, from its hero, Godfrey of Bouillon, and 
Geruscdemme Liberata (" Jerusalem Delivered "), from its action. 
There were eight independent and sometimes conflicting issues 
of this poem in Italy within nine months of its first publication. 
One of these had an essay prefixed on the question of the two 
titles. To one of the last of them there was appended an alle- 
gorical interpretation. The old relish for allegory in literature, 
which we have traced down from early Christian days, was in 
Elizabeth's time unabated. 

But for some years after 1581 the fame of the now obscure 
Du Bartas rose higher than that of Tasso. The " Divine Week " 
of Du Bartas was followed by a "Second Week" {Second 
Scpmaine), in 1584. This divided into seven periods, poetically 
called days, the religious history of man expressed in the suc- 
cessive histories of Adam, Noah, Abraham, David, Zedekiah, 
the Messiah, and, for seventh " day," the Eternal Sabbath. 
Du Bartas only lived to complete four of the seven sections of 
this work, but he wrote also many other moral and religious 
poems. He also repaid the royal compliment of a translation 



toa.d. 1587.] FOREIGN RELATIONS. TRANSLATORS. ' 407 

of E Wranieby translating into French, as La Lepanthe, the poem 
on the battle of Lepanto which King James of Scotland wrote 
soon after publishing his " Essayes of an Apprentise." This 
appeared with a preface of the translator to the author, wherein 
James was honoured with the name of a Scotch Phoenix, and 
the divine Du Bartas himself declared that he could not soar 
with him, could only stand on earth to see him in the clouds. 
Du Bartas wished he had only so much of James, as to be but 
the shadow of his shape, the echo of his voice. 

" He ! fusse ie vrayment, O Phcenix Escossois, 
Ou l'ombre de ton corps, ou l'echo de ta voix ! " 

There was another Frenchman then in high and deserved 
repute among English Reformers, one of Philip Sidney's friends, 
Philip de Mornay, Seigneur du Plessis. He was not much 
older than Sidney, for he was born in 1549 ; and he would have 
been endowed with good things in the Church by family in- 
fluence, if his mother had not become Protestant, and trained 
her child from ten years old in the Reformed opinions. He served 
awhile in the army, went to Geneva, studied law in Heidel- 
berg, travelled in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and England. 
He went in 1576 to the court of King Henry of Navarre, became 
one of his nearest friends, and helped to make him Henry IV. 
of France. Philip du Plessis Mornay was an accomplished man 
of the world, with tact, experience, and a practical mind, as well 
as religious earnestness and a delight in literature. He became 
known as an envoy at Elizabeth's court, where the best men 
were his companions. The influence obtained by his high 
character, his skill in management of affairs, and the pure tone 
of his writings, caused him to be called sometimes the Pope of 
the Huguenots. In 1587, Arthur Golding (§ 6) published a 
translation of Du Plessis Mornay on the Truth of Christianity. 

53. There were still also translations from the ancient poets. 
Hichard Stanihurst, who was son of a Recorder of Dublin, 
had written at University College, Oxford, a system of logic, in 
his eighteenth year, had studied law also at two Inns of Court, 
had been married to a knight's daughter, and was living at 
Leyden, when he published in 1583 a translation of the first four 
books of Virgil's "^Eneid" into English hexameters. This 
was made at the time of the small war against rhyme, and 
fashion for this sort of " new English versifying ; ' (§ 43) ; and 
Stanihurst was accounted a fine scholar. His attempt at an 



405 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1560 

English "Virgil" in Virgil's own measure was praised by those 
who encouraged the experiment, attacked by others. Had 
Virgil himself written in English in 1583, he would hardly have 
expressed Jupiter's kiss to his daughter by saying, as Stanihurst 
made him say, that he " bussed his pretty prating parrot," or 
written hexameters of this sort to describe Laocoon's throwing 
his spear at the great wooden horse: 

" ' My lief for an haulfpennie, Troians, 
Either heere ar couching soom troups of Greekish asemblie, 
Or to crush our bulwarcks this woorck is forged, al houses 
For to prie surmounting thee town : soom practis or oother 
Heere lurcks of coonning : trust not this treacherus ensigne ; 
And for a ful reckning, I like not barrel or herring ; 
Thee Greeks bestowing their presents Greekish I feare mee.' 
Thus said, he stout rested, with his chaapt staffe speedily running, 
Strong the steed he chargeth, thee planck ribs manfully riding. 
Then the iade, hit, shivered, thee vauts haulf shrillie rebounded 
With clush clash buzzing, with droomming clattered humming." 

Richard Stanihurst published in 1584, in Latin, four books of 
an Irish chronicle, De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis Libri IV. He 
had been at work on this since the close of his college days, and 
though born in Dublin he had been bred in England, and was 
trained into the prevalent opinion then held by the English of 
the native Irish race. It is not necessary to believe that he 
desired to write only what would please his English patrons. 
He afterwards took orders in the Catholic Church, and, it is said, 
undertook to recant the errors in his " Irish Chronicle." In 
1587 he published at Antwerp, in two Latin books, a Life of St. 
Patrick, the apostle of Ireland, and his later writings were 
religious. He lived on through a great part of the reign of 
James I., and died in 161 8. 

The first attempt at a translation of Homer into English 
Alexandrine verse was begun in 1563, and published in 1581. 
This appeared in Ten Books of Homer's Iliades. It was not 
translated from the Greek direct, but chiefly through the French 
version of Hugues Salel, by Arthur Hall, of Grantham, a 
member of Parliament. The fact that this is the first Englishing 
of Homer gives the book importance. 

54. Barnaby Googe, born about 1540, at Alvingham, and 
son of the Recorder of Lincoln, was a translator from the 
moderns. In 1560 he issued the first three books, and in 1565 
all twelve books of an English version of the Italian Manzolli's 
satirical invective against the Papacy, The Zodiac of Life. In 



TO a.d. 1584.] TRANSLA TORS. ANTHONY MUNDA Y. 409 

1570, Googe published a translation of another Latin invective, 
written by Thomas Kirchmeyer, which he called The Popish 
Kingdomej or, Reigne of Antichrist. In 1577 he published a 
translation from the Latin of the Four Bokes of ' Husbandrie, by 
Conrad Heresbach. He also translated from the Spanish ; and 
a little volume of his own verse, Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonettes, 
was issued in 1563. Googe died in 1594. 

George Whetstone, a minor poet of this time, who 
was in repute with his contemporaries as " one of the most 
passionate above us to bewail the perplexities of love," wrote 
under a name taken from the popular story-book of Marguerite 
of Navarre, A Heptaniero7i of Civil Discourses. This also is a 
book of tales. Among those which he took from the " Hecatom- 
mithi," or " Hundred Tales," of Giraldi Cinthio, first published 
in 1565, tales which deal with the tragic side of life, is one that 
was used by Shakespeare for the plot of his Measure for Mea- 
sure. Whetstone had himself written a play on the same sub- 
ject, Promos and Cassandra, in two parts, printed in 1578. 

Anthony Munday was a minor writer, whose literary activity 
in verse and prose, as playwright, ballad writer, and pamphleteer, 
began in 1579, and extended through the rest of the reign of 
Elizabeth, and the whole reign of her successor. He died in 
the reign of Charles I., in 1633. He was bred in the English 
college at Rome, and afterwards turned Protestant. His earliest 
introduction to literature was as a player and a writer for the 
stage. In 1582 he gave great offence to the Catholics by pub- 
lishing The Discoverie of Edmund Campion, the Jesuit, which 
provoked reply. After this he was in the service of the Earl of 
Oxford, and was also a messenger of the queen's bedchamber. 
He had reputation among our first dramatists for skill in the con- 
struction of a comic plot. His earliest printed book is religious 
in its tendency ; and so indeed was a great part of the drama 
during Elizabeth's reign. Its title explains its purport. It was 
in verse, and called The Mirror of Mutabilities or, Principal 
Part of the Mirrour of Magistrates : Selected out of the Sacred 
Scriptures. The titles of his next two books may be taken as 
examples of Euphuism; they are both dated in 1580, the year of 
the second part of Lyly's Euphues (§ 22). One is The Fountaine 
of Fame, Erected in an Orchard of Amorous Adventures; the 
other, The Paine of Pleasure, profitable to be perused of the 
Wise, and necessary to be by the Wanton. 

Munday took violent interest in the arrest and execution of 



41 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1582 

the Jesuits sent by the pope as devoted missionaries for the re- 
conversion of England. Edmund Campion had been an Oxford 
student and a Protestant. He changed his faith from con- 
viction, became a Jesuit, and exposed himself to death in Eng- 
land for devotion to what seemed to him the highest duty he 
could find. In his torture and execution, and in the other exe- 
cutions of like men, we feel painfully, as elsewhere proudly, the 
intensity of conflict in their day. They did not, it was said by 
those who sent them to death, suffer for their faith, but for their 
political assent to the pope's right to depose the Queen of 
England. They did suffer for that assent ; but then unhappily 
it was a part of their religious faith. There were high principles, 
momentous interests of the future, then at stake ; the immediate 
issues of the struggle were uncertain, peril was great, on each 
side temper rose with the excitement of a noble energy : but we 
need not now read with the pleasure that was taken in the 
writing of it, Anthony Munday's Breefe and T?-ue Reporte of the 
Execution of certaine Tray tours at Tiborne, the xxviii. andxxx. 
Dayes of May, 1582 ; though we can understand the ground of 
his Watchwoord to Efiglande, to beware of Traytors and Tretche- 
rous Practises, which have bee?ie the Overthrowe of many famous 
Kingdomes and Cojnmonweales (1584) ; and see the harmony 
between this strength of public feeling and the religious tempera- 
ment which caused him to print in 1 586 a book of Godly Exercise 
for Christian Families, co?itaini?ig an Order of Praires for 
Morning and Evening, with a little Catechism between the Man 
aiid his Wife. Such men were of the common crowd of English 
dramatists of Elizabeth's day, and there was a bright spirit of 
song in them all. Munday's next book (in 1588) was A Banquet 
of Dainty Conceits; furnished with verie delicate and choyce 
Inventions to delighte their Mindes who take Pleasure in 
Musiquej and there withall to sing sweete ditties, either to the 
lute, bandora, virginalles, or anie other Instrument. 

55. George Peele, a playwright with genius, who belonged 
also to this early group, was born in 1558, a gentleman's son, 
and said to be of a Devonshire family. He became a student 
of the University of Oxford, at Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke 
College, took his degree of B.A. in June, 1577, became M.A. in 
1579, when twenty-one years old. He remained another two 
years in the University, thus having been a student there for nine 
years, when he married a wife with some property, and went to 
London. While in the University he was esteemed as a poet,. 



TOA.D. 1589.] GEORGE PEELE. THE FIRST DRAMATISTS. 411 

made a version (now lost) of one of the two Iphigenias of 
Euripides into English, and probably then wrote his Tale of 
Troy, in one book of heroic couplets ; but this was first printed 
in 1589. In London, Peele took his place, probably at once, 
among the poets. 

They were almost without exception University men who 
were writing for the players. It was pleasant work and profit- 
able. Hitherto everywhere, and still outside the theatre, the 
man with ability to be useful or pleasant — and to be whole- 
somely pleasant is also to be useful — as a writer, could not 
expect to live by the use of his pen, unless he received indirect 
aid from the patronage, or direct aid from the purse, of a great 
lord or of the sovereign. Without help of the patron, or hope 
of such help, many works of genius could never have been 
written in a world where daily bread costs daily money. Such 
patronage took many gracious forms ; often it was ungracious. 
It offered only a precarious support, and lured sensitive men 
through years of vain anxiety and hope to a sorrowful old age- 
Spenser described it in his " Mother Hubbard's Tale : ,; 

" So pitiful a thing is suitor's state ! 
Most miserable man, whom wicked fate 
Hath brought to court, to sue for had ywist 
That few have found, and many one hath mist ! 
Full little knowest thou that hath not tried, 
What hell it is in suing long to bide : 
To lose good days that might be better spent ; 
To waste long nights in pensive discontent ; 
To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow ; 
To feed on hope, to pine with fear and sorrow ; 
To have thy princes' grace, yet want her peers'; 
To have thy asking, yet wait many years ; 
To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares ; 
To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs ; 
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run, 
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone." 

But there was no large public of readers, and there was no 
possible escape from the patron till the theatres began to rise. 
Then those who would now be readers became hearers, and 
paid for hearing as they would now pay for reading. From the- 
money taken for each performance, there was pay to the author, 
pay to the actors ; pay earned as simply and independently by 
the use of a craft, as money earned by carpenter or smith. A 
short experience of this made known to the clever men who 
came to London from the Universities to make their way ia 



412 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1583 

life how they could run alone at once, and remain masters of 
themselves. If they chose to seek a patron, they might do that 
also, but they were not compelled to feed on hope ; there was 
money for their bread, unless they spent all upon sack. In later 
years, when the stage had a less direct relation to all classes of 
the people, but was itself debased by court patronage, this way 
of escape from the patron became but a narrow one. All hope 
of independence for the men of genius rested then upon the 
slow advance of education, till the readers could do gradually, 
now for one, then for another, and at last for all forms of litera- 
ture, what in Elizabeth's day the hearers did for one form only. 
The young men thus established in London, drawing money 
from the theatres, could add also to their reputations and their 
incomes by writing for the booksellers tales, poems, or pamph- 
lets upon stirring questions of the day. This they did, and 
there were some who flung themselves with high glee into paper 
wars, ready to profit in all possible ways by skill in the amuse- 
ment of the town. 

Peele's acquired knowledge caused him to be employed in 
Oxford, in 1583, as acting manager for two Latin plays, by his 
friend Dr. Gager, presented at Christ Church before a Polish 
prince. His first published verse was prefixed to Thomas 
Watson's " Passionate Centurie of Love," published in 1583. 

56. Thomas Watson was of about Peele's age, and died 
in 1592. The thirty-five years of his age were all lived in 
Elizabeth's reign. He was born in London, studied in Oxford, 
then in London again, and applied himself to common law ; 
was in Paris for a time before 1581, in which year he published 
a version in Latin of the Antigone of Sophocles. A scholar 
and a poet ; at first writing chiefly in Latin, afterwards in Eng- 
lish verse ; appreciated as he deserved to be by Sidney, Lyly, and 
Peele ; a friend of Spenser's ; Watson was the sweetest of the 
purely amatory poets of Elizabeth's reign. In 1582 appeared 
his book with a Greek and English title — Greek titles were then 
becoming fashionable — 'EKaro/jLiradia ( The Passionate Centzirie of 
Love), that is to say, a Love Passion in a Hundred Sonnets. 
According to the old Italian method, which had been revived 
by Surrey (ch. vi. § 46), exercises upon various phases of the 
passion of love in sequences of sonnets were still in fashion ; 
these poems were known as Passions. Each of Watson's 
hundred passions has a prose explanation before it ; and 
each consists of three of the six-lined stanzas then called 



toa.d. 1592.] GEORGE PEELE. JOHN LYLY. 413 

Common Verse, the stanza which, as King James VI. recorded, 
poets were to use " in materis of love." Take one of Watson's 
for example : 

"Tully, whose speech was bold in ev'ry cause, 

If he were here to praise the saint and serve, 
The number of her gifts would make him pause, 

And fear to speak how well he doth deserve. 
Why then am I thus bold, that have no skill ? 
Enforced by love, I show my zealous will." 

In 1585 appeared Watson's Latin Poem, Amyntas, from 
which his fellow poets took the name they gave him in their 
rhymes; and in 1595 — after Italian Madrigals Englished and 
other works — appeared his Teares of Fansie; or, Love Dis- 
dained. From Watson we return to his friend, 

57. George Peele, who published anonymously, in 1584, 
The Araygnement of Paris : a Pastor all, presented before 
the Queenes Maiestie by the Children of her Chapell. It is a 
pastoral play in five acts, not the less but the more poetical for 
a child-like simplicity of dialogue. It is written at first in various 
rhymed measures, which run into musical songs, passions, and 
complaints that sing themselves, but the metre becomes blank 
verse when the arraigned shepherd Paris has to defend himself 
before the council of the gods against the charge of unjust judg- 
ment. The gods, greatly puzzled, leave Diana to settle the 
question, and she settles it by compromise. In the fifth act 
she comes with Juno, Pallas, and Venus, all content to present 
the apple to Elizabeth, before whom also the three sisters, 
" Dames of Destiny," yield up their distaff, reel, and fatal knife. 
By way of epilogue, the performers at the end of the play poured 
the good wishes of men and gods on Her Majesty in two Latin 
hexameters. 

In 1585, George Peele was the deviser of a Lord Mayor's 
pageant. Of his other plays, there were none printed before 
1590, the year in which Spenser published the first three books 
of the " Faerie Oueene," and which we take as a convenient 
dividing point for study of the second part of the reign of 
Elizabeth. 

58. John Lyly, after the publication of the two parts of 
his "Euphues," in 1579 and 1580, was paying suit and service 
to Lord Burghley. Sir Thomas Benger, Master of the Revels, 
had died in 1577, and the place, which remained for a time 
vacant, was desired by Lyly. But Edmund Tylney was 



414 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1584 

appointed in July, 1579. Lyly now became a dramatist, and 
wrote plays for the court on classical or mythological subjects, 
nine plays in all, seven in prose, one of the later ones — The 
Woman in the Moon — in blank verse, and another of the later 
ones — The Maid's Metamorphosis — chiefly in rhyme. The 
prose is laboured to the fashion of the day ; a Euphuism, rich 
in far-fetched, whimsical, and delicate conceits, play upon words, 
and antithesis with alliteration, interspersed with songs which 
now and then are excellent. In each play the plot, characters, 
and dialogues are alike artificial ; the poet's aim is not to stir 
the soul, but to provide a pleasant entertainment for the fancy. 
The first printed of Lyly's plays, in 1584, was Campaspe, played 
before the queen by Her Majesty's children, and the children of 
Paul's. It was acted both at court and at the Blackfriars' 
theatre. In this play is Lyly's well-known song of Apelles — 
founded on a conceit, of course : 

" Cupid and my Campaspe played 
At cards for kisses, Cupid paid ; 
He stakes his quiver, bow and arrows, 
His mother's doves, and team of sparrows, 
Loses them too ; then down he throws 
The coral of his lip, the rose 
Growing on's cheek (but none knows how), 
With these the crystal of his brow, 
And then the dimple of his chin : 
All these did my Campaspe win. 
At last he set her both his eyes, 
She won, and Cupid blind did rise. 
O Love ! has she done this to thee ? 
What shall, alas, become of me?" 

In the same year was printed Sapho and Phao, which had 
been played before the queen on Shrove Tuesday, by the children 
of her chapel and the boys of Paul's. These were the only 
plays of Lyly's printed before 1590. But we shall find him 
presently taking a part, through his tract called Pap with a 
Hatchet, in the paper war of 1589, which gave rise to Bacon's 
" Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of 
England." 

59. Robert Greene was novelist as well as dramatist, and 
as a novelist he was a follower of Lyly. He was born at Nor- 
wich, educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, took his degree 
of B.A. in 1578. Peele taking his at Oxford in 1577, there 
probably was little difference between the ages of those poets ; 
and Greene may have been born about 1559 or 1560. After 



toa.d. 1588.] LYLY'S PLAYS. ROBERT GREENE. 415 

1578, Greene visited Italy and Spain, before graduating as M.A* 
in 1583. In 1584 he published three prose love-pamphlets, in 
the style of Euphues, The Myrrour of Modestie j Mirando, the 
Tritameron of Love ; and Groydonitis, the Carde of Fancie. 
On the title-page of his little book of 1585, Planetomachza, 
he wrote himself, " Student in Physicke." In the same year he 
satisfied the natural interest of the public in what was for that 
time of conflict with Catholicism one of the great topics of the 
day, the death of the pope, by translating through the French, 
An Oration, or Funerall Sermon, uttered at Roome, at the 
Buriall of the Holy Father, Gregorie the XIII., who departed 
in Christ Jesus, the nth of Apr ill, 1585. In this or the next 
year Greene married. He himself told, in one of his last 
writings, of the vicious way of life into which he had now fallen. 
Dramatists and players enjoyed jovial fellowship at the tavern, 
the money soon earned was soon spent ; temptations pressed on 
the weak will, and more than one fine mind sank under them. 
Greene's wife, a gentleman's daughter, endeavoured in vain to 
part him from bad company ; he says that he spent her marriage 
portion, and after the birth of a child forsook her ; she going 
into Lincolnshire, he working on in London, " where in short 
space I fell into favour with such as were of honourable and 
good calling. But here note that though I knew how to get a 
friend, yet I had not the gift or reason how to keep a friend." 
In these and all such words we must not omit to observe that 
Greene's object in accusing himself was to warn others to keep 
in the right way. He was, like Occleve in one of his poems 
(ch. v. § 8), seeking to win hearts to his cause by holding a brief 
against himself as advocate for virtue. But Greene was actually 
sinking low in 1590, and within two years of death. His plays 
remained unprinted until after his death. The actors were 
unwilling to chill interest in a play, while it was still upon the 
stage, by publication of its dialogue. The date, therefore, of the 
first printing of any good Elizabethan play is often much later 
than that of its first performance. Love-pamphlets Greene was 
issuing steadily. In 1587, Euphues, his Censure to Philautus, 
was followed by an Arcadia. In 1588 he printed Pa?idosto; 
or, the Triumph of Tizne, the story upon which Shakespeare 
founded his "Winter's Tale." In the same year followed a 
collection of stories, poems, and reflections, called Perimedes, 
the Blacke- Smith : a Golden Methode how to vse the Mind in 
Pleasant and Profitable Exercise. If Greene was himself 



41 6 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1589. 

falling from the true standard of life, yet to the last he laboured 
to maintain it in his writings. Perimedes was followed, still in 
the same year, by Alcida and Greene's Metamorphosis; and, 
in 1589, by the Spanish Masquerado, Tidlie's Love, and 
Orpharion. 

60. Christopher Marlowe, who advanced the Elizabethan 
drama to the point from which Shakespeare rose to the supreme 
heights of poetry, was six years younger than George Peele. He 
was but two months older than Shakespeare ; born at Canterbury 
in Shakespeare's birth-year, 1564, one of several children of John 
Marlowe, shoemaker, and clerk of St. Mary's, and he was baptised 
on the 26th of February. He was educated first at the King's 
School, Canterbury, and then at Corpus Christi (Benet) College, 
Cambridge. For his University education he must have been 
indebted to the kindness of some liberal man who had observed 
his genius. He did not go with a scholarship from the King's 
School. He graduated as B.A. in 1583, as M.A. in 1587, by 
which time he had achieved great success at a stroke with his 
play of Tamburlaine the Great. The theme, like the grievance 
of Mycetes, with which it opened, required " a great and thunder- 
ing speech," and Marlowe did not, like Mycetes, find himself 
" insufficient to express the same." The old British public had 
enjoyed for centuries, in Herod of the miracle-plays (ch. iv. § 5), 
the character of a pompous braggart, who could rant well. In 
one of the sets of plays Herod's speeches were crowded with 
words that began with "r," for greater convenience of r-r-rolling 
them well in his mouth. Marlowe gave them a Tamburlaine 
who could out-herod Herod, and he roared Marlowe into sudden 
fame. The desire indeed was so great to hear him roar, that 
Marlowe let him roar again, and maintained his success by the 
production of a Second Part of Tamburlaine. The two parts 
were first printed in 1590, without author's name. These plays 
were founded on the story of Tamerlane, or Timour the Tartar, 
who after leading his countrymen to their own deliverance from 
foreign oppression, was crowned at Samarcand in 1370, and 
presently set forth on a career of conquest. In 1402, he made 
the great Ottoman sultan, Bajazet, his prisoner. He had set 
out in winter weather, at the age of seventy, for the addition of 
China to his conquests, when he died. In the embodiment of 
this notion of an all-devouring conqueror, "the scourge of God," 
Marlowe used the blank verse, which had not then secured Its 
footing on the public stage. Our first tragedy was in that new 



a.d. 15S9J CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. 417 

measure ; but it was written for Christmas entertainment at the 
Inner Temple. Blank verse was used in the last two acts of 
"The Arraignment of Paris ; " but that was written for the queen 
and court. The plays for the public were in prose or rhyme, 
till the Prologue of Tamburlaine said to the people : 

" From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, 
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, 
We'll lead you to the stately tent of war, 
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine 
Threaten the world with high astounding terms, 
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword." 

Marlowe, by his " Tamburlaine," and by the better plays 
which followed it, developed blank verse as the measure for 
English dramatic poetry, made its worth felt, and was among 
dramatists the first cause of its general adoption. 

"Tamburlaine" is rant glorified. It was enjoyed even by 
those who laughed at it. The boldest stroke was in the opening 
of the 3rd Scene of the 4th Act of Part II. "Enter Tambur- 
laine, drawn in his chariot by the Kings of Trebizon and Soria 
with bits in their mouths, reins in his left hand, and in his right 
hand a whip with which he scourgeth them." 

" ' Holla, ye pamper'd jades of Asia ! 

What ! can ye draw but twenty miles a day, 
And have so proud a chariot at your heels, 
And such a coachman as great Tamburlaine ? ' 

Marlowe's Tragical History of Doctor Faustus probably 
appeared on the stage in 1589, in blank verse intermixed with 
scenes of prose ; but it was not printed in the lifetime of its 
author. The hero of this famous legend, which is said by some 
to have been grafted upon Faust the printer (ch. v. § 26), seems 
to have been really a man who, at the beginning of the sixteenth 
century, affected pre-eminence in necromancy, astrology, and 
magic, and took as one of his sounding names, " Faustus," for 
its Latin meaning — favourable, or auspicious. About him, as a 
centre of crystallisation, tales ascribed in the first instance to 
other conjurors arranged themselves until he became the popular 
ideal of one who sought to sound the depths of this world's 
knowledge and enjoyment without help from God. But in the 
religious controversies of the sixteenth century, the connection 
between Faustus and Satan associated this legend in the minds 
of ardent Reformers with the Church of Rome; and in 1587 
there appeared at Frankfort, written with a strong Protestant 

B B 



41 8 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1589. 

feeling, the first elaborated " History of Dr. Faustus," told as a 
terrible example to all high-flying, headstrong, and Godless men. 
It gathered about Faustus more old tales of magic, and was so 
popular that it was reprinted in 1588. From this edition of 
1588 an English story-book of Dr. Faustus was translated. 
This book Marlowe also translated in his nobler way, taking the 
plot of his play either from the German original, or from this 
€rst translation, perhaps while it was yet in hand. 

Marlowe, in telling this tale on the stage, made no division 
into acts. Using the chorus as narrator of any part of a tale 
that was not to be shown or told during the action, Marlowe 
first brought in Chorus to tell how Faustus was born of poor 
parents, at Rhodes, in Germany, taught at Wittenburg made 
Doctor of Divinity, and excelled all in dispute, 

" Till swoln with cunning of a self conceit, 
His waxen wings did mount above his reach, 
And melting, heavens conspired his overthrow." 

He turned to magic — "And this the man that in his study sits." 
Chorus then left the audience to hear Faustus condemn each of 
the sciences in turn, discard the Bible, and swell with desire for 
the magician's power, stretching as far as doth the mind of man. 
The people saw his good and evil angels stand beside him, as he 
heard one warn, the other tempt. They saw him yield him- 
self to Valdes and Cornelius, to be taught magic arts ; saw 
Mephistophiles appear to his incantation in his own natural 
ugliness, but, at Faust's bidding, reappear in the shape of a 
Franciscan Friar. Compelled to answer, Mephistophiles spoke 
truth. The people heard Faustus disdain the fear of God : 

" But leaving the vain trifles of men's souls, 

Tell me what is that Lucifer thy lord ? 
Meph. Arch-regent and commander of all spirits. 
Faust. Was not that Lucifer an angel once ? 
Meph. Yes, Faustus, and most dearly-loved of God. 
Faust. How comes it, then, that he is prince of devils ? 
Meph. Oh, by aspiring pride and insolence ; 

For which God threw him from the face of heaven. 
Faust. And what are you that live with Lucifer? 
Meph. Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer, 

Conspired against our God with Lucifer, 

And are for ever damned with Lucifer. 
Faust. How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell 1 
Meph. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it ; 

Think'st thou that I, that saw the face of God, 

And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, 

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells 



a.d. 1589.] MARLOWE'S FAUSTUS. 419 

In being deprived of everlasting bliss ? 
Faustus, leave these frivolous demands 
Which strike a terror to my fainting soul. 
Faust. What ! Is great Mephistophiles so passionate 
For being deprived of the joys of heaven ? 
Learn then of Faustus manly fortitude, 
And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess." 

Boldly Faustus sends an offer of his soul to Lucifer, for four- 
and-twenty years of his own will. At midnight he expects the 
answer. Midnight approaches, and again his good and evil 
angels speak at either ear. The guardian angel's voice is heard 
in vain. The bond is signed with blood stabbed from the arm. 
Upon the first hour of its enjoyment a touch of repentance 
breaks. Again his good angel pleads with him ; his evil angel 
seeks to harden him against the warning voice. His heart is 
hardened, he cannot repent. He questions Mephistophiles upon 
the heavenly spheres ; and he is answered. He asks, " Who 
made the world ? " and his familiar will not tell. Again comes 
the pang of conscience. He cries to himself, " Think Faustus 
upon God who made the world ! " 

"Re-enter Good Angel and Y.y'i\ Angel. 
" E. Ang. Too late. 
G. A ng. Never too late, if Faustus will repent. 
E. A ng. If thou repent, devils will tear thee in pieces. 
G. Aug. Repent, and they shall never raze thy skin. 

[Exeunt Angels. 
Faust. O Christ, my Saviour, my Saviour, 

Help thou to save distressed Faustus' soul ! " 

But Lucifer and Beelzebub now stand with Mephistophiles before 
him; hold him to his bond; will show him pastime. They 
introduce to him the seven deadly sins. Chorus explains now 
to the people that we shall see' Faustus next at Rome, and 
straightway the pomp of the court of Rome is marshalled out 
for mockery. Pope Adrian in supreme pride ascends his chair, 
by using for a footstool Saxon Bruno, whom the Emperor ap- 
pointed. Adrian will depose the Emperor, and curse his people. 
Then Faustus and Mephistophiles beguile him in his policy; 
scatter confusion in his court; snatch, being invisible, his dishes 
and his cup; box his ears; and beat the friars, who come in 
with bell, book, and candle, to sing maledictions on them. Other 
scenes follow to represent incidents in the life for which a soul 
was paid. Touches of farce lie by the tragic scenes. Then 
Faustus is in his study again. His end is near. To some of 
his scholars he shows a fair vision of Helen. They depart. An 

B B 2 



420 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.b. 1583 

old man enters who, with loving words, warns Faustus of his 
peril. Faustus despairs. Mephistophiles gives him a dagger. 
" Oh, stay ! " cries the old man : 

" Oh, stay, good Faustus, stay thy desperate steps ! 
I see an angel hover o'er thy head, 
And with a vial full of precious grace 
Offers to pour the same into thy soul : 
Then call for mercy, and avoid despair." 

He repents, yet he despairs ; he cannot escape from the toils 
of Mephistophiles. Helen is brought to him between Cupids, 
He leaves the stage worshipping her, and then the thunder rolls ; 
the Powers of Evil enter, and from the background Lucifer and 
Beelzebub keep grim watch over their victim. With changed 
looks Faustus parts from his scholars, and they leave him to 
his last agony on earth. The poet makes its horror felt. The 
good and evil angels speak again. His good angel sets before 
him and before the audience, while music sounds, a vision of 
the heavenly throne among the saints which he has forfeited. 
His Evil Angel then sets before him and the audience a vision 
of that " vast perpetual torture-house" to which he goes : 

" Those that are fed with sops of naming fire 
Were gluttons, and loved only delicates, 
And laughed to see the poor starve at their gates. 
But yet all these are nothing ; thou shalt see 
Ten thousand tortures that more horrid be. 
Faust. Oh, I have seen enough to torture me ! 
E. Aug. Nay, thou must feel them, taste the smart of all ; 
He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall." 

The clock strikes eleven, and the terror of the last hour is then 
painted. In language drawn from Scripture, Faustus cries in his 
despair : 

" Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me, 
And hide me from the heavy wrath of heaven ! 
No! 

Then will I run headlong into the earth ; 
Gape earth ! Oh, no, it will not harbour me ! " 

The terror grows, and the clock strikes the half hour. Faustus 
now cries in his anguish : 

" Cursed be the parents that engender'd me ! 
No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer, 
That hath deprived thee of the joys of heaven." 

The clock strikes twelve, and the audience sees the terrible fulfil- 
ment of the bond. Depths of religious energy were stirred when 



toa.d. 1589.] SIP PHILIP SIDNEY. 1^.21 

this was the new play, and the last great event in the real world 
had been the defeat of the Spanish Armada. 

Marlowe's Faustus represents the highest point reached by 
the Elizabethan drama before 1590. Shakespeare, who had 
come unknown and poor among the dramatists and actors, with 
credentials from no University, was then quietly and surely 
working his way up. Bound to the truth of nature, he could not 
rise by an audacity like that of Marlowe, who in 1590 had a 
higher public reputation. In 1589, Shakespeare was one of 
the sixteen sharers in the Blackfriars Theatre, an actor and a 
working playwright, ready at any time to mend and alter old 
plays for revival, or to do what else he could for the general 
welfare of the company. 

61. Philip Sidney, at court again, after the months of 
retirement at Wilton, during which he wrote "Arcadia," was 
knighted by Elizabeth in January, 1583, when his age was about 
twenty-eight. In the following March he was married to Frances, 
eldest daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, and the next year 
was spent in married peace. Sidney wrote sonnets in those days 
— " Passions " of the old conventional type — meaning, as usual, 
to address them to some lady who deserved compliment, and of 
whom his conventional rhapsodies could not very well be taken 
seriously. As the Earl of Surrey addressed his love exercises 
to a child for whom the court felt sympathy, Sidney paid 
the like compliment to an unhappy wife. Penelope Devereux, 
daughter to his old friend the late Earl of Essex, had once been 
talked of as his own possible wife. Her father said that he 
would have been proud of Philip Sidney for a son-in-law. And 
if so why had the match not taken place ? If Sidney had been 
really devoted to the lady he could have married her. He did 
not marry her because he did not wish to do so, and in his own 
day no reasonable being ever supposed that he paid suit to her 
except in the way of verse. Towards the close of 1580, 
Penelope, then about eighteen, was married by her guardian 
against her will to Lord Robert Rich, heir to the ill-gotten 
wealth of Lord Chancellor Rich. That chancellor, the grand- 
son of two thriving London mercers, had risen by his want 
of principle, and had secured to himself great bargains at 
the suppression of the monasteries. He grasped wealth 
enough to endow two earldoms acquired by his descen- 
dants. The chancellor died in 1 568, and his son Robert, second 
baron Rich, died in 1581, leaving his son and heir, another Lord 



422 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1574 

Robert, the rich man to whom Penelope was sold. She pro- 
tested even at the altar. The contractor for her is described as 
" of an uncourtly disposition, unsociable, austere, and of no 
very agreeable conversation to her." The unhappiness of her 
forced marriage made Lady Rich at this time an object o. 
considerate attention. Philip Sidney was an old friend of her 
father's, and he gave her the place of honour in his sonnet- 
writing, wherein she was to be Stella (" the Star "), he Astrophel 
" the Lover of the Star ") ; and certainly, as all the court knew, 
and as the forms of such ingenious love-poetry implied, so far 
as love in the material sense was concerned, with as much dis- 
tance between them as if she had shone upon him from above 
the clouds. Sidney's Astrophel and Stella sonnets were being 
written at the time when he was about to marry Fanny Wal- 
singham ; and in those earnest Elizabethan days, at the fitfully 
strict court of Elizabeth, since the character of such poetical love- 
passions was then understood, they brought upon Sidney's credit 
not a breath of censure. As for Lady Rich, she gave herself 
to Sir Christopher Blount, who became Lord Mountjoy in 1600, 
and after divorce from her husband she married him. But that 
was a real passion, and what each felt in it was not told for the 
amusement of the public. 

In 1584 the course of events led Sir Philip Sidney to advo- 
cate direct attack by sea upon the Spanish power. He would 
have Elizabeth come forward as Defendress of the Faith, at the 
head of a great Protestant League. He was a member of the 
Parliament that met in November, 1584, and in July, 1585, he 
was joined with the Earl of Warwick in the Mastership of the 
Ordnance. His strongest desires caused him to look in two 
directions for his course of action : he might aid in direct attack 
on the Spanish possessions, which, as source of treasure, were a 
source of power ; he might aid in the rescue from Spain of the 
Netherlands. During a great part of the year 1585 his mind 
was very much with Drake and Raleigh. 

62. Naval enterprise had advanced rapidly in England since 
the days of the Cabots (ch. v. § 29). In 1574, George Gascoigne 
(§ 29) obtained from Sir Humphrey Gilbert— who had been 
knighted for his services against the Irish— his Discourse to 
prove a Passage by the North-West to Cathay and the East 
Indies. He first sought to prove that America was an island ; 
and then brought together the reports of voyagers by whom a 
North- West Passage to Cathay and India had been attempted. 



toa.d. 1585.3 ADVENTURERS BY SEA. 423 

By this route only, he argued, we could share the wealth derived 
by Spain and Portugal from traffic with the East ; be unmolested 
by them in our course; and undersell them in their markets, 
besides finding new sources of wealth, and founding colonies for 
the relief of overcrowded England. 

This treatise revived interest in the subject. It passed from 
hand to hand in M.S., and was printed in 1576, the year in 
which Martin Frobisher started, on board the Gabriel, of twenty- 
five tons burthen, upon the first of his three voyages in search of 
a North-West Passage. He entered the bay called Frobisher's 
Straits, and believed that through this he should find a passage. 
He was away four months, and from a piece of stone brought 
b>ack with him it was inferred that he had found a region rich 
in gold. A " Company of Cathay" was formed, with Frobisher 
for Captain- General by Sea, and Admiral of the ships and Navy 
of the company. This company received its charter in March, 
1577; and in May Frobisher started on his second voyage. The 
chief aim now was to secure a gold district on the north shore 
of America. He took possession of Meta Incognita for Queen 
Elizabeth, and carried home 200 tons of the supposed ore, 
reaching England again at the close of September. The ad- 
venturers did not find satisfaction in their ore ; it was admitted 
to be " poor in respect of that brought last year, and of that 
which we know may be brought the next year." At the end 
of May, 1578, Frobisher started again. He found the channel 
afterwards known as Hudson's Straits, but was obliged to hold 
to the search for gold, and his little fleet brought home, after 
many perils, a good supply of the stones, out of which no gold 
could be got. The Cathay Company broke up in quarrel and 
confusion, and Frobisher himself was brought low by the un- 
lucky bit of stone on which he stumbled. It had excited thirst 
for gold, which ruined both his enterprise and him. Francis 
Drake, a Devonshire sailor's son, had been a sea-captain at the 
age of twenty-two. He had served against the Spaniards^, under 
Sir John Hawkins ; had damaged them much in an expedition of 
his own in 1572. In November, 1577, he had been entrusted 
with a little fleet of five vessels to attempt a voyage into the 
South Seas through the Straits of Magellan, and in November, 
1580, he returned in his own ship, the Pelican, from his 
memorable voyage round the globe. The queen knighted him 
in April, 1581, and ordered his ship to be preserved. 

In June, 1578, Sir Humphrey Gilbert obtained a charter for 



424 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1579 

discovery and occupation of distant and barbarous lands, and 
for the planting of a colony which he was to rule " as near as 
conveniently might be according to the laws of England." His 
brother-in-law, Sir Walter Ealeigh, went with him on his 
first unlucky voyage (§ 46), and returned with him to Plymouth 
in May, 1579. After this, Gilbert fought in Ireland and the 
Netherlands. In the summer of 1583, having raised money by 
admitting others to a share in the adventure, Gilbert and Raleigh 
started again, and arrived at St. John's Harbour, in Newfound- 
land, where were some six-and-thirty vessels of merchants and 
fishermen. There Gilbert determined to set up his colony. The 
traders agreed to join the colonists in paying their tax to the 
governor ; but of the colonists brought with him, most were 
men from whom the steadier sort asked to be taken away home. 
After many misfortunes, Gilbert on the homeward voyage went 
down with his vessel, the last words heard from him by those 
on board a companion ship being his cry to them, as he stood 
firm to the helm of his own little craft — the Squirrel, of ten 
tons — " Courage, my friends, we are as near heaven by sea as 
on the land." 

Such letters-patent as Gilbert had held were given by the 
queen, in March, 1584, to his step-brother, Walter Raleigh. In 
April he sent out Captains Barlow and Amadas, in two vessels, 
to explore the coast of America from Florida northward, and 
report promptly upon any region he found fit for colonising. 
They returned in September, after a fortunate voyage, and 
Captain Barlow gave an excellent account of the shores to 
which our maiden queen was pleased to give the name of 
" Virginia." 

In the spring of 1585, Raleigh sent a fleet of seven vessels 
to Virginia, in charge of his cousin, Sir Richard Grenville, with 
Ralph Lane, who was to be governor of the colony they went to 
found. Lane was left with 105 colonists on the island of Roanoake. 
In the same year Sir Francis Drake was sent as admiral, with a 
fleet of twenty-one ships, against the Spaniards in the West 
Indies. Sir Philip Sidney helped towards the fitting of this 
expedition, and was bent on taking part in it himself, sharing 
authority with Drake after they had put to sea. Sidney went 
to Plymouth ; but his secret plan became known, and his 
sailing with Drake's fleet was stayed by the queen's absolute 
command. Drake, therefore, sailed without him in September; 
and soon afterwards a daughter was born to Sir Philip Sidney, 



to A.D. 1586.] RALEIGH. SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. $2$ 

who was baptised Elizabeth, the queen standing as sponsor. 
Then he went to his death in the Low Countries. 

63. The seven northern provinces of Holland had declared 
their independence on the 29th of September, 1580. In 1584, 
William of Orange had been assassinated. In 1585, the ten 
southern provinces were conquered by the Prince of Parma. 
Catherine de' Medici was in that year proposing to Philip of 
Spain invasion of England for the crushing of heresy. Philip 
pointed to heretics nearer home. Protestants of the Nether- 
lands appealed to England, and on the 10th of August, 1585, a 
treaty, was signed at Nonsuch, stipulating that England should 
provide 5,000 foot-soldiers and 1,000 horse to aid war in 
the Netherlands, while, as security for expenses, and as head- 
quarters for troops, temporary possession was to be taken of 
Flushing, Brill, and the Castle of Rammekins. Then England 
declared war for three objects : to secure peace to all of the 
Reformed Faith ; restoration to the Netherlands of ancient 
rights ; and the safety of England. The English went out with 
the Earl of Leicester for their leader ; Sir Philip Sidney as 
Governor of Flushing and of Rammekins ; and Sir Thomas 
Cecil, eldest son of Lord Burghley, as Governor of Brill. Sidney 
went to his post in November, 1585 ; the earl followed in Decem- 
ber, and spent over-much time in feasting. Sidney's heart was 
in his duty ; he planned work in vain, and he sought in vain to 
protect the poor soldiers against chiefs who enriched themselves 
out of their pay and their supplies. In January, Leicester 
offended Elizabeth by accepting from the States the rank of 
Governor- General of the United Provinces. Sir Philip Sidney 
fretted at inaction. His wife joined him at Flushing. In May, 
1586, Sidney received news of the death of his father. In July, 
he had a chief part in the capture of Axel. In August his 
mother died. In September he joined with Sir John Norris 
and Count Lewis William of Nassau, in the investment of 
Zutphen. On the 22nd of that month Sir Philip Sidney received 
his death wound in a gallant assault made by a few hundred 
English against a thousand cavalry, and under fire from walls 
and trenches. A musket-ball from one of the trenches shattered 
Sidney's thigh-bone. His horse took fright and galloped back, 
but the wounded man held to his seat. He was then carried to 
his uncle, asked for water, and when it was given, saw a dying 
soldier carried past, who eyed it greedily. At once he gave the 
water to the soldier, saying, " Thy necessity is yet greater than 



426 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1586 

mine." Sidney lived on, patient in suffering, until the 17th of 
October. When he was speechless before death, one who stood 
by asked Philip Sidney for a sign of his continued trust in God. 
He folded his hands as in prayer over his breast, and so they 
were become fixed and chill when the watchers placed them by 
his side, and in a few minutes the stainless representative of the 
young manhood of Elizabethan England passed away. 

64. In the same year Ralph Lane and his colonists were 
brought back from Roanoake, rescued by Drake, as he returned 
from his West Indian expedition. The colonists had ruined 
themselves by ill-treatment of the friendly natives, whom they 
had converted into foes. They brought tobacco back with 
them, and were the first to teach England the art of smoking 
it. Thomas Hariot, one of their number, published in 1588 
A Brief e and True Report of The New Foiind Land of Virginia, 
&>c, in which he described the cultivation by the natives of the 
herb which they called appowoc, but the Spaniards, tabacco. 
" They use to take the fume or smoke thereof by sucking it 
through pipes made of claie into their stomacke and heade," 
with wonderfully good results. " We ourselves," Hariot added, 
" during the time we were there, vsed to suck it after their 
maner, as also since our returne, and have found manie rare 
and wonderful experiments of the vertues thereof; of which 
the relation would require a volume by itselfe : the vse o. it by 
so manie of late, men and women of great calling as else, and 
some learned phisitions also, is sufficient witnes." 

The year of the death of Sidney, and the return of Drake 
from his success in the West Indies, 1586, was the year also 
of the plot known as Babington's Conspiracy, for the murder 
of Elizabeth and setting of Queen Mary upon the throne. 
Elizabeth's secretary, Walsingham, gave Mary full opportunity 
of committing herself to this scheme before it was disclosed. 
She was then tried, under a commission issued in October. 
That she had plotted for her own rescue by a Spanish invasion, 
Mary did not deny. She denied privity in the conspiracy for 
assassination, but was declared guilty of that, the sentence being 
without derogation to James King of Scots. On the 8th of 
February, 1587, Mary Queen of Scots was executed in the 
Great Hall at Fotheringay. A jyeek afterwards there was in 
London a funeral pageant for Sir Philip Sidney. 

Raleigh was growing rich by his adventures. Sir Richard 
Grcnville, who arrived too late at Roanoake for the relief of 



toa.d. 1589.] RALEIGH. HAKLUYT'S "VOYAGES." 427 

Lane and his party, obtained great booty from Spain on the way 
home. One of Raleigh's privateers took a Spanish ship in the 
Azores with great treasure of gold, jewels, and merchandise. 
Two barks of his in the Azores made more prizes than they 
were able to bring home. Raleigh was in favour too, at court, 
knighted (1585), enriched with 12,000 acres of forfeited land in 
Ireland (1586), with a lucrative licence for the sale of wines, 
with the profits on over-lengths of cloth, alone worth more than 
^4,000 a year. He was made Captain of the Guard, Gentleman 
of the Privy Chamber, Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and 
Lord- Lieutenant of Cornwall. Money was sunk in the attempts 
to colonise Virginia, but it was only a part of the money made 
by Spanish prizes. Another expedition to Virginia was sent out 
by Raleigh in 1587; it was unsuccessful, and, in March, 1589, 
Raleigh transferred his patent to a company of merchants. In 
1588, Raleigh was at work with all his might upon the raising of a 
fleet to resist Spanish invasion. Elizabeth was excommunicated 
by Pope Sixtus V. Crusade was preached against England; 
the Armada came. On board one of its ships was Cervantes. 
On Sunday, the 24th of November, 1588, Queen Elizabeth went 
in state to St. Paul's, to return thanks for the defeat of the 
Armada. Shakespeare, with his career before him, was at work 
in London in those days, with his great successes all to come, 
but sharing the deep feelings that bred noble thought in the 
Elizabethan time. 

The narratives of our adventurous seafarers were in those 
days treasured for posterity by Hiehard Hakluyt, who was 
born at Eyton, Herefordshire, in 1553. He was educated at 
Westminster School, and Christchurch, Oxford, and delighted 
always in tales of far countries and adventure by sea. He 
entered the Church, went to Paris in 1584, as chaplain to the 
English Ambassador, and was made prebendary of Bristol. In 
1582, when he was twenty-nine years old, Hakluyt issued his 
first publication, Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of 
America, and the Lands adjacent unto the, sa?ne, made first of 
all by our Englishmen, and afterward by the Frenchmen and 
Bretons: and certain Notes of Advertisements for Observations, 
necessarie for such as shall hereafter make the like attempt. 
Hakluyt also translated books of travel from the Spanish, but 
his great work was that which first appeared in folio in 1589 — 
The Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries 7nade by 
the English Nation. 



428 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1583 

65. In such times William Camden (§ 16) published his 
Britannia, which described the country that had risen to its 
front place in the world ; and William Warner, born in 
London in the year of Elizabeth's accession, a poetical attorney, 
celebrated Albion's England in thirteen books of fourteen- 
syllabled rhyming verse, first published in 1586. His poem 
was of Albion's England, because it did not, like Albion, 
include Scotland. It was an easy, lively, homely history of 
England, from the Deluge down to Warner's own time, homely 
in use of simple idiomatic English, full of incidents and stories, 
often rudely told, and often with a force or delicacy of touch 
that came of the terse directness with which natural feeling was 
expressed. Warner's poem had for a time great popularity. 
He was not a great poet, but the times were stirring, and they 
drew ten thousand lines of lively verse upon his country, even 
out of an attorney. 

66. But the Elizabethan time, like any other, had its surface 
follies and its varieties of fashion. In 1583 the Reverend 
Philip Stubbes published The Anatomie of Abuses : cojiteyn- 
ing a Discoverie or Briefe Suimnarie of such Notable Vices 
and Imperfections as now raigne i7i matiy Christian Countreyes 
of the World: but especialie in a very famo7ts Ilande called 
Ailgna : Together with most fearful Exa?nples of God's Judge- 
7nentes executed vpon the wicked for the same as well in Ailgna 
of late, as in other places elsewhere. Ailgna, of course is 
Anglia, and a second part of " The Anatomie of Abuses " 
appeared in the same year. The book is in dialogue between 
Philoponus and Spudeus. Ailgna, says Stubbes, is a famous 
and pleasant land, with a great and heroic people, but they 
abound in abuses, chiefly those of pride ; pride of heart, of 
mouth, of apparel. In pride of apparel they pane, cut, and 
drape out with costly ornaments the richest material, and spread 
out ruffs with supportasses — wires covered with gold or silk — 
and starch. Philip Stubbes denounced starch as " the devil's 
liquor," and told of a fair gentlewoman of Eprautna (Ant- 
werp) upon whom a judgment had fallen for her vanity in 
starched ruffs, even so lately as the 22nd of May, 1582. She 
was dressing to attend a wedding, and falling in a passion 
with the starching of her ruffs, said what caused a handsome 
gentleman to come into the room, who set them up for her to 
perfection, charmed her, and strangled her. When she was 
being taken out for burial, the coffin was so heavy that four 



toa.d. 1589.] WARNER. STUBBES. WEBBE. PUTTENHAM. 429 

strong men could not lift it. It was opened. The body was 
gone ; but a lean and deformed black cat was sitting in the 
coffin, " a setting of great ruffs and frizzling of hair, to the great 
fear, and wonder of all the beholders." 

67. The days that were to produce great poets produced also 
discussions on the Art of Poetry. Young King James of Scot- 
land had tried his 'prentice hand at this (§ 51) ; Sidney had 
written "An Apologie for Poetrie " (§ 44). William Webbe, of 
whom little is known, was a Cambridge man, who took his B. A. in 
1573, and was a friend of Harvey and Spenser. He was after- 
wards private tutor in the Sulyard family, at the manor-house of 
Flemings, near Chelmsford, and there he wrote in the summer 
evenings A Discourse of English Poetrie, which was printed in 
1586. Webbe shared Gabriel Harvey's interest in the reformed 
English versifying. His book, which dwells much on Phaer's 
"Virgil," and most upon Spenser's " Shepheard's Calender" 
(§ 31), leads up to a discussion of metres, with special reference 
to Latin models and to his own translation of the first two 
Eclogues of Virgil into English hexameters ; beginning thus : 

" Tityrus, happilie thou lyste tumbling under a beech tree, 
All in a fine oate pipe these sweete songs lustilie chaunting." 

Webbe added to his little book a summary of Horace's " Art of 
Poetry," taken from George Fabricius, of Kemnitz, himself a 
very good poet in Latin, who died in 1571. Another Eliza- 
bethan book upon the art of verse was by George Puttenham 
— The Art of English Poesie, in Three Books j the first of Poets 
and Poesy e, the second of Proportion, and the third of Orna- 
mente — written about 1585, and published in the spring of 1589. 
The author, who cited a dozen other works of his own which are 
lost, was born about 1530, had been a scholar at Oxford, had 
delighted in verse and written it, had seen the courts of France, 
Spain, Italy and the Empire, and was skilled in French, Italian, 
and Spanish, as well as in Greek and Latin. There was no 
.author's name on the title-page of his book; but as early as 1605 
it was said to be by George Puttenham, one of the queen's 
gentlemen pensioners. The book is a systematic little treatise 
of some extent, dealing with the origin and nature of poetry ; its 
several forms, as satire, comedy, tragedy, &c. ; its several metres 
and proportions, including the various ways of writing verse in 
shapes, as the lozenge, or rombus ; the fuzie spindle, or romboides ; 
the triangle, or tricquet ; the square ; the pillar, pilaster, or 



43° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1589. 

cylinder; taper, or piramis; rondel, or sphere; egg, or figure 
oval; with many of these reversed and combined; a fashion 
then coming into use from Italy and France. Puttenham says 
that an Eastern traveller whom he met in Italy told him that 
this fashion was brought from the courts of the great princes of 
China and Tartary. The introducer of " shaped verses " into 
Europe is said to have been a Simmias of Rhodes, who lived 
under Ptolemy Soter, about 324 B.C. Puttenham's argument 
concerning metres includes, of course, some reference to the 
question of Latin quantity applied to English verse. The last 
book discusses the language of the poet ; tropes and figures of 
speech, with examples ; fitness of manner, and the art that con- 
ceals art. Among illustrations of poetical ornament is a poem 
by Queen Elizabeth herself, written when the presence of Mary 
Queen of Scots in England was breeding faction; and the 
Queen of England, "nothing ignorant in those secret favours, 
though she had long, with great wisdom and pacience, dissem- 
bled it, writeth this ditty most sweet and sententious, not hiding 
from all such aspiring minds the daunger of their ambition 
and disloyaltie : " 

" The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy, 
And wit me warns to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy. 
For falsehood now doth flow, and subject faith doth ebb, 
Which would not be if reason ruled or wisdom weaved the web. 
But clouds of toys untried do cloak aspiring minds, 
Which turn to rain of late repent by course of changed winds. 
The top of hope supposed the root of ruth will be, 
And fruitless all their graffed guiles, as shortly ye shall see. 
Then dazzled eyes with pride, which great ambition blinds, 
Shall be unsealed by worthy wights, whose foresight falsehood finds ; 
The daughter of debate, that eke discord doth sow, 
Shall reap no gain where former rule hath taught still peace to grow, 
No foreign banished wight shall anchor in this port, 
Our realm it brooks no stranger's force, let them elsewhere resort. 
Our rusty sword with rest shall first his edge employ 
To poll their topes that seek such change and gape for joy." 

68. The year of the publication of George Puttenham's book, 
1589, was the year of chief activity in the Martin Marprelate 
Controversy. Martin Marprelate was the name under which 
first one epistle writer than many companions of his in the work 
of " Pistling the Bishops " — nearly all these writers being deprived 
ministers — waged war against that which Elizabethan Puritans 
condemned in Episcopacy. Government sought to suppress 
their publications. They were " printed in Europe not fur from 
some bouncing priests ; " or " over sea, in Europe, within two 



ap. 1589.1 THE MARPRELATE CONTROVERSY. 43 1 

furfongs of a bouncing priest, at the cost and charges of Martin 
Marprelate, gent." The first tract was temperately answered 
by Thomas Cooper, Bishop of Winchester, in An Admonition 
to the People of England. This made Cooper himself an object 
oi attack. The Martinists were earnest men, who affected light 
speech to win light minds of the many to their side. The books 
were printed at a wandering press, hunted by the Government 
from Moulsey, near Kingston-on-Thames, where it was first set 
up, to Fawsley, in Northamptonshire, thence to Norton, thence 
to Coventry, thence to Welstone, in Warwickshire, whence 
letters were sent to another press in or near Manchester, which 
was found printing More Work for a Cooper. The chief Mar- 
tinists were John Penry, John Udall, John Field, and Job 
Throckmorton, who wrote, Hae ye any Work for Cooper. John 
Penry, a Welshman, bred at both Universities, and earnestly- 
devoted to his cause, was hurried to the gallows for his writings. 
Yet, as he wrote before his execution, " I never did anything in 
this cause for contention, vain-glory, or to draw disciples after 
me. Great things in this life I never sought for : sufficiency I 
had, with great outward trouble ; but most content I was with 
my lot, and content with my untimely death, though I leave 
behind me a friendless widow and four infants." John Udall, 
left unexecuted, died in prison. He was tried for the authorship 
of an anonymous book, called, The Demonstration of Discipline ; 
and when he would have called witnesses they were refused 
hearing, on the ground that witnesses in favour of the prisoner 
were against the queen. " It is for the queen," said John Udall, 
" to hear all things, when the life of any of her subjects is in 
question." The literary war against the maintainers of Martin 
Marprelate was carried on by the wits and playwrights. John 
Lyly contributed Pap with a Hatchet; or, a Fig for my God- 
son; or, Crack me this Nut. To be sold at the sign of the Crab- 
tree Cudgel, in Thwack-coat Lane. " Who," he said in it, "would 
curry an ass with an ivory comb ? Give the beast thistles for 
provender." Conscious of the unseemly tone of the whole con- 
troversy, he wrote towards the end, " If this vein bleed but six 
ounces more, I shall prove to be a pretty railer, and so in time 
grow to a proper Martinist;" and he took leave of his adversary 
with a " farewell and be hanged." 

Another active writer was a scurrilous and unscrupulous 
young wit, Thomas Nash, then about twenty-three years old, 
beginning to be active as a dashing pamphleteer. One of his 



432 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1589. 

pieces was called Almond for a Parrot; or, an Alms for Martin. 
Francis Bacon was twenty-nine years old when, in his paper 
on these Controversies of the Church (§ 48), he reasoned against 
contention about ceremonies and things indifferent, strife in a 
spirit opposite to that of St. James's admonition, " Let every 
man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath." Bacon 
thought men over-ready to say of their own private opinions, 
" Not I, but the Lord," where Paul said " I, and not the Lord," 
or " according to my counsel ; " he desired, therefore, as to the 
Church controversies, to point out " what it is on either part 
that keepeth the wound green, and formalizeth both sides to a 
further opposition, and worketh an indisposition in men's minds 
to be reunited." " And, first of all," he said, " it is more than 
time that there were an end and surcease made of this immodest 
and deformed manner of writing lately entertained, whereby 
matters of religion are handled in the style of the stage." 
Bitter and earnest writing came, he said, of an enthusiasm not 
to be hastily condemned ; but to leave all reverent and religious 
compassion towards evils, to intermix Scripture and scurrility 
sometimes in one sentence, was far from the manner of a 
Christian. It was an evil, too, " that there is not an indifferent 
hand carried towards these pamphlets as they deserve. For 
the one sort flieth in the dark, the other is uttered openly. And 
we see it ever falleth out that the forbidden writing is thought 
to be certain sparks of a truth that fly up in the faces of those 
that seek to choke and tread it out ; whereas a book authorised 
is thought to be but the language of the time." Bacon thought 
that, except Bishop Cooper's, the pamphlets were equally bad 
on both sides. As to the occasion of the controversies, if 
any bishops be as all are said to be, let them amend ; men 
might abate some of their vanities of controversial zeal, think 
less of measuring the value of religion by its distance from the 
error last condemned as heresy, and care less about introducing 
new forms from abroad. Bacon, whose mother sympathised 
with the Nonconformists, avowed in this paper his own adherence 
to the established system in the Church, but he desired to urge 
on both parties moderation, a spirit of concession in discussing 
mere externals, and a better sense of Christian brotherhood, 
for " the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God." 
" A contentious retaining of custom," he urged, " is a turbulent 
thing, as well as innovation." He agreed kk that a character of 
love is more proper for debates of this nature than that of 



A.D.1589.] CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT. 433 

zeal," and trusted that what he had said should " find a corre- 
spondence in their minds which are not embarked in partiality, 
and which love the whole better than a part." 

69. In August, 1589, the rule of the house of Valois came to 
an end in France by the assassination of Henry III. The king 
in the preceding December had by assassination got rid of his 
powerful opponents, the Duke of Guise, head of the Catholic 
League, and the duke's brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine. The 
League was therefore in open revolt against him ; the Sorbonne 
released Frenchmen from their oath of allegiance to him ; the 
pope excommunicated him ; and he was driven into alliance with 
Henry of Navarre and the Huguenots for the recovery of his 
capital. At the beginning of these days Catherine de' Medici 
died. While the King of France and the King of Navarre, 
whom the League wished to exclude from the succession, were 
besieging Paris, Henry III. was stabbed by an enthusiastic 
young Dominican. Before he died he acknowledged the King 
of Navarre his successor. Henry IV. thus became King of 
France, with a promise to maintain the Catholic faith and the 
property and rights of the Church. Many of his Huguenot 
followers fell from him, because they looked on this as an 
engagement to protect idolatry. But the League opposed him. 
Queen Elizabeth sent succour of men, and ,£22,000 in money. 
In September Henry IV. repulsed the Leaguers at Arques. At 
the end of October he carried the suburbs of Paris. He then 
retired on Tours, making that his capital. On the 14th of 
March, 1590, he obtained a signal victory over the Leaguers 
and the Spanish auxiliaries at the battle of Ivry, in which " the 
divine Bartas " fought. 

Against England Spain was yet gathering force. He would 
persevere, Philip said, even if he sold the silver candlesticks on 
his table. But England had risen to the occasion. The golden 
time of Athens was the time when the soul of the people was 
stirred nobly in contest for liberty against the power of the 
Persians. The Netherlands were so much the better for their 
life-struggle on behalf of all that men should hold most dear, 
that while the southern unemancipated provinces were declining, 
the Dutch were adding to the streets of their old towns, new 
towns were erected by the industries that flocked in, and in 
the year 1586-7 eight hundred ships entered their ports. So 
England, trained for generations in the path of duty, faced the 
great peril of these days, held in the world of thought the 

c c 



434 ^ FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1589 

ground which she had thus far conquered, and, gathering all her 
energies, went strongly forward. When, in 1589, Drake was 
sent as admiral, with Sir John Norris in command of the land 
forces, to attack the Spanish power over Portugal, by making 
Don Antonio king, George Peele, the dramatist (§ 55, 57), sang 
A Farewell, entituled to the Famous and Fortunate Generalls of 
our English Forces : Sir John Norris and Sir Francis Drake, 
knights, and all theyr brave and resolute followers ; to which he 
added his Tale of Troy (§ 55), then first printed. Peele's cry 
was: 

" To arms, to arms, to glorious arms ! 
With noble Norris and victorious Drake, 
Under the sanguine cross, brave England's badge, 
To propagate religious piety ; 

***** 
Sail on, pursue your honours to your graves : 
Heaven is a sacred covering for your heads, 
And every climate virtue's tabernacle. 
To arms, to arms, to honourable arms ! 
You fight for Christ, and England's peerless queen, 
Elizabeth, the wonder of the world, 
Over whose throne the enemies of God 
Have thunder'd erst their vain successful braves. 
Oh, ten times treble happy men, that fight 
Under the Cross of Christ and England's queen, 
And follow such as Drake and Norris are ! 
All honours do this cause accompany ; 
All glory on these endless honours waits : 
These honours and this glory shall He send, 
Whose honour and whose glory you defend." 

Thus spoke out of our literature the mind of England ; and such 
was its mind in the year 1590, to which we have now brought 
down this narrative. 

70. Robert Greene was much occupied during his la3t 
years in exposure of the cheats of London, by his Notable 
Discovery of Coosnagej also his two parts of Coney Catching, 
published in 1591, and a third part of" Coney Catching" in the 
year of his death, 1592. In his novel of Never Too Late, 
published in 1590, he shadowed his relation to his own wife; 
and in the Groat's Worth of Wit Bought with a Million of 
Repentance, he drew from incidents in his own sad life part of 
the story of a reprobate Roberto. His hero, reduced to a single 
groat, said, " Oh, now it is too late to buy wit with thee! and 
therefore will I see if I can sell to careless youth what I 
negligently forgot to buy." This novel was published after 
Greene's death, in September, 1592. He died at the house of a 



toa.d. 1592.] GEORGE PEELE. ROBERT GREENE. 435 

poor shoemaker, near Dowgate, to whom he owed ten pounds. 
Under the bond for this money, he wrote to his deserted wife, 
" Doll, I charge thee, by the love of our youth and by my soul's 
rest, that thou wilt see this man paid ; for if he and his wife had 
not succoured me I had died in the streets." These last lines of 
of his, in Chaucer's stanza, were written not long before his 
death : 

" Deceiving world, that with alluring toys 

Hast made my life the subject of thy scorn, 
And scornest now to lend thy fading joys 

T'outlength my life, whom friends have left forlorn; 

How well are they that die ere they be born, 
And never see thy sleights, which few men shun 
Till unawares they helpless are undone ! 

" Oft have I sung of Love, and of his fire ; 

But now I find that poet was advised 
Which made full feasts increasers of desire, 

And proves weak love was with the poor despised; 

For when the life with food is not sufficed, 
What thoughts of love, what motion of delight, 
What pleasaunce can proceed from such a wight? 

" Witness my want, the murderer of my wit : 

My ravished sense, of wonted fury reft, 
Wants such conceit as should in poems fit 

Set down the sorrow wherein T am left ; 

But therefore have high heavens their gifts bereft, 
Because so long they lent them me to use, 
And I so long their bounty did abuse. 

" Oh, that a year were granted me to live, 

And for that year my former wits restored ! 
What rules of life, what counsel would I give, 

How should my sin with sorrow be deplored ! 

But I must die, of every man abhorred : 
Time loosely spent will not again be won ; 
My time is loosely spent, and I undone." 

Here also the depths were stirred ; but the earnest spirit of the 
time, and the sweet music it drew from the souls of men, 
ennobled also the fallen dramatist whom a town ruffian, " Cut- 
ting Ball," defended from arrest. Among Greene's plays was 
one, written with Thomas Lodge, called A Looking-Glass for 
London and England. This was not printed until 1594. In it 
the corruption of Nineveh stood as a figure for the sins of 
England. Oseas the prophet witnessed and warned from the 
stage : 

" Look, London, look ; with inward eyes behold 
What lessons the events do here unfold. 
Sin grown to pride, to misery is thrall : 
The warning bell is rung, beware to fall." 

C C 2 



436 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1590 

At the close of the play the prophet Jonas, who had been calling 
on Nineveh to repent, turned to the audience of islanders, 
" whose lands are fattened with the dew of heaven," and ex- 
claimed : 

" O London ! maiden of the mistress isle 
Wrapt in the folds and swathing-clouts of shame, 
In thee more sins than Nineveh contains ! 
Contempt of God ; despite of reverend age ; 
Neglect of law ; desire to wrong the poor ; 

***** 
Thy neighbours burn, yet dost thou fear no fire ; 
Thy preachers cry, yet dost thou stop thine ears ; 
The 'larum rings, yet sleepest thou secure. 
London, awake, for fear the Lord do frown : 
I set a looking-glass before thine eyes. 
Oh, turn, oh, turn, with weeping to the Lord, 
And think the prayers and virtues of thy queen 
Defer the plague which otherwise would fall ! 
Repent, O London! lest, for thine offence, 
Thy shepherd fail— whom mighty God preserve, 
That she may bide the pillar of His Church 
Against the storms of Romish Antichrist ! 
The hand of mercy overshade her head, 
And let all faithful subjects say, Amen." 

Whereupon there arose, it may be, an emphatic " Amen " from 
the playhouse benches ; for although many precisians stayed 
away, a playhouse audience under Elizabeth represented more 
nearly than it has done at any later time the whole people of 
England. 

There were plays wholly by Greene, on the stories of Orlando 
Furiosoj Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay j George a Greene, the 
Pinner of Wakefield j Alphonso,King of Aragon j and Scottish 
James IV. 

His Groat's Worth of Wit was published after his death 
by his friend Henry Chettle, a fat and merry dramatist, of 
whose forty plays about four remain, and who was a printer 
before he became wholly a playwright. To the " Groat's Worth 
of Wit" there was an appended address from Greene to his 
brother playwrights, Marlowe and Peele, with whom he 
associated Lodge, which includes this reference to Shakespeare: 
— " Unto none of you, like me, sought those burrs to cleave ; 
those puppets, I mean, that speak from our mouths, those antics 
garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange that I to whom they 
all have been beholding — is it not like that you to whom they 
all have been beholding — shall, were ye in that case that I am 
now, be both of them at once forsaken ? Yea, trust them not ; 



toa.d. 1593.] GREENE. CHETTLE. SHAKESPEARE. 437 

for there is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that, 
with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is 
as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you ; 
and, being an absolute Johannes-fac-totum, is in his own conceit 
the only Shake-scene in a country. Oh, that I might entreat 
your rare wits to be employed in more profitable courses, and 
let these apes imitate your past excellence, and never more 
acquaint them with your admired inventions ! " 

71. Here, then, about six years after his coming to London, 
is, in 1592, the first evidence that William Shakespeare has 
worked his way up to success. It is the first and last unkind 
word spoken of him, spoken in bitterness of spirit and in sick- 
ness, by a fallen man. A few weeks after the appearance of this, 
Henry Chettle took occasion, in a publication of his own, 
called Kind-Hart's Dream, to regret that he had not erased 
what Greene wrote about Shakespeare. " I am so sorry," he 
said, " as if the original fault had been my fault, because myself 
have seen his demeanour no less civil than he excellent in the 
quality he professes ; besides, divers of worship have reported 
his uprightness of dealing, which augurs his honesty, and his 
facetious grace in writing that approves his art." 

Greene's special reference is to Shakespeare's work upon 
those old plays which are placed among his own as the three 
parts of King Henry VI. The First Part of Henry VI. is doubt- 
less an old play slightly altered and improved by Shakespeare. 
The Second Part of King Henry VI. was Shakespeare's altera- 
tion of a drama, printed in 1594 as The First Part of the Conten- 
tion betwixt the two famous Houses of York and Lancaster j and 
The Third Part of King Henry VI. was an alteration from The 
True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke, and the Death oj good 
King Henrie the Sixt, with the whole Conientione betweene the 
two Hotises Lancaster and Yorke, first printed in 1595. This 
was the play that contained the line preserved by Shakespeare, 
.and turned against him by Greene, " O tiger's heart wrapt in a 
woman's hide" (Act I., Scene 4). The line may have been 
Greene's own, for one or two of the plays thus altered may have 
been written by Greene or by Marlowe. 

72. Greene died at the age of thirty-two, on the 3rd ot 
September, 1592. Marlowe died when he was not yet thirty, 
on the 16th of June, 1593, stabbed in the eye by Francis Archer, 
who was defending himself in a brawl after a feast at Deptford. 
We have spoken of Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and of his Fatistus. 



43^ A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1590 

His Jew of Malta gives in Barabas a powerful picture of the 
Jew maligned still by the mediaeval prejudices of the Christians. 
Marlowe's Edward the Second was the nearest approach made 
by the year 1590 to a play in which there is a natural develop- 
ment of character. The last and worst of Marlowe's plays, 
and the one that was most carelessly printed, is his Massacre 
of Paris, which dramatised the strife in France. It included 
not only the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, but also the death 
of Charles IX., the assassination of the Duke of Guise by- 
Henry III., and the assassination of Henry himself by the 
Dominican Friar, Jacques Clement, with the succession of Henry 
of Navarre to the French throne. The dying Henry III. in the 
last scene of the play breathed vengeance against the pope, and 
said: 

" Navarre, give me thy hand : I here do swear 
To ruinate that wicked Church of Rome, 
That hatcheth up such bloody practices ; 
And here protest eternal love to thee, 
And to the Queen of England specially, 
Whom God hath blest for hating papistry."* 

In the last lines of the play Henry of Navarre vowed so to re- 
venge his predecessor's death, 

" As Rome, and all those popish prelates there, 
Shall curse the time that e'er Navarre was king, 
And rul'd in France by Henry's fatal death." 

A tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, left unfinished by 
Marlowe, was completed by his friend Thomas Nash, and acted 
by the children of Her Majesty's chapel. Thomas Nash (§ 68), 
who was baptised at Lowestoft in November, 1567, was dead in 
1 60 1. Marlowe made a poor version of Ovid's Elegies, first 
published in 1596 with the Epigrams of Sir John Davies. His 
beginning of a free paraphrase of the Hero a?id Leander ascribed 
to Musaeus, was afterwards completed by George Chapman- 
George Peele died about 1598 ; but Thomas Lodge, whose 
novel of Rosalynde, published in 1590, suggested the plot of 
Shakespeare's " As You Like It," lived on throughout the reign 
of Elizabeth's successor. 

In Peele's Old Wives' 1 Tale, printed in 1595, there was a sort 
of child's story told with a poet's playfulness. There was no 
division into acts. Three men lost in a wood were met by Clunch, 
and introduced to his old wife Madge, who gave them a sup- 
per, over which they sang, and then began telling them in old. 



toa.d. I593-] PEELES OLD WIVES' TALE. SHAKESPEARE. 439 

wives' fashion the " Old Wives' Tale." It is a tale of a king's 
daughter stolen by a conjuror, who flew off with her in the shape 
of a great dragon, and hid her in a stone castle, " and there he 
kept her I know not how long, till at last all the king's men went 
out so long that her two brothers went to seek her." While the 
old woman talked, the two brothers entered, and the story-telling 
passed into the acting of the story : very much as the art of the 
mediaeval story-teller had passed into that of the Elizabethan 
dramatist. The Princess Delia was sought by her brothers, and 
sought also by Eumenides, her lover. A proper young man, 
whom the 'magician had turned into a bear by night and an old 
man by day, delivered mystic oracles by a wayside cross. 
Sacrapant triumphed in his spells, until Eumenides had made 
a friend of the ghost of Jack by paying fifteen or sixteen shil- 
lings to prevent the sexton and churchwarden from leaving poor 
Jack unburied. The ghost of Jack played pranks, and made an 
end of Sacrapant, whose destiny it was " never to die but by a 
dead man's hand." The light in the conjuror's mystic glass had 
been blown out, as before said (§ 47), by one that was " neither 
wife, widow, nor maid." The piece included a comic braggart, 
who could deliver himself — in burlesque of Stanihurst (§ 53) — 
according to the reformed manner of versifying : 

" Philida, phileridos, pamphilida, florida, flortos ; 
' Dub dub-a-dub, bounce,' quoth the guns, with a sulphurous huff-snuff." 

The piece was a playful child's story, told with child-like simpli- 
city and grace. 

73. William Shakespeare in 1593, the year of the death 
of Marlowe, had not yet produced any of his greatest plays. 
The plays of his own then written were The Two Gentle?nen of 
Verona (1591 ?), The Comedy of Errors (1592 ?), probably also 
Love's Labour's Lost. In 1593 he first appeared in print by 
publishing his Venus and Adonis, a poem in the six-lined stanza 
then used as the common measure for a strain of love. It was 
dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, who in 
1593 was twenty years old ; the age of Shakespeare being 
twenty-nine. The Earldom of Southampton had been given in 
1546 by Henry VIII. to the grandfather of Shakespeare's friend 
and patron. The father of Shakespeare's earl had been a 
Roman Catholic, and friend to the cause of Mary Queen of 
Scots. He died when his successor in the earldom (through 
death of an elder brother) was a child. The young earl, a ward 



44° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1589 

of Lord Burghley's, had been educated at Cambridge, where he 
took his degree of M.A. in 1589; he then came to London, 
joined an Inn of Court, was in favour with the queen, and was 
a liberal friend of the poets. In his dedication of it to Lord 
Southampton, Shakespeare called Venus and Adonis the "first 
heir of my invention." To the same patron Shakespeare dedi- 
cated in the following year, 1594, his Lucrece, in Chaucer's stanza 
• — " Troilus verse." The two poems, one of the passion of love, 
one of heroic chastity, belong together, and their sweet music 
spread over the land that once had been filled with the songs of 
Chaucer. Of the Venus and Adonis there were five editions 
before the close of Elizabeth's reign. Titus Andronicus, a play 
ascribed to Shakespeare, but certainly a piece from another 
hand which he but slightly touched (in an older form it had been 
called " Titus and Vespasian "), seems to have been first acted in 
January, 1594- 

74. In 1594 the Blackfriars Company built, as a summer 
theatre, The Globe, on Bankside. It was a wooden hexagon, 
circular within, and open to the weather ; but the stage was 
sheltered by some roofing. London Bridge was the one bridge 
of that time, and playgoers crossed to the Bankside theatres by 
water from various parts of London. Sunday performances had 
been abolished for the last ten years. They had been strongly 
opposed (§ 40). On the 13th January, 1 583, in Paris Garden — an 
old place of entertainment, where beasts had been baited early 
in Henry VIII.'s reign — during performance on the Sabbath, a 
decayed wooden gallery fell down, and many lives were lost. 
This was looked upon as a judgment from Heaven, and the 
Privy Council thenceforth enforced an order that the actors 
should " forbear wholly to play on the Sabbath-day, either in 
the forenoon or afternoon, which to do they are by their lord- 
ships' order expressly denied and forbidden." But there was 
now no want of audiences on other days. Having built the 
Globe, the Blackfriars Company, to which Shakespeare belonged, 
proceeded in 1596, not without opposition, to repair and enlarge 
the Blackfriars ; and after this the children of Her Majesty's 
chapel acted at Blackfriars when the adult company was acting 
at the Globe. Thus we have prefixed to Lyly's " Campaspe," " the 
Prologue at the Court," and " the Prologue at the Black Friars." 
75. John Lyly in 1590 was famous, but not prosperous in 
his dependence on court patronage. He had in vain sought 
office as Master of the Revels, and wrote to the queen, " If your 



TOA.D. I595-] SHAKESPEARE. LYLY. SPENSER. 44 1 

sacred Maiestie thinke me vnworthy, and that after x yeares 
tempest, I must att court suffer shipwrack of my tyme, my 
wittes, my hopes, vouchsafe in your neuer-erring iudgement 
some plank or rafter to wafte me into a country where, in my sad 
and settled devocion, I may in euery corner of a thatcht cottage 
write praiers in stead of plaies, prayer for your longe and pros- 
prous life, and a repentaunce that I have played the foole so 
longe." In 1593, in a second petition to the queen, Lyly prayed 
for " some lande, some good fines or forfeitures that should fall 
by the iust fall of these most false traitors, that seeing nothing 
will come by the Revells, I may pray vppon the Rebells. Thir- 
teene years your highnes servant, but yet nothing ; twenty freinds 
that though they saye they wil be sure I find them sure to be 
slowe. A thousand hopes, but all nothing ; a hundred promises, 
but yet nothing. Thus casting vpp the inventory of my freinds, 
hopes, promises, and tymes, the summa totalis amounteth to 
iust nothing. My last will is shorter than myne invencion; but 
three legacies — patience to my creditors, melancholie without 
measure to my friends, and beggerie without shame to my family." 
Lyly's comedy of Mother Bombie, acted by the children of 
Paul's, was first printed in 1594. Mother Bombie is a fortune- 
teller, and the scene is laid at Rochester ; but the construction 
of the plot is artificial, and even the names of the characters 
show the relation between Plautus and Terence, and the earlier 
Elizabethan comedy. There are Memphis and Stellio, Prisius 
and Sperantus, Candius, Masstius, Accius, Livia, Serena and 
Silena, even a " Dromio, servant to Memphio," side by side 
with " Halfpenny, a boy, servant to Sperantus." Lyly, who 
lived in the parish of St. Bartholomew the Less, had a son born 
in 1596, who died in 1597, a son born in 1600, and a daughter in 
1603; and he died himself in November, 1606, aged fifty-two. 

76. Edmund Spenser (§ 23, 31, 34, 43, 45, 46), whose 
"Shepheard's Calender " had been reprinted in 1581 and 1586, 
came to London at the end of 1589, was introduced by Raleigh 
to Elizabeth, and published in 1590 the first section, containing 
the first three books, of The Faerie Queene, disposed into Twelve 
Bookes, Fashioning XII Morall Verities. It was dedicated to 
Her Majesty, and had a prefatory letter addressed to Sir Walter 
Raleigh, dated January 23, 1589 (New Style, 1590). Spenser 
had been at work on his great poem for more than ten years 
(§ 43), and the part of it now published was received with an 
admiration that caused its publisher to get together a volume of 



442 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1591. 

other poems by Spenser, which he published in 1591, under the 
title of Complaints. This volume contained Spenser's Ruines 
of Time; Teares of the Muses; VirgiVs Gnat ; Prosopopoia, or 
Mother Hubberd's Tale; The Ruines of Rome, by Bel lays Muio- 
potmos, or the Tale of the Butterflies Visions of the IVorld's 
Vanities Bellayes Visions s and Petrarches Visions. The Ruines 
of Time, dedicated to Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke, 
was a series of mournful visions, forming a poem in Chaucer's 
stanza, on the death of " Philisides" (Sir Philip Sidney). In the 
Teares of the Muses, each Muse in turn lamented, in the six-lined 
Common Verse, the decay of her just rule. This poem Spenser 
dedicated to the Lady Strange, with whom he claimed kindred, 
and whom we shall meet again. She was Alice, youngest 
daughter of Sir John Spencer, of Althorpe, then married to 
Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, who became Earl of Derby 
by the death of his father, in September, 1593. He died him- 
self in the following April, leaving his widow Countess Dowager 
of Derby, and the mother of two girls. VirgiVs Gnat, done 
into octave rhyme, was said to have been long since "dedicated 
to the most noble and excellent lord, the Earl of Leicester, 
late deceased." It is a free version of a poem — Culex — that 
used to be ascribed to Virgil. Prosopopoias or, Mother Hubberd's 
Tale, Spenser dedicated to the Lady Compton and Monteagle, 
who was Anne, another of the daughters of Sir John Spencer, 
of Althorpe. It is a pleasant satirical fable, in Chaucer's rhym- 
ing ten-syllabled lines, and written designedly in Chaucer's 
manner, showing how the Fox and the Ape, his neighbour and 
gossip, went disguised into the world to mend their fortunes. 
To begin, they would not be of any occupation, but the free 
men called beggars. But what warrant should they have for 
their free life ? They would protect themselves by the name of 
soldiers — " That now is thought a civil begging sect." The Ape, 
as likest for manly semblance, was to act the poor soldier ; the 
Fox to wait on him and help as occasion served. Spenser 
having cried shame on this common abuse of an honourable 
name, next made the Ape a shepherd, with the Fox for sheep- 
dog. In this character 

" Not a lamb of all their flockes supply 
Had they to shew ; but ever as they bred 
They slue them, and upon their fleshes fed." 

The Fox and the Ape, having escaped after a great slaughter of 
the flock entrusted to their care, set up a new calling " much like 



a.d. 1591.] SPEAKER'S COMPLAINTS. 443*. 

to begging, but much better named." They got gown and 
cassock, and as poor clerks begged of a priest, who reproached 
them for not seeking some good estate in the Church. Through 
the counsel given by this priest when the Fox and the Ape asked 
for advice, Spenser satirised the too easy lives of an indolent, 
well-to-do clergy. 

" By that he ended had his ghostly sermon 
The Foxe was well induc'd to be a parson, 
And of the priest eftsoones gan to inquire 
How to a benefice he might aspire. 
' Marie, there,' said the priest, ' is arte indeed : 
Much good deep learning one thereout may read ; 
For that the ground-worke is, and ende of all, 
How to obtaine a beneficiall.' " 

They must dress well, wait on some religious nobleman, and 
affect a godly zeal ; or, if the Fox looked to court for pro- 
motion : 

" Then must thou thee dispose another way : 
For there thou needs must learne to laugh, to lie, 
To crouche, to please, to be a beetle-stock 
Of thy great Master's will, to scorne, or mock ; 
So maist thou chance mock out a benefice, 
Unless thou canst one conjure by device, 
Or cast a figure for a bishoprick." 

The courtiers also must be bribed. The Fox and Ape were- 
thankful for good counsel, and presently Fox was a priest, with 
Ape for parish clerk. They behaved so ill in their new calling 
that they were obliged at last to escape from it, and, by counsel 
of a fat mule from the court, they next tried life among the 
courtiers. At court the Ape walked on tiptoe, as if he were 
some great Magnifico ; and the Fox, as his man, supported him. 
Here followed Spenser's satire of court vices and follies, with a 
picture in verse of the true courtly gentleman, for which in 
Spenser's mind perhaps his friend Sir Philip Sidney sat. It is 
in this part of " Mother Hubberd's Tale" that we find Spenser's 
lines upon the pitiful state of the suitor (§ 55). From court also 
Fox and Ape were obliged to fly ; and next they came upon the 
Lion sleeping, stole his crown and skin, and assumed royalty. 
The Ape was king, the Fox his minister. A satire followed on 
tyrannical misgovernment. Jove saw it; and Mercury, sent from 
Jove to make inquiry into it, aroused the sleeping Lion, who> 
reclaimed his own. 

" The Foxe, first author of that treacherie, 
He did uncase, and then away let flie : 



444 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1591 

But th' Ape's long talle (which then he had) he quight 
Cut off, and both ears pared off their height ; 
Since which all Apes but halfe their eares have left, 
And of their tailes are utterlie bereft." 

Muiopotmos j or, the Tale of the Butter/lie, Spenser dedicated 
to the Lady Carey, who was Elizabeth, another of the daughters 
of Sir John Spencer, of Althorpe. It is an original allegory in 
octave rhyme. The Ruins of Rome and the Visions, both from 
Bellay, his own Visions of the World's Vanity, and the Visions 
of Petrarch, are alike in form, and written sonnet wise, the 
" Visions " of Bellay and " Visions " of Petrarch, being chiefly a 
new version of Spenser's youthful contribution to the Theatre 
for Worldlings (§ 23). These were the contents of the volume 
of Spenser's poetry published as Complaints, in 1591, the year 
after the success of the the first three books of the " Faerie 
Queene." 

Spenser wrote also about this time an elegy on the death of 
the wife of Arthur (afterwards Sir Arthur) Gorges, a " lover of 
learning and virtue." The lady was daughter and heir of Henry- 
Lord Howard, Viscount Byndon, and the poem was published 
separately, under the name of Daphnaida. 

77. In February, 1591, Spenser received, as further earnest 
of success, a pension of ^50 a year from Queen Elizabeth. 

In October, 1591, a grant was made or confirmed to him of 
land in Cork, with the old castle of Kilcolman, in which he 
seems to have lived before his visit to England, and which had 
belonged to the Earls of Desmond. It was two miles from 
Doneraile, on the north side of a lake fed by the river Awbey, 
Spenser's Mulla. After his return to Ireland, Spenser dedicated 
to Sir Walter Raleigh, from his house at Kilcolman, the 27th of 
December, 1591, his poem entitled Colin Clout's Come Home 
Again, to which additions were made before its publication. In 
this poem Colin, having told his fellow shepherds how Raleigh, 
"the Shepherd of the Ocean," visited him in 1589, and caused 
him to " wend with him his Cynthia to see," described, in pas- 
toral form, England, the queen herself, and, under pastoral 
names, celebrated personages of the court and living poets. 
Among them was he of the name Shake Spear, that doth 
heroically sound : 

"And there, though last, not least, is Aetion ; 
A gentler shepherd may no where be found : 
Whose Muse, full of high thoughts' invention. 
Doth like himselfe heroically sound." 



toa.d. I599-] EDMUND SPENSER. 445 

This was not published until 1595, and in the same year ap- 
peared Spenser's sonnets or Amoretti, and the Epithalamium, 
an exquisitely musical and joyous bridal song, written about the 
time of his own wedding. No lady's name is publicly associated 
with the sonnets, and they were written doubtless for the plea- 
sure of the lady who became his wife. Three or four of them 
contain personal references, but the rest are of the usual kind. 
Spenser had been married on the nth of June, 1594, when his 
age was about forty, to a lady living near Kilcolman, whose name, 
like the name of his queen and of his mother, was Elizabeth. 
In 1595 he had come to England again with the next instal- 
ment of three books of the " Faerie Queene," and with a prose 
View of the Present State of Ireland, in a dialogue between 
Eudoxus and Irenaeus, which was circulated in manuscript, but 
was not printed until more than thirty years after his death. 
It was hard in the policy it recommended, and about Kilcolman 
Spenser was not kindly remembered. The Second Part of the 
Faerie Queene, containing the fourth, fifth, and sixth books, ap- 
peared in 1596, together with a reprint of the first three books. 
In the same year Spenser, while in London, added to two hymns 
of " Love and Beauty," written years before, two other hymns 
of " Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty." These Hymns were 
published at once, and in the same year appeared also his Pro- 
thalamium on the marriage of two daughters of the Earl of 
Worcester. Spenser published nothing more before his death. 
In 1597 he returned to Kilcolman. In 1598 he was named by 
the queen for Sheriff of Cork. Children had been born to him ; 
there were two sons living, Sylvanus and Peregrine. In October, 
1598, Tyrone's rebellion broke out. Kilcolman was attacked, 
plundered, and burnt. Spenser and his family were cast out ; 
an infant child of his is said to have perished in the flames, but 
that is doubtful. Spenser was thus driven back to England, and 
died soon after his arrival, on the 16th of January, 1599, at a 
tavern in King Street, Westminster. King Street was then a 
very good street, on one side open to fields, and forming the 
main road between the Abbey and Parliament House and the 
court, which since Wolsey's forfeiture had been at the old 
Palace of Whitehall. That palace having been for centuries the 
residence of the Archbishop of York, was the York House that 
Wolsey had enriched with his magnificence. Henry VIII. took 
it in 1529. Elizabeth held court there ; and Spenser had taken 
his lodging where he might be near the court, to which he 
looked for repair of his fortunes. 



446 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1590 

78. Spenser's letter to Raleigh prefixed to the fragment of 
the " Faerie Queene," " expounding his whole intention in the 
course of this work," said only that he laboured to pourtraict in 
Arthure, before he was king, the image of a brave knight, per- 
fected in the twelve moral vertues, as Aristotle hath devised, 
the which is the purpose of the first twelve books ; which if I 
finde to be well accepted, I may be perhaps encouraged to frame 
the other part, of polliticke vertues, in his person after that hee 
came to be king." It was left for the reader to discover how 
grand a design was indicated by these unassuming words. 
Spenser said that by the Faerie Oueene whom Arthur sought, 
" I mean glory in my generall intention, but in my particular I 
conceive the most excellent and glorious person of our sove- 
raine the queene, and her kingdom in Faeryland." The student 
of the " Faerie Queene " must bear in mind that its " general 
intention" is its essential plan as a great spiritual allegory; that 
this is consistent throughout, is the very soul of the poem, source 
of its immortal life ; and that the " particular " significations, 
which are frequent and various, are secondary senses lying only 
•on the surface of the main design, with which they harmonise, 
and to which they gave a lively added interest in Spenser's time. 
Faery means in the allegory Spiritual. A faery knight is a 
spiritual quality or virtue militant, serving the Faerie Oueene, 
Gloriana, which means in the general allegory Glory in the 
highest sense — the glory of God. Read out of allegory, there- 
fore, " The Glory of God " is the name of Spenser's poem. 
Again said Spenser, in this introductory letter, " In the person of 
Prince Arthure I sette forth Magnificence in particular, which 
vertue, for that (according to Aristotle and the rest) is the per- 
fection of all the rest, and conteineth in it them all : therefore 
in the whole course I mention the deedes of Arthure applyable 
to that vertue, which I write of in that booke ; but of the xii 
other vertues I make xii other knights the patrones, for the 
more variety of the history." Spenser's ethical system was 
bound up with his religion ; he painted, therefore, in his sepa- 
rate knights, each single virtue of a man striving heavenward, 
but failing at some point, and needing aid of Divine grace. 
This came through Arthur, in whom all the virtues are con- 
tained, who is filled with a great desire towards the Faerie 
Oueene — the Glory of God — and who above all represents, in the 
literal sense of the word, Magnificence, since he may be said to 
indicate the place of the Mediator in the Christian system. If 



toa.d. 1596.] SPENSER'S "FAERIE QUEENE." 447 

we had had all twelve books of the poem, which was left only- 
half finished, they would have been an allegory of man battling 
heavenward with all his faculties, through trial and temptation. 
The other poem, had it followed, would have been an endea- 
vour to represent through allegory an ideal citizenship of the 
kingdom of Heaven. Because the " Faerie Oueene " was pub- 
lished incomplete, Spenser told so much of what its readers 
could have found in the whole work as was necessary to direct 
their understanding to the well-head of the history, " that from 
thence gathering the whole intention of the conceit, ye may as 
in a handfull gripe at the discourse." He gave the clue into our 
hands, and then left us to find our own way through the poem 
upon which he spent the best thought of his life. 

Moral philosophy was divided into ethics, which dealt with 
the individual ; and politics, which dealt with the community. 
Spenser's project was of two poems, applying each of these to 
his own sense of the relation between man and God. In Plato's 
" Republic" there was mention of four Cardinal Virtues — Courage, 
Temperance, Justice, Wisdom. In the "Protagoras," Plato 
added to these, Holiness. This Aristotle omitted, because, as 
studies, he distinctly separated Ethics from Religion. Aristotle's 
list in his " Ethics," made without special devotion to the 
number twelve, was, in Book III., Courage and Temperance ; 
in Book IV., Liberality, Magnificence, Laudable Ambition 
(Philotimia), Mildness of a Regulated Temper; Courtesy, or re- 
gulated conduct in society ; Regulation of Boastfulness, including 
avoidance of the affectation of humility, that is to say, sincerity 
of manner ; Social Pliability of Wit (Eutrapelia) ; and Modesty, 
which Aristotle called hardly a virtue, but rather a feeling. In 
the fifth book of his " Ethics," the virtue he discussed was 
Justice. In the sixth book he took Intellectual Virtues — Phi- 
losophy and Wisdom, including Prudence, Apprehension, and 
Considerateness. The seventh book of the " Ethics " was on 
Pleasure, and dealt also with Incontinence and Intemperance ; 
the eighth and ninth books were on Friendship. Upon the 
groundwork of this treatise of Aristotle's there had been built 
this classification of the virtues, which was that commonly 
received in Spenser's time : they were of three kinds — I. Intel- 
lectual, II. Moral, III. Theological. The Intellectual Virtues 
were — Intellectual Knowledge, producing Art ; Wisdom, 
producing Prudence. The Moral Virtues were— i, Prudence, 
Mother of All ; 2, Justice ; 3, Courage ; 4, Temperance. These 



44-8 a FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1590 

were the four Cardinal Virtues. Then came, 5, Courtesy ; 6, 
Liberality ; 7, Magnificence ; 8, Magnanimity ; 9, Philotimia 
(Laudable Ambition); 10, Truth; 11, Friendship; 12, Eutrapelia 
(Social Pliability of Wit). The theological virtues were these 
three — Faith, Hope, and Charity. Spenser dealt as a poet with 
his subject, and in no way bound himself to the scholastic list. 
In the six books of the " Faerie Queen " which are extant, and 
the fragment of a seventh, first printed with a new edition of 
the poem, in 161 1, this is Spenser's order of the virtues: — 1, 
Holiness; 2, Temperance; 3, Chastity; 4, Friendship; 5, 
Justice ; 6, Courtesy; and (probably) 7, Constancy. The several 
qualities of the true man taken in this order represent fidelity 
to God, 1, in soul, and, 2, in body ; 3, 4, the bond of love 
between man and woman in pure marriage, this form of love 
being dealt with especially under the head of Chastity ; and 
between man and man, this form being dealt with especially 
under the head of Friendship. Love, the great bond of humanity, 
having been taken first, Spenser then passed to the next great 
bond, 5, Justice. Where the supremacy of Love does not 
suffice, Justice must govern. Having dealt with these two 
great bonds between man and man, Spenser passed next to the 
lighter, all-pervading bond of, 6, Courtesy. " Greet kindly, 
though ye be strangers," said one of the old Cymric bards. 
The recognition of this bond of common kindliness, where there 
has been no opportunity for closer ties, was the next condition 
in a sequence reasoned out like Spenser's. But Courtesy, which 
bids us yield to others on all non-essential points, needs to be 
balanced with the virtue that will save us from a careless yielding 
of essentials. So after Courtesy came, probably, Constancy, in 
Spenser's system. Thus we may trace the mind of the poet 
even in the sequence of the six books of his poem. 

The more detailed study of English writers, to which this 
volume is an introduction, attempts an analysis of the whole 
allegory of the " Faerie Queene." Here there can be no more 
said than will suffice to show its nature. The form of a 
romance of chivalry was in its own day the most popular that 
could have been selected. Spenser not only followed Spanish 
romances, and Ariosto's " Orlando," but adapted himself to 
the humour of his time, as illustrated by the Famous Historie 
of the Seve?i Champions of Christendome, a pious romance 
of saintly knights and fair ladies, dragons and chivalrous 
adventures, told in Euphuistic style, of which the first part, 



to a. d. 1596.] SPENSER'S "FAERIE QUEENE. 449 

which Spenser had read, appeared probably about the middle 
of Elizabeth's reign, the second part certainly in 1597. Richard 
Johnson, whose name is associated with this book, and who 
finished re-editing it in the year of Shakespeare's death, was 
not its author. Shakespeare also had read it ; and since 
Elizabeth's time it has been dear to many generations of children. 
Spenser formed his allegory out of stock incidents in such 
romances, but he so told his story as to give to every incident a 
spiritual meaning. The form of verse contrived by Spenser 
for exclusive use in this poem is a nine-lined stanza, called 
" Spenserian." It was made by adding an Alexandrine to the 
stanza that French poets often used in the Chant Royal, a longer 
form of balade, called "Royal Song," in which God was the King 
celebrated. That eight-lined stanza was applied also to other uses. 
Marot, for example, who did not use it for his "Chants Royaux," 
made it the measure of his poem on the marriage of James V. 
of Scotland with Magdalene of France. Chaucer and followers 
of his had used it now and then, as in the " Envoye to the 
Complaint of the Black Knight," in " Chaucer's A B C," in " The 
Balade of the Village without Painting," and " L'Envoye a 
Bukton" It consisted of two quatrains of ten-syllabled lines, 
with alternate rhyme ; the second rhyme of the first quatrain 
agreeing with the first rhyme of the quatrain that followed, 
thus, abab, bcbc; this could go on indefinitely upon the 
same system — cdcd, dede, efef, &c. Now, Spenser's 
added line follows the system of the verse as to its rhyme, but 
destroys expectation of continuance by the two extra sylla- 
bles, which close with a new turn the music of the stanza. 
Thus the Spenserian stanza becomes as to its rhyming abab, 
bcbc, c. The Faerie Queene, it may be added, abounds in 
graceful imitations or paraphrases from the ancient poets, and 
from Ariosto and Tasso ; incidents are also suggested by 
Spenser's readings in Arthurian romance, in the first part of 
"The Seven Champions," in "The Orlando Furioso," and in 
Tasso's heroic poem. 

Let us now lightly illustrate from the first book the manner 
of the allegory. Twelve Faerie Knights, who represent twelve 
virtues, were knights of the Faerie Queene ; they served the 
Divine glory. One, a clownish young man — " base things of the 
world, and things that are despised, hath God chosen " — desired 
to serve, and rested on the floor, " unfit through his rusticity for 
a better place." Then came Truth, as a fair lady, to complain 

D D 



45° A tIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1590 

of the huge dragon— "the Dragon, that old serpent, which is 
the Devil " — who besieged her father and mother, an ancient 
lung and queen, Adam and Eve, typifying the race of man. 
What knight would aid her ? Then " that clownish person," 
who was to represent in the allegory Holiness, or the religion 
of England in Spenser's time, and that, too, in Spenser's form 
of it — " upstarting, desired that adventure." The lady told him 
that unless he could use the armour which she brought, he 
could not succeed in that enterprise : that was the armour of a 
Christian man specified by St. Paul : " Wherefore take unto 
you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand 
in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand, there- 
fore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on 
the breast-plate of righteousness, and your feet shod with the 
preparation of the Gospel of Peace ; above all, taking the 
shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the 
fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, 
and the sword of the spirit, which is the Word of God." St. 
Paul used the image again : " Let us who are of the day be 
sober, putting on the breast-plate of faith and love ; and for an 
helmet the hope of salvation." When thus armed, the clownish 
person " seemed the goodliest man in all that company, and 
well liked of the lady." " If any man," said St. Paul, " be in 
Christ, he is a new creature." The knight set out to battle with 
the Dragon, and — so much having been indicated in the letter 
to Raleigh — here the first book of the Faerie Queene begins. 
The gentle knight was the element of holiness in the Christian 
soul, seeking conquest of evil, clad in the armour of righteous- 
ness, with the cross on his breast and on his shield. His 
steed represented passions and desires, disdaining the curb, 
but needing the curb as they carry us upon the chosen path. 
The knight sought his adventure to win the grace of Gloriana, 
which of all earthly things he most did crave. " The Lord 
shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory." 
Beside him rode a lovely lady, Truth, on a lowly ass, more white 
than snow — patient of desire, dispassionate of temper — Truth 
under a veil. " And by her, in a line, a milk-white Lamb she 
led," guide and companion of innocence, herself as guileless, 
descended from the angels who knew man in Paradise. 

" Behind her farre away a Dwarfe did lag 
That lasie seemd, in being ever last, 
Or wearied with bearing of her bag 
Of needments at his backe.' 



TOA.D. 1596.] SPENSER'S "FAERIE QUEENE." 45 1 

The dwarf was the Flesh, with its needments : sometimes the 
bodily life of the man; sometimes, when the allegory took a 
wider range, the common body of the people, with, its natural 
instincts. The theme of the book was opened with a general 
allegory of the contest with Error; then it became individual 
and national, painting English religion from the point of view of 
an Elizabethan Puritan. 

The day became troubled, and the knight and his companions 
found shelter in a wood, whose ways were the ways of the world. 
The trees in it typified the forms of human life : " the sailing 
pine " for trade ; " the vine-prop elm " for pleasure : " the poplar 
never dry," freshness of youth ; " the builder oak, sole king of 
forests all/' man in mature strength building his home in the 
world ; " the aspen, good for staves," to support decrepid age ; 
and then the grave, " the cypress funeral." The other trees 
typified glory and tears, chase of meat, grinding of meal, griefs 
of life and their consolations, the shock of war and the wise 
uses of life, fruitfulness, completeness in form, that which' is for 
us to mould, and that which is often rotten at the core. Losing 
themselves among the pleasant ways of the world the knight 
and his companions took the most beaten path, which led them 
to the den of Error. Before the battle with the monster there 
was flinching of the flesh, eagerness of the spirit. By the light 
of his spiritual helps the Red Cross Knight could see the monster 
as it was ; it was a light from his glistening armour which the 
brood of Error could not bear. 

" Soone as that uncouth light upon them shone 
Into her mouth they crept, and suddain all were gone." 

When the knight, in the contest, was wound about with the huge 
train of the monster, the poet cried, " God helpe the man so 
wrapt in Errores endlesse traine ! " That was the help his lady 
urged him to secure. " Add faith unto your force, and be not 
faint." After this general picture of the conquest over Error, 
Spenser began to sketch, in the bitter spirit of his time, the rela- 
tion of Catholicism to the Red Cross Knight of England. 

The knight's armour was worn that he might stand against 
" the wiles of the devil." That chief deceiver, Archimago, now 
appeared, representing as a simple hermit the first stage of what 
Spenser looked upon as the " diabolical faith " (§ 45). He bade 
the Red Cross Knight and his companions to rest within his 
hermitage, and, as they slept there he created by his magic a 

D D 2 



45 2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERA TURE. [a.d. 1590 

deceiving semblance of the lady, now named Una, because of 
the singleness of Truth. The deceiving image represented 
sensuous religion. The Christian misdoubted the corrupt Church 
that yet feigned to be his, and missed the firm voice of his guide 
and comforter: 

" ' Why, dame,' quotn he, 'what hath ye thus dismayed ? 
What frayes ye, that were wont to comfort me affrayd ? ' " 

The close of that first canto represented, then, from Spenser's 
point of view, the Christian before the Reformation. In the second 
canto, simple Truth having been maligned by arts of the devil, 
the Christian was stirred to passion against her, she was deserted 
by him, body and soul, but at her slow pace she followed the 
man carried away by his swift passions. Then the devil, hater 
of truth, disguised himself as the Red Cross Knight, and there 
was the " diabolical faith " personified. The true Saint George — 
the religion of England — parted from Truth, met with a faithless 
Saracen, named Sansfoy, Infidelity, strong, careless about God 
and man, companion of the woman clothed in scarlet, who was 
mitred, jewelled, and borne on a " wanton palfrey " — by wanton 
passions. Then followed the shock of battle against infidelity, 
which only through the death of Christ has Christianity been 
able to survive : 

" ' Curse on that Cross ' (quoth then the Sarazin), 
' That keepes thy body from the bitter fitt ! 
Dead long ygoe, I wote, thou haddest bin, 
Had not that charme from thee forwarned itt.'" 

The heavenward -striving soul could strike down infidelity; 
but then it took the woman clothed in scarlet, named Duessa, 
because of the doubleness of Falsehood, for Fidessa, the true 
faith. She was another image of the Church of Rome — 

" Borne the sole daughter of an Emperour, 
He that the wide West under his rule has, 
And high hath set his throne where Tiberis doth pas." 

Her the knight took for companion; but she appealed rather to 
his eyes than to his mind, he was— 

" More busying his quicke eies her face to view, 
Than his dull eares to heare what shee did tell. 

He travelled on with his new lady, who could not endure the 
heat of the day, and rested with her under shade of trees, from 
which he plucked a bough to make a garland for her forehead. 
But the tree bled, and uttered a sad voice. It was Fradubio, 



toa.d. 1596.] SPENSER'S "FAERIE QUEENE." 453 

thus transformed because he had doubted between the witch 
Duessa and Fraelissa. That witch had caused Fraslissa to 
appear deformed, Fradubio had then given himself to Duessa, 
till one day he saw her in her own true ugliness. Fradubio 
and Fraelissa were both turned to trees, and 

" ' We may not channge ' (quoth he) ' this evill plight, 
Till we be bathed in a living well.' " 

Frselissa being thus transformed, and awaiting such release, 
could not herself represent true Christian faith, between which 
and the false Church Fradubio was in doubt. Spenser repre- 
sented by her a pure heathen philosophy, like that of Plato ; 
purer and fairer than the " diabolical faith " that rivalled and 
supplanted it, but no longer an active moving power in the 
world. Philosophy must live with its votary a vegetative life 
until its powers are renewed by union with the Church of Christ. 
" A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse— a well of living 
waters." 

In the next canto, forsaken Truth, parted from men, 

" Her dainty limbs did lay 
In secrete shadow, far from all men's sight : 
From her fayre head her fillet she undight, 
And layd her stole aside. Her angel's face, 
As the great eye of heaven, shyned bright, 
And made a sunshine in the shady place ; 
Did never mortal eye behold such heavenly grace." 

A lion that rushed upon her was subdued to the service of her 
innocence. Spenser used here the romance doctrine that a lion 
will not hurt a virgin. St. George, in " The Seven Champions," 
recognised the virginity of Sabra by two lions fawning upon her. 
Spenser's lion, whose yielded pride and proud submission made 
him the companion of Una, represented Reason before the 
: Reformation serving as ally of Truth against Ignorance and 
Superstition. " The lion would not leave her desolate, but with 
her went along," and presently they came near the dwelling of 
Ignorance and her daughter Superstition. Una called to the 
damsel — the voice of Truth calling to Superstition : 

" But the rude wench her answered nought at all : 
Shee could not heare, nor speake, nor understand ; 
Till seeing by her side the Lyon stand 
With suddeine feare her pitcher downe she threw. 
And fled away : for never in that land 
Face of fayre Lady she before did view, 
And that dredd Lyon's looke her cast in deadly hew." 



454 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1590 

She never had seen the fair face of Truth, and dreaded the 
attack of Reason. The Lion, " with his rude clawes, the wicket 
open rent," thus representing still the work of Reason at the 
Reformation. Una and the lion, Truth served by Reason, lay 
down in the house of Ignorance and Superstition, whither by 
night came Kirk-rapine with plunder of the Church to his com- 
panion, " the daughter of this woman blind, Abessa, daughter of 
Corceca slow." Kirk-rapine represented theft of sacred things 
and of the money of the poor, by men who entered the Church 
only for the goods they could take out of it ; by the abbots and 
high clergy, the hirelings in the Church, false pastors who took 
no care of the sheep committed to their care, except to fleece 
them and devour their flesh. Kirk-rapine found in Abessa's 
den the lion, who, 

•' Encountring fierce, him suddein doth surprize; 
And, seizing cruell clawes on trembling brest, 
Under his lordly foot him proudly hath supprest." 

Doubtless, the general image of the force of reason in attack on 
the ill-gotten wealth of those who took to their own use what 
was given to maintain religion and relieve the poor, was joined 
here to a particular image of the lion of England, as Henry 
VIII., with his foot on the suppressed monasteries. Therefore, 
when it is said of Kirk-rapine that " the thirsty land dranke up 
his life," there might be reference to the enrichment of the land 
by restoration of wealth that had been drawn from it to feed the 
luxury of Churchmen. 

Reason had now taken its fit place in the allegory. In 
Spenser's system it was not by help of Reason, but only by 
Grace of God, that the last triumph was to be secured. The 
lion, therefore, fell under the stroke of Sansloy. Reason could 
not resist the force of lawlessness. Not yet joined to her Red 
Cross Knight, Una had only the natural heart of man to recog- 
nise her beauty. She was adored by the " salvage nation." 

" During which tyme her gentle wit she plyes 
To teach them truth, which worshipt her in vaine, 
And made her th' Image of Idolotryes." 

The Red Cross Knight was taken by Duessa to the House of 
Pride, thence, warned and aided by the natural instincts of his 
dwarf, he escaped, wounded by Joylessness ; and being weary 
took his armour off and rested by the way. He sat by a fount- 
ain which had been once a nymph — one of Diana's nymphs— 



toa.d. 1596.] SPENSER'S "FAERIE QUEENE.' 455 

who " satt downe to rest in middest of the race." " Let us not 
be weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap — if we 
faint not." The Christian warrior, thus resting in midst of his 
race, escaped from the pomps of " the diabolical faith " only to 
become the thrall to like pomps in another form. That Spenser 
held to be the present danger of the English Church. The woeful 
dwarf, the common body of the people, took up the knight's 
neglected arms, carried them on, seeking aid in this distress, 
and met with Una. Then to the aid of Truth and to the rescue 
of the religion of England came Prince Arthur, bearing the 
shield of Divine Grace. " Ay, me," now says the poet in the 
prelude to the canto which describes Prince Arthur's inter- 
vention, — 

" Ay, me ! how many perils doe enfold 
The righteous man, to make him daily fall, 
Were not that heavenly Grace doth him uphold 
And stedfast Truth acquite him out of all." 

The wondrous horn blown by Arthur's squire — the faithful 
preacher — before the giant's castle, was the horn of the Gospel. 

" Wyde wonders over all 
Of that same homes great virtues weren told, 
Which had approved bene in uses manifold." 

The rescued Christian looking back on his delusions and 
misdeeds was tempted by despair, but the voice of Truth 
answered to his doubt : 

Come, come away, fraile, feeble, fleshly wight, 

Ne let vaine words bewitch thy manly hart, 

Ne divelish thoughts dismay thy constant spright; 

In heavenly mercies hast thou not a part ? 

Why should'st thou then despeire that chosen art ? 

Where justice growes, there grows eke greater Grace. 

And when the Red Cross Knight was next brought by Una 
to the House of Holiness, where Dame Ccelia lived with her 
three daughters, Faith, Hope, and Charity, to be prepared for 
the last great fight with the Dragon, the opening stanza showed, 
again, how carefully Spenser had provided for the most essential 
feature of his poem, express declaration of its meaning: 

' What man is he, that boasts of fleshly might 
And vaine assuraunce of mortality, 
Which, all so soone as it doth come to fight 
Against spirituall foes, yields by and by, 
Or from the fielde most cowardly doth fly! 



40 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE [a.d. 159& 

Ne let the man ascribe it to his skill, 
That thorough Grace hath gained victory : 
If any strength we have, it is to ill, 
But all the good is God's, both power and eke will." 

Spenser believed that he had given aid enough for the inter- 
pretation of his allegory. In the introduction to his second 
book he told the reader that 

" Of faery land, yet if he more inquyre, 
By certein signes, hece sett in sondrie place 
He may it fynd: ne let him then admyre, 
But yield his sence to bee too blunt and bace 
That no'te without an hound fine footing trace." 

Spenser's "fine footing" has been traced but carelessly % 
while all readers have felt the sweetness of music, and enjoyed 
the feast of imagination that the Faerie Queene offers to 
those who simply yield themselves up to a sense of the sur- 
passing beauty of its pictures and of its deeply earnest spiritual 
undertone. Profoundly earnest, and the work of a pure mind, 
the Faerie Queene is yet bitter at core. It is the work of a 
great poet, who felt and expressed both the essence and the 
accidents of the great struggle in which he was himself a com- 
batant. Through all its delicious melody it breathes a stern 
defiance of whatever cause was not, in the eyes of a true-hearted 
Elizabethan Puritan, the cause of God. The deeper allegory 
that expresses abstract truth holds on throughout the Faerie 
Queene its steady course, but it is conveyed through many 
references, in their own time not in the least obscure, to affairs 
of England, Ireland, France, Spain, Belgium. For example, in 
the ninth canto of Book V. Spenser enforced the whole case for 
the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, and at the beginning of 
the next canto he spoke his mind, still on the surface of the 
allegory of Mercilla and Duessa, upon Elizabeth's unwillingness 
to sentence Mary. The doom was 

" By her tempred without griefe or gall,, 
Till strong constraint did her thereto enforce: 
And yet even then ruing her wilfull fall 
With more than needfull naturall remorse, 
And yeelding the last honour to her wretched corse.. 

The larger allegory dealt here with the mercy tnat should 
season justice ; but the bitterness of conflict was so prominent 
that, on the publication, in 1596, of the second part of the Faerie 
Queene, which contained this passage and others like it, King 
James of Scotland desired Spenser's prosecution. The English 



to a.d. 1599.] SAMUEL DANIEL. 457 

ambassador in Scotland wrote to Lord Burghley, in November, 
1596, that he had satisfied the king as to the privilege under 
which the book was published, yet he still desired that Edmund 
Spenser, for this fault, might be tried and punished. 

79. Samuel Daniel was born near Taunton, in 1 562, the son 
of a music master. From 1579 to 1582 he was studying as a 
commoner at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, but he did not take a 
degree. In 1585, at the age of twenty-three, he translated from 
the Italian The Worthy Tract of Paulus louius, contayning a 
Discourse of rare Inuentions, both Militarie and Amorous, called 
Impresse. W hereunto is added a Preface, contayning the Arte 
of Composing the?n, with many other Notable Deuises. Daniel 
became tutor to the Lady Anne Clifford, afterwards Countess of 
Pembroke, and became historian and poet under the patronage 
of the Earl of Pembroke's family. He began his career as an 
original poet, strongly influenced by the Italian writers, in 1592, 
with Delia: contayning certayne Sonnets, with the Complaint of 
Rosamond. This he dedicated to Mary, Countess of Pembroke, 
Sidney's sister; augmented editions, bringing the number of 
sonnets to fifty-seven, followed in 1594 and 1595. In 1595, 
Daniel combined his functions of historian and poet by publish- 
ing The First Fowre Books of the Civille Warres betweene the 
Two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke. This poem is in stanzas 
of the octave rhyme, established by Boccaccio as the Italian 
measure for narrative poetry (ch. iv. § 12), used by Pulci, Boiardo, 
Ariosto, Tasso. Strongly influenced by Italian forms, and often 
paraphrasing and translating from Italian, Daniel took naturally 
to octave rhyme for his poem on the civil wars. It was, like 
Sackville's tragedy of Buckingham, in the Mirror for Magis- 
trates, too much of a history to be a poem in the true artistic 
sense, but it was musical in versification, patriotic and religious, 
and somewhat diffuse in moralising, with so much of the con- 
servative tone that, in Church matters, some thought Daniel 
inclined towards Catholicism. In 1597 appeared his Tragedy 
of Philotos; in 1599, Musophilus, and other Poetical Essay es. 
The poem on the Civil Wars was also extended to five books in 
1599, a sixth book followed in 1602. Daniel's Musophihis was 
a general defence of learning in dialogue between Philocosmus, 
a lover of the world, and Musophihis, a lover of the Muses. It 
has been said that after the death of Spenser, in 1599, Daniel 
Succeeded him as poet laureate. But there was in Elizabeth's 
time no recognised court office of poet laureate (ch. v. § 34). 



45 8 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1590 

80. Michael Drayton, born at Harthill, Warwickshire, 
was of about the same age as Daniel, but a poet with more 
sensibility, more vigour and grace of thought. Like Daniel, he 
began to write after 1590, and became a busy poet. He is said 
to have been maintained for a time at Oxford by Sir Henry 
Godere, of Polsworth, and he had a friend and patron in Sir 
Walter Aston, of Tixhall, in Staffordshire. In 1591, Drayton 
began his career as poet with a sacred strain: The Harmonie 
of the Church, containing the Spiritual Songs and Holy Hy?nnes 
of Godly Men, Patriarchs, and Prophets, all sweetly souiiding 
to the Glory of the Highest. This was followed, in 1 593, by Idea; 
The Shepherd's Garlajid, fashioned in Nine E clogs; Rowland's 
Sacrifice to the Nine Muses; in 1594, by his Matilda, and 
his Idea's Mirrour, Amours in Quatorzains. In 1596, Matilda 
reappeared in a volume which showed Drayton's muse to be 
then running parallel with Daniel's in choice of subject, and to 
be passing from love pastorals and sonnets to a strain from the 
past history of England. A year after Daniel's "Civil Wars," 
appeared Drayton's Tragical Legend of Robert Duke of Nor- 
mandy, with the Legend of Matilda the Chaste, Daughter of 
the Lo?'d Robert Fitzwater, poysoned by King John; a?id the 
Lege?id of Piers Gaveston, the latter two by him newly corrected 
and augmented; and in the same year, 1596 — year of the second 
part of the Faerie Queene, and of Spenser's last publications — 
appeared Drayton's Mortimeriados ; The Lamentable Ciuell 
Warres of Edward the Second and the Barrons — a poem 
afterwards known as the Barons' Wars. It was in stanzas of 
octave rhyme, like that poem on the civil wars of Lancaster and 
York which Daniel had published in part, and was still at work 
upon. The poets chose these themes because they yielded 
much reverse of fortune that could point a moral in the spirit 
illustrated by the still popular Mirror for Magistrates (§ 9). 
In 1598 Drayton again made poetry of history by publishing — 
their idea taken from Ovid — Engla7id's Heroical Epistles— 
letters from Rosamond to Henry II. and Henry II. to Rosa- 
mond, with like pairs of letters between King John and Matilda, 
Mortimer and Queen Isabel, and so forth. 

Henry Constable published in 1592 twenty-three sonnets, 
under the title of Diana; or, the Praises of his Mistres in 
Certaifie Sweete Sonnets: five were added to the next edition 
(1594). Other occasional verses and his Spiritual Sonnets 
bear witness to his ingenuity and sense of music. Constable 



TOA.D. 1599. J MICHAEL DRAYTON. CONSTABLE. DA VIES. 459 

belonged to a good Roman Catholic family, was born about 
1555, became B.A. of St. John's College, Cambridge, 1579, and 
falling, as a Roman Catholic, under suspicion of treasonable 
correspondence with France, left England in 1595. In 1601 or 
1602 he ventured to return, was discovered, and committed to 
the Tower, whence he was not released till the close of 1604. 
He was dead in 16 16. 

81. John Davies— who did not become Sir John till after 
the death of Elizabeth — was born in 1570, third son of John 
Davies, a lawyer at Westbury, in Wiltshire. He was sent to 
Oxford at the age of fifteen, as commoner of Queen's College, 
and thence went to study law at the Middle Temple, but he 
returned to Oxford in 1590 and took his degree of B.A. He was 
called to the Bar in 1595, and in 1596 published a poem on the 
art of dancing, entitled Orchestra. In the Middle Temple John 
Davies had been sometimes under censure for irregularities, and 
in February, 1598, he was expelled the Society for beating one 
Mr. Martin in the Temple Hall. John Davies then went back to 
Oxford and wrote a poem of good thoughts, pithily expressed, 
in quatrains. The poem was called (Know Thyself) Nosce 
Teiftsum. This Oracle Expoimded in Two Elegies. 1. Of 
Humane Knowledge. 2. Of the Soule of Man, and the Im- 
mortalite thereof j dedicated to Elizabeth, and published in 
1599. Its stanzas of elegiac verse were so well packed with 
thought, always neatly contained within the limit of each 
stanza, that we shall afterwards have to trace back to this 
poem the adoption of its measure as, for a time, our "heroic 
stanza." The manner of it may be shown in a few quatrains 
that point the connection between Nosce Teipsum (Know Thy- 
self). and its author's recent disgrace at the Middle Temple t 

" If aught can teach us aught, Affliction's looks 
(Making us pry into ourselves so near), 
Teach us to know ourselves, beyond all books, 
Or all the learned schools that ever were. 

'-' This mistress lately pluck'd me by the ear, 
And many a golden lesson hath me taught ; 
Hath made my senses quick and reason clear; 
Reform'd my will and rectify'd my thought. 

"" So do the winds and thunders cleanse the air: 
So working seas settle and purge the wine : 
So lopp'd and pruned trees do flourish fair: 
So doth the fire the drossy gold refine. 



460 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1590 

" Neither Minerva, nor the learned Muse, 
Nor rules of art, nor precepts of the wise, 
Could in my brain those beams of skill infuse, 
As but the glance of this dame's angry eyes. 

" She within lists my ranging mind hath brought. 
That now beyond myself I will not go; 
Myself am centre of my circling thought, 
Only myself I study, learn, and know." 

Thenceforth there was a change in Davies's career. He 
was a member of the Parliament which met in October, 1601, 
showing liberal interest in the privileges of the House and the? 
liberties of the people. In Trinity term of that year he was 
restored to his old rank in the Temple; and at the death of 
Elizabeth stood ready for a rapid rise in his profession. 

82. "William Camden (§ 16, 65), who was second master 
of Westminster School when he published, in 1586, the first 
edition of his Britannia — a work afterwards much expanded — 
succeeded Dr. Edward Grant as head master in 1593. In 1597 
he published for the use of Westminster boys a Greek Grammar, 
which in course of time went through a hundred editions. In 
the same year he left the school on being appointed Clarencieux 
King-at-Arms. Camden was widely famed for learning, and 
his purity of life and modest kindliness surrounded him with 
friends. 

John Stow (§ 16) still worked at history, and published in 
1598, when more than seventy years old, the first edition of his 
Survey of London — a book of great value. But he had lost 
his best friends, and at the end of Elizabeth's reign he was dis- 
tressed by poverty. 

John Hayward — who became Sir John in the next reign — 
published, in 1599, the first of his historical biographies, as the 
First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie LLII. 
Extetiding to the end of the first yeare of his raigne. It was 
dedicated, with high admiration, to the Earl of Essex, at a time 
when the earl's dealing with the question of King James's suc- 
cession was bringing his head into peril ; and it contained a 
passage on hereditary right in matters of succession that caused 
Elizabeth to imprison the author and bid Francis Bacon search 
the book for any treasonous matter to be found in it. Narra- 
tives and stage presentations of the deposition of Richard II. 
were at this time supposed to have political significance. 
Bacon's report was a good-natured joke : he found no treason 
but much larceny from Tacitus. 



toa.d. 1599-1 HISTORIANS. BACON. RALEIGH. 46 1 

83. Francis Bacon (§ 38, 48, 68), who had sat in Parliament 
for Melcombe Regis and Taunton, became member for Middlesex 
in the Parliament that met in February, 1593. One of the 
first questions before it was the granting of money to provide 
against danger from the Catholic Powers by which England was 
threatened. The Lords asked for a treble subsidy, payable 
within three years, in six instalments. Bacon assented to the 
subsidy, but raised a point of privilege in objection to the joining 
of the Commons with the Upper House in granting it. The point 
of privilege was overruled ; the Lords and Commons did confer ; 
the treble subsidy was granted ; four years instead of three being 
allowed for the payment. Bacon had argued that the payment 
ought to extend over six years, for three reasons— the difficulty, 
the discontent, and the better means of supply than subsidy. 
His speeches on this occasion gave serious offence to the queen. 
He had no longer free access to her at Court, and this displeasure 
made her less ready to give him, over the heads of older lawyers, 
the office of Attorney- General, which presently fell vacant. The 
Earl of Essex, six years younger than Francis Bacon, was then 
looked to by both Anthony and Francis as their patron, and he 
did all that he could to influence the queen in Bacon's favour. 
The queen hesitated; dwelt on Bacon's youth and small ex- 
perience — he was thirty-three — and in Aprils 1594, she gave the 
desired office to Sir Edward Coke, who was already Solicitor- 
General, who had large practice and high reputation as a 
lawyer, and was nine years older than Bacon. But Coke's 
appointment left vacant the office of Solicitor-General. For this 
suit was made with continued zeal, but in November, 1595, it 
was given to Serjeant Fleming. Essex, generous and impulsive, 
wished to make some amends to Bacon for his disappointment, 
and gave him a piece of land, which he afterwards sold for 
;£ 1,800— say about ,£12,000, at the present value of money. 
Before July, 1596, Bacon was made Queen's Counsel. At the 
beginning of May in that year, Sir Thomas Egerton, who had 
been Master of the Rolls, became Lord Keeper. Bacon then 
sought in vain to succeed Egerton as Master of the Rolls. That 
was the year in which the Earl of Essex sailed for Cadiz. 

84. Sir Walter Raleigh (§ 27) went with Essex on that 
expedition. He and Essex had been volunteers in the expedi- 
tion of Drake and N orris (§ 69) to Portugal, which came home 
with much booty. Then the " Shepherd of the Ocean" went to 
Ireland, and came back with his friend Spenser to Court, after 



462 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1590 

planting about his own house at Youghal the first potatoes in 
Ireland, with roots brought from Virginia. In the spring of 
1591 an expedition was sent out under Lord Thomas Howard 
and Raleigh's cousin, Sir Richard Grenville, to intercept the 
fleet which annually brought to Spain its treasure from the 
East. The English cruised about the Azores, where the Spanish 
fleets from the East and the West Indies came together. The 
Spanish fleet was found to be too strong, and Lord Thomas 
Howard ordered his ships to keep together and avoid attack ; 
but Sir Richard Grenville, in the Revenge, believing that others 
would follow, boldly dashed into the enemy's armada, where he 
was left unaided, and fought desperately for fifteen hours with 
fifteen great ships out of a fleet of fifty-five, sinking two and 
doing great damage to others. When the Revenge must needs 
be lost, and Grenville himself was wounded in the brain, he 
ordered his surviving men to blow up the vessel. But the 
Revenge was surrendered, Grenville's wounds were dressed by 
the Spanish surgeons, the Spaniards who stood by marvelling 
at his stout heart. As death drew near he said to them, in 
Spanish, " Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet 
mind, for that I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to da 
that hath fought for his country, queen, religion, and honour ;. 
whereby my soul most joyful departeth out of this body, and 
shall always leave behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and 
true soldier that hath done his duty, as he was bound to do." 
A Report of the Truth of the Fight about the lies of Azores 
this last Sommer Betuuixt the Reuenge, one of her Maiesties 
Shippes, and an Armada of the King of Sfiaine, was published 
by Raleigh in November, 1591. 

Raleigh then had Sherborne Castle given to him, but was 
soon afterwards in the Tower, under her Majesty's displeasure, 
for an amour with Elizabeth Throgmorton, a Maid of Honour, 
whom he married after his release. He was in the Parliament 
of 1593, when a bill was brought in for suppression of the 
Brownists — a sect opposed to prelacy, and claiming equality 
and independence of all congregations. " Root them out," 
said Raleigh, " by all means ; but there are twenty thousand 
of them, and if the men are put to death or banished, 
who is to maintain the wives and children?" Raleigh next 
planned an expedition to Guiana, tempted by the fables about 
El Dorado (the Gilded One, priest or king smeared with oil and 
covered with gold dust, an ideal god of wealth, lord of a city 



toa.d. I597-] o/tf WALTER RALEIGH. FRANCIS BACON. 463 

fabulously rich), and sailed with a little expedition in February, 
I 595? attacked the Spaniards in Trinidad, and destroyed the 
new city of San Jose. He then went up the Orinoco, picked up 
a legend of Amazons, which gave its European name to a great 
river, and, when the rains set in, came home, bringing a young 
cacique with him. Raleigh reached England about the end of 
July, 1595, lived in London in great state, and published, in 1596, 
The Discoverie of the Empyre of Guiana, with a ReIatio?i of the 
Citie of Manoa (which the Spanyards call El Dorado), and of 
the Prouinces of Emeria, Arromaia, Amapaia, &"c. Performed 
in the year 1595. 

In the spring of 1596 the Spanish forces, under Cardinal 
Albert, Archduke of Austria, Spanish Governor of the Nether- 
lands, took Calais before English aid could be sent to Henry IV. 
of France. An English fleet, with a Dutch contingent, sailed 
from Plymouth on the 1st of June, under Essex as commander 
of land forces and Lord Howard of Effingham as commander at 
sea, with Sir Walter Raleigh as Rear- Admiral. It entered the 
harbour of Cadiz, scattered and partly destroyed the fleet — the 
Spaniards themselves firing the large vessels — and left the Duke 
of Medina Sidonia to burn the carracks laden with merchandise 
worth millions, while they were engaged in the capture and sack 
of the town. Essex counselled that they should proceed to 
catch the treasure fleet on its way home, but this counsel was 
overruled, and a few days afterwards the Spanish treasure fleet 
sailed unhurt up the Tagus. The popularity of Essex was 
greatly increased, and Bacon wrote him a long letter on the 
text of Martha troubled about many things when one only was 
needful, and that one was — win the queen. It was a letter of 
astute council as to the management of her Majesty. 

85. Francis Bacon having fallen into debt, cherished, in 
1597, a hope of marrying the rich young widow of Sir William 
Hatton, who died in March of that year. In that year, also, 
Bacon was returned to Parliament as member for Ipswich. 
Essex endeavoured to help him in his widow hunt. The lady, in 
November, 1598, married Sir Edward Coke. In 1597 Essex sailed 
with another expedition to the. Azores, where he was joined by 
Raleigh as Rear- Admiral. Raleigh took the town of Fayal, 
and was accused of breach of discipline ; but nothing more 
came of that expedition, except the chance capture of a few rich 
prizes. When the fleet returned, in October, there had been 
alarm at home of Spanish invasion. A Spanish force had been 



464 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1597 

seen from the coast of Cornwall ; some of its officers had landed 
on the Stilly Islands. But again our loyal English weather had 
confounded the Spaniards, and that danger, the last of its kind, 
had been averted. 

It was in January of this year (1597) that Francis Bacon 
— then thirty-six years old — published, with a dedication to his 
brother, Essay es, Religious Meditations, Places of Perswasion 
and Disswasion. The essays in this first edition were only 
ten in number, and they dealt exclusively with the immediate 
relations of a man to life ; his private use of his own mind ; his 
use of it in relation to the minds of others, in relation to the 
interests of others, in relation to his own interests — personally, 
as in case of money, health, and reputation, and also as they 
were mixed up with the business of mankind. Thus the ten 
essays were — 1. Of Study; 2. Of Discourse; 3. Of Ceremonies 
and Respects ; 4. Of Followers and Friends ; 5. Of Suitors ; 
6. Of Expense ; 7. Of Regiment of Health ; 8. Of Honour and 
Reputation ; 9. Of Faction ; 10. Of Negotiating. The relation 
of man to another world was left designedly beyond the range 
of this first little group of essays ; but that element was sup- 
plied in the same book by twelve essays of another kind — the 
"Religious Meditations" which next followed. These " Medi- 
tationes Sacras " were in Latin; their subjects — 1. The Works 
of God and Man ; 2. The Miracles of our Saviour ; 3. The 
Innocency of the Dove and the Wisdom of the Serpent ; 4. The 
Exaltation of Charity ; 5. The Moderation of Cares ; 6. Earthly 
Hope ; 7. Hypocrites ; 8. Impostors ; 9. Several kinds of Im- 
posture ; 10. Atheism; 11. Heresies; 12. The Church of the 
Scriptures. The third section was formed by a group of what 
may be called ten essays of another kind — " A Table of Coulers, 
or Apparances of Good and Euil, and their Degrees as Places 
of Perswasion and Disswasion ; and their several Fallaxes, and 
the Elenches of them." Colours meant circumstances which are 
likely to produce popular impressions and to sway the judgment 
of a weak man, or of a strong man not fully considering and 
pondering a matter. They persuade to error, and they also 
quicken the persuasion to accept a truth. Therefore, said 
Bacon, " to make a true and safe judgment nothing can be of 
greater use and defence to the mind than the discovery and 
reprehension of these colours, showing in what cases they hold 
and in what cases they deceive : which, as it cannot be done but 
out of a very universal knowledge of the nature of things, so 



a.d. 1597. ] FIRST EDITION OF BACON'S ESSAYS. 4^5 

being performed, it so cleareth a man's judgment and election 
as it is the less apt to slide into error." Elenches are specious 
arguments. Bacon takes a colourable form, such as this — " Let 
us not wander into generalities, let us compare particular with 
particular, " submits it to an intellectual analysis, and points out 
where its fallacies may lie ; illustrating his argument with 
images that would themselves have force to persuade or dis- 
suade. Thus the form, " Let us not wander into generalities, 
let us compare particulars with particulars," is met in three 
ways, which are illustrated by these three examples — " The 
blossom of May is generally better than the blossom of March; 
and yet the best blossom of March is better than the best 
blossom of May." " In many armies, if the matter should be 
tried by duel between two champions, the victory should go 
on one side, and yet if it be tried by the gross it would go of the 
other side." " Generally metal is more precious than stone, and 
yet a diamond is more precious than gold." 

The little book, no bigger than the palm of a man's hand, 
in which Bacon made his first appearance as an essayist, is thus, 
throughout, an illustration of that genius for analysis applied to 
the life of man which he applied in his philosophy to Nature, 
He used the word "essay" in its exact sense. The Latin 
exigere meant to test very exactly, to apply to a standard, 
weight or measure. The late Latin word exagium meant a 
weighing, or a standard weight; thence came Italian saggio r 
a proof, trial, sample ; and assaggiare, to prove or try ; whence 
the French essay, and the English double forms, "assay" and 
"essay." An assay of gold is an attempt to ascertain and 
measure its alloys and to determine accurately its character 
and value. An essay of anything in human nature submitted 
it to a like process within the mind : it was an " essay of" some- 
thing, and not as we write, now that the true sense of the word 
is obscured, an " essay on." Strictly in that sense Bacon used 
the word, and the essays, at which we shall find his work 
running side by side with the development of his philosophy, 
have therefore a definite relation to it. The style of these brief 
essays, in which every sentence was compact with thought and 
polished in expression until it might run alone through the world 
as a maxim, had all the strength of euphuism and none of its 
weakness. The sentences were all such as it needed ingenuity 
to write ; but this was the rare ingenuity of wisdom. Each 
essay, shrewdly discriminative, contained a succession of wise^ 

E E 



4 66 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1537 

thoughts exactly worded. Take, for example, the first form of 
the first words of the first essay in this first edition : " Studies 
serue for pastimes, for ornaments, and for abilities. Their chiefe 
use for pastime is in priuateness and retiring ; for ornamente is 
in discourse, and for abilitie is in iudgement. For expert men 
can execute, but learned men are fittest to iudge or censure. To 
spend too much time in them is sloath, to vse them too much 
for ornament is affectation : to make iudgement wholly by their 
rules is the humour of a scholler. They perfect Nature, and are 
perfected by experience. Craftie men contemne them, simple 
men admire them, wise men vse them : For they teach not their 
owne vse, but that is a wisedome without them : and aboue them 
wonne by obseruation. Reade not to contradict, nor to belieue, 
but to waigh and consider." And so forth ; words like these 
being themselves considered by their writer and made more 
weighty in subsequent editions. Small as the book was, the 
quality of Bacon's mind was proved by this first publication of 
his essays. 

86. Elizabeth's faithful Minister, William Cecil, Lord 
Burghley, died in August, 1598 ; Philip II. of Spain died a month 
later. But Spain still threatened England. Hugh O'Neale, Earl 
of Tyrone, aided by Spain, was in arms in Ireland. Sir John 
N orris had died under the fatigues of conflict with him. The 
Earl of Essex — frank and generous, but hot-headed, obstinate, 
and indiscreet — was made Lord-Deputy of Ireland, with large 
power. He left London for Dublin, openly confident of his 
future achievements, at the end of March, 1599. In May he 
marched out of Dublin with 16,000 men. After showy move- 
ments in Munster that seemed purposeless, for his work lay in 
Ulster, he had, early in September, a force in Ulster facing 
that of the rebel army ; but after a conference with Tyrone 
he assented to a six weeks' armistice, and agreed to make 
known to the English Government such conditions of peace 
from Tyrone as a conqueror might have dictated. Then he 
dispersed his army. The queen wrote her disapproval ; Essex 
left his command to hurry to her, and on the 28th of September, 
"about ten o'clock in the morning, alighted at the court-gate 
in post, and made all haste up to the presence, and so to the 
privy chamber, and stayed not till he came to the queen's bed- 
chamber, where he found the queen newly up, with her hair 
about her face .... and he so full of dirt and mire that his 
very face was full of it." He was commanded in the evening 



to a.d. 1601O FRANCIS BACON. 467 

to keep his chamber. Next day he was examined before the 
Council, and was put under easy restraint— first with the Lord- 
Keeper, then in his own house. Tyrone rose in rebellion again ; 
another lord-deputy was sent, whose action was efficient. Essex 
was then suspended from his offices of Privy Councillor, Lord- 
Marshal, and Master of the Ordnance. In August he was 
released from custody, but forbidden to come to Court. His 
monopoly of sweet wines expired, and Elizabeth would not 
renew the patent. Then his quick temper became rebellious. 
He had been in correspondence with James VI. of Scotland — 
by cypher in the hand of Francis Bacon's brother Anthony — to 
force from Elizabeth, now sixty-eight years old, a recognition of 
her successor. His impulsive dealing with this question perhaps 
introduced the considerations that had paralyzed his Irish 
policy. But Essex now passed into open rebellion. On the 8th 
of February, 1601, he and three hundred gentlemen, including 
Shakespeare's friend, the Earl of Southampton, were at Essex 
House. The queen sent the Lord- Keeper and other officers of 
State to ask the reason of the gathering. Essex contrived to 
lock them up in his library, and then, with his adherents, he 
rode out to raise the Londoners. His object was to surprise the 
Court, seize the queen's person, and compel her to dismiss her 
present advisers and then call a Parliament. But he overrated 
his own influence with the people, and after some lives had been 
lost, retreated by water to Essex House, burnt some papers, and 
was forced to surrender ; that night the Earls of Essex am? 
Southampton were prisoners in the Tower. Queen's counsel, 
Bacon one of them, were called upon to inquire into this act of 
treason, by examining the prisoners. They worked for seven 
days, in parties of not more than three, taking the several 
prisons in succession. When Essex was arraigned, the evidence 
against him was produced by Coke, and Coke's way of letting it 
Tun off into side issues was rather favourable to the accused. 
Then Bacon rose, not being called upon to rise, pointed more 
strongly the accusations against his friend and benefactor, and 
brought the evidence back into a course more perilous to his 
life. " As Cain," said Bacon, " that first murderer, took up an 
excuse for his fact, shaming to outface it with impudency, thus 
the earl made his colour the severing some men and councillors 
from her Majesty's favour, and the fear he stood in of his pre- 
tended enemies, lest they should murder him in his house." 
The evidence proceeded, and Coke's method again gave the earl 

E E 2 



468 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1577 

some advantage. Bacon then rose and said, " I have never yet 
seen in any case such favour shown to any prisoner ; so many 
digressions, such delivering of evidence by fractions, and so silly 
a defence of such great and notorious treasons." And he pro- 
ceeded again to urge the main accusation home against Essex. 
On the 25th of February, 1601, Essex was beheaded, by his own 
wish privately, within the Tower. Upon Lord Southampton 
sentence was not executed, but he remained a prisoner during 
the rest of Elizabeth's reign. Justification of the execution of 
the Earl of Essex was entrusted to the advocate who had 
pressed with most energy the case against him at his trial. 
Materials were supplied in " twenty-five papers concerning the 
Earl of Essex's treasons, &c, to be delivered to Mr. Francis 
Bacon, for Her Majesty's service ;" and Bacon's hand, following 
particular instructions as to the manner of treatment, drew up 
for the public A Declaration of the Practices and Treasons 
attempted and committed by Robert late Earle of Essex and 
his Complices. Before its publication (in 1601) this declaration 
was discussed by councillors and queen, and underwent the 
alterations incident to such discussion. Bacon had been living 
beyond his means, and was still seeking advancement. In 
September, 1598, he had been arrested for debt, but in the 
spring of 1601 his worldly means were somewhat improved by 
the death of his brother Anthony. He obtained a gift of ^1,200, 
the fine of one of the accomplices of Essex, but he obtained no 
higher reward of his services before the death of Elizabeth, on 
the 24th of March, 1603. 

87. Francis Bacon, our first essayist, was preceded in 
European literature only by Montaigne. Montaigne had a 
translator in John Florio. It has been suggested, without 
reason, that in the Holofernes of Love's Labour's Lost, Shakes- 
peare was ridiculing Florio. " Resolute John Florio," as he 
wrote himself, was an active man of Italian descent, born in 
London in Henry VIII.'s reign, who taught Italian and French 
at Oxford, and was in high repute at Court. He published, in 
1578, Florio his First Fruites; which yeelde familiar speech, 
merie Prouerbes, wit tie sentences, and golden sayings. Also, 
a pe7-fect Introduction to the Italian and English Tongues. In 
1 591 followed Florio's Second Frvtes. To which is annexed his 
Garden of Recreation, yeelding six thousand Italian Prouerbs. 
At the end of Elizabeth's reign, in 1603, appeared The Essays of 
Michael, Lord of Montaigne, done into English by John Florio. 



toa.d. 1600.] TRANSLATORS. RICHARD HOOKER. 469 

Upon a copy of this book Shakespeare's autograph has been 
found, and Shakespeare's knowledge of Montaigne is shown in 
the Tempest, where the ideal commonwealth of the old Lord 
Gonzalo (Act ii. sc. i) corresponds closely, in word as well as in 
thought, with Florio's Montaigne. Of course, also, the great 
poems of Ariosto and Tasso were translated. 

Sir John Harington, born at Helston, near Bath, in 
1 561, and educated at Eton and Cambridge, published at the 
age of thirty, in 1591, Orlando Furioso in English Heroical 
Verse. Harington was knighted on the field by the Earl of 
Essex. 

» Tasso had in Elizabeth's reign two translators. The first 
was Richard Carew, whose Godfrey of Bulloigne, or the 
Reeouerie of Hierusalem appeared in 1594; the second was 
Edward Fairfax, whose translation appeared with the same 
titles in 1600. It is in the octave rhyme of the original, one of 
the most musical and poetical of all English translations into 
verse. Fairfax was the second son, perhaps illegitimate, of Sir 
Thomas Fairfax, of Denton, in Yorkshire. He lived as a retired 
scholar at Newhall, in Knaresborough Forest, and, later in life, 
educated with his own children those of his brother Ferdinand, 
Lord Fairfax. One of these nephews became famous as the 
Fairfax of the Civil Wars. Edward Fairfax himself lived into 
the reign of Charles I., and died in 1632. 

88. The literature of the Church of England was represented 
in the latter years of Elizabeth's reign by Richard Hooker, 
who was born at Heavitree, near Exeter, about 1553. He was 
to have been apprenticed to a trade, but his aptness for study 
caused him to be kept at school by his teacher, who persuaded 
young Richard Hooker's well-to-do uncle, John, then Chamber- 
lain of Exeter, to put him to college for a year. John Hooker, 
a friend of Bishop Jewel's (§ 14), introduced his nephew to that 
bishop, who, finding the boy able and his parents poor, sent 
him at the age of fifteen to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. 
Edwin Sandys, Bishop of London, heard from Jewel the praises 
of young Richard Hooker, and though himself a Cambridge 
man, sent his son to Oxford that he might have Hooker, whose 
age then was nineteen, for tutor and friend. Other pupils came, 
and Hooker was on the most pleasant relations with them. In 
1577 he became M.A. and Fellow of his college. 

89. A friend of Hooker's at college, about four years older 
than himself, was Sir Henry Savile, who had graduated at 



47° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1S79 , 

Brazenose and removed on a Fellowship to Merton College. 
Savile afterwards travelled on the Continent. On his return he 
gave lessons to the queen in Greek and Mathematics, and be- 
came Warden of Merton College. In 1581 Savile published, at 
Oxford, a translation of The Ende of Nero and Beginning 0} 
Galba, Fower Bookes of the Histories of Cornelius Tacitus; 
The Life of Agricola. In 1596, Savile added to his office of 
Warden of Merton College that of Provost of Eton, and in the- 
same year published Rerum Anglicarum Script ores post Bedam 
prcscipui — a folio containing the works of some of the old his- 
torians after Bede; namely, William of Malmesbury, Henry of 
Huntingdon, Roger Hoveden, Ethelwerd, and Ingulphus of 
Croyland. The death of his son caused Savile to devote his 
property to the encouragement of learning, and, in the reign of 
James I., in 1619, he founded at Oxford the Savilian professor- 
ship of Astronomy and Geometry. Sir Henry Savile died at 
Eton in 1622. 

90. Richard Hooker, whom we left to follow the career of 
his friend Savile, was appointed, in 1579, to read the Hebrew 
lecture in his university, and did so for the next three years. 
He took holy orders, quitted Oxford, and married a scolding wife. 
He was shy and shortsighted, and had allowed her to be chosen 
for him. Of himself it is said that he never was seen to be 
angry. In 1584 Hooker was presented to the parsonage of 
Drayton-Beauchamp, near Aylesbury ; and there he was found 
by his old pupil, Edwin Sandys, with Horace in his hand, 
relieving guard over his few sheep out of doors, and indoors 
called from his guests to rock the cradle. Sandys reported 
Hooker's condition to his father, who had become Archbishop 
of York. In 1585 the office of Master of the Temple became 
vacant, and Hooker, then thirty-four years old, was, through the 
Archbishop's influence, called from his poor country parsonage 
to take it. 

When, in 1583, good Archbishop Grindal (§ 33) was suc- 
ceeded at Canterbury by John Whitgift, there was a return of 
bitterness against the Nonconformists, with extreme claim of all 
rights of the Church. This intensified the controversies of the 
time. The lecturer at the Temple for evening sermons, when 
Hooker became Master, was Walter Travers, a minister of 
blameless life, a correspondent of Beza's, and a warm supporter 
of opinions cherished by the Puritans. He was popular in the 
Temple, had hoped also himself to be chosen Master, and 



to a.d. 1594.] HOOKER'S ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY. 47I 

obtain increase of influence for his opinions. In Hooker the 
Temple had a Master who was faithful to the ecclesiastical 
system of the English Church. In the Temple church on 
Sundays Hooker preached in the morning, Travers in the 
evening, and, as it was said, " the forenoon sermon spake Can- 
terbury, the afternoon Geneva." This continued until the Arch- 
bishop forbade Travers's preaching. Petition was in vain made 
to the Privy Council; and this led to discontent. The petition 
was printed privately, and published. Hooker then published 
an Answer to the Petition of Mr. Travers, and was drawn into 
a controversy, which led his pure and quiet mind to the resolve 
that he would argue out in detail his own sense of right and 
justice in the Established Church system of his country, in 
Eight Books of the Law of Ecclesiastical Polity. That he 
might do this he asked for removal to some office in which 
he might be at peace. He wrote to the Archbishop, " My Lord, 
when I lost the freedom of my cell, which was my college, yet I 
found some degree of it in my quiet country parsonage : but I 
am weary of the noise and oppositions of this place; and 
indeed, God and Nature did not intend me for contentions, but 
for study and quietness. My Lord, my particular contests with 
Mr. Travers here have proved the more unpleasant to me, 
because I believe him to be a good man; and that belief hath 
occasioned me to examine mine own conscience concerning his 
opinions." Study had not only satisfied him, but he had 
" begun a treatise, in which I intend a justification of the laws 
of our ecclesiastical polity; in which design God and his holy 
angels shall at the last great Day bear me that witness which 
my conscience now does, that my meaning is not to provoke 
any, but rather to satisfy all tender consciences ; and I shall 
never be able to do this but where I may study, and pray for 
God's blessing upon my endeavours, and keep myself in peace 
and privacy, and behold God's blessings spring out of my 
mother earth, and eat my own bread without opposition; and, 
therefore, if your Grace can judge me worthy of such a favour, 
let me beg it, that I may perfect what I have begun." Hooker 
accordingly was made, in 1591, rector of Boscombe, in Wilt- 
shire, a parish with few people in it, four miles from Amesbury, 
and was instituted also, as a step to better preferment, to a 
minor prebend of small value in Salisbury. At Boscombe 
Hooker finished the Four Books of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical 
Politie, published in 1594, with "A Preface to them that Seeke 



472 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1594 

(as they tearme it) the Reformation of Lawes and Orders 
Ecclesiasticall in the Church of England." These four books 
treated, 1. Of laws in general; 2. Of the use of Divine law con- 
tained in Scripture, whether that be the only law which ought 
to serve for our direction in all things without exception; 3. Of 
laws concerning Ecclesiastical Polity, whether the form thereof 
be in Scripture so set down that no addition or change is 
lawful ; and, 4. Of general exceptions taken against the Lawes 
of the English Church Polity as being Popish, and banished 
out of certain reformed churches. What Hooker said of 
Travers, Travers had like reason to say of Hooker, for this was 
the work of a good man, in the eyes of thousands whom it may 
not have convinced on points of discipline ; a work perfect in 
spirit, earnest, eloquent, closely reasoned, and in the best sense 
of the word religious. Hooker's opening argument upon the 
origin of laws among men has interest from its close relation to 
the later arguments of Hobbes and Locke upon the origin and 
nature of the rights of kings. After reasoning that we derive 
our knowledge from experience and reasoning, and that the 
two principal fountains of human action are knowledge and 
will, he says that we find out for ourselves laws, by reason, to 
guide the will to that which is good, and further to supply those 
defects and imperfections which are in us living singly and 
solely by ourselves, we are naturally induced to seek com- 
munion and fellowship with others. "Thus arose political 
societies among men naturally equal. Men reasoned that strifes 
and troubles would be endlesse, except they gave their common 
consent all to be ordered by some whom they should agree upon, 
without which consent there were no reasons that one man 
should take upon him to be lord or iudge over another ; because 
although there be, according to the opinion of some very great 
and iudicious men, a kinde of naturall right in the noble, wise, 
and vertuous, to governe them which are of servile disposition ; 
neuerthelesse for manifestation of this their right, and men's 
more peaceable contentment on both sides, the assent of them 
who are to be governed seemeth necessary." 

In 1595 Richard Hooker left Boscombe for tne rectory of 
Bishopsbourne, three miles from Canterbury, where he spent 
the rest of his life. In 1597 appeared the fifth book of his 
Ecclesiastical Polity, which was longer than all the other four 
together. He died in 1600, having, while his health failed, 
desired only to live till he had finished the remaining three 



-ro A.D. 1599.] RICHARD HOOKER. JOSEPH HALL. 473 

books of the work, for which his life seemed to have been given 
him. His health suffered the more for his labour at them, but 
he did complete the remaining three books, though without 
the revision given to the preceding five, and they were pub- 
lished, some years after his death, in 1618. 

91. There were in Elizabeth's reign two brothers Fletcher, 
Richard and Giles, whose children are more interesting than 
themselves. Richard Fletcher became D.D., and bishop suc- 
cessively of Bristol, Worcester, and London. He attended at 
the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, angered the queen by his 
second marriage, smoked much tobacco, and was the father of 
John Fletcher, in the next reign, friend and fellow- writer, as a 
dramatist, with Francis Beaumont. Richard's brother, Giles 
Fletcher, became LL.D., was employed by Elizabeth as Com- 
missioner in Scotland, Germany, and the Low Countries, was 
sent as ambassador to Russia, and published, in 1591, a book 
Of the Russe Com?non Wealth, with dedication to the queen. It 
was quickly suppressed, " lest it might give offence to a prince 
in amity with England." Dr. Giles Fletcher thought he had 
found in the Tartars the lost tribes of Israel. He became 
treasurer of St. Paul's, secretary to the City of London, and 
Master of the Court 01 Requests. He had two sons, Phineas 
and Giles Fletcher, afterwards known as poets. These, then, 
were first cousins of John Fletcher the dramatist. 

92. Shakespeare was in his maturity of power, and a new 
generation of dramatists was growing towards manhood, when 
Joseph Hall published his satires. Joseph Hall was born in 
1574, at Bristow Park by Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and educated at 
Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 1597, at the age of twenty- 
three, he published Virgidemiarvm, Six Bookes j First Three 
Bookes of toothlesse Satyrs : 1. Poeticallj 2. Academicall; 
3. Morall. In the following year the work was completed by 
Virgidemiaritm ; the Three Last Bookes of Byti?ig Satyrs. It 
means nothing particular to say that these satires were burnt 
by order of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Whitgift and Ban- 
croft, Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London, as 
censors of the press, distinguished themselves, in 1599, by 
ordering the burning of much literature, Marlowe's Ovid and 
his Satires, Marston's Pygmalion* Hall's Satires, the epigrams 
of Davies and others, the tracts of Nash and Harvey, and 
decreeing that no satires or epigrams should, be printed for the 
future 



474 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERA TURE. [a.d. 1597- 

Censorship of the press by the Church came in with printing. 
The ecclesiastical superintendence introduced in 1479 and 1496, 
was more completely established by a Bull of Leo X. in 151 5, 
which required bishops and inquisitors to examine all books 
before printing, and to suppress heretical opinions. At the 
Reformation this practice was continued, under authority, and 
assumed now by the Crown as part of its prerogative, and 
delegated to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of 
London. Printing was also restrained by patents and mono- 
polies. In Elizabeth's time it was interdicted in all parts of 
England, except London, Oxford, and Cambridge, and the 
presses there were limited in number. 

Joseph Hall's six books, Virgidemiarum, i.e., of rod-harvests, 
stripes or blows, were the work of a clever young man who 
had read Juvenal and Persius and the satires of Ariosto, and 
who, because he was the first to write English satire in the 
manner of Juvenal, ignorantly believed himself to be the first, 
English satirist. " I first adventure," he said in his prologue — 

" I first adventure, follow me who list, 
And be the second English satirist." 

The mistake is of no consequence. Hall's satires are in 
rhyming couplets of ten-syllabled lines ; he thought English 
rhyme inferior to Latin quantity, but saw that the Latin metres 
could not be applied to English verse, and laughed at Stanihurst 

Whoever saw a colt, wanton and wild, 
Yok'd with a slow foot ox on fallow field, 
Can right areed how handsomely besets 
Dull spondees with the English dactylets. 
If Jove speak English in a thund'ring cloud, 
Thwick thwack, and riff raff, roars he out aloud. 
Fie on the forged mint that did create 
New coin of words never articulate ! " 

Hall laughed at the rising drama, crying — 

" Shame that the Muses should be bought and sold 
For every peasant's brass on each scaffold." 

He laughed at what he called "pot fury of the dramatists.'' 

" One higher pitch'd doth set his soaring thought 
On crowned kings, that fortune hath low brought : 
Or some upreared high aspiring swaine, 
As it might be the Turkish Tamburlaine : 
Then weeneth he his base drink-drowned spright 
Rapt to the threefold loft of heaven hight, 



toa.d. 1598.] HALUS SATIRES. SYLVESTER'S DU BARTAS. 475, 

When he conceives upon his feigned stage 
The stalking steps of his great personage, 
Graced with huff-cap terms and thund'ring threats 
That his poor hearer's hair quite upright sets." 

But while Hall attacked the "terms Italianate, big-sounding 
sentences and words of state " upon the stage, he paid homage 
to Spenser. 

" Let no rebel satyr dare traduce 
Th' eternal legends of thy faerie muse, 
Renowned Spenser : whom no earthly wight 
Dares once to emulate, much less dares despight." 

Only he paired in the next line Du Bartas with Ariostor 
" Salust of France and Tuscan Ariost." The satirist in the 
golden time of Elizabethan vigour talked as usual of the good 
old times that were gone, when luxury was not, and our 

" Grandsires' words savoured of thrifty leeks 
Or manly garlicke. 

But thou canst mask in garish gauderie, 

To suit a foole's far-fetched liverie. 

A French head joyn'd to necke Italian : 

Thy thighs from Germanie, and brest from Spain : 

An Englishman in none, a foole in all : 

Many in one, and one in seyerall. 

Then men were men ; but now the greater part 

Beasts are in life, and women are in heart." 

If we go back to Occleve (ch. v. § 8), or farther back to 
Gower (ch. iv. § 32), we find that the note has always been the 
same; sound and true in the steady fixing of attention upon 
vices and follies to be conquered (since there is small hope for 
a people that will only praise itself), but with innocent delusion 
of a bygone golden age. Hall's golden age, however, is not 
bygone ; it is to be found in Spain, if the test of it be a relish for 
garlic. Joseph Hall obtained the living of Hawstead, Suffolk, 
but resigned it for the living of Waltham Holy Cross, in Essex. 
This he held for two-and-twenty years, while obtaining, as we 
shall find, after Elizabeth's death, other promotions. 

93. We part, in Elizabeth's reign, from " Salust of France/*" 
at the year 1598, when Joshua Sylvester, then thirty-five 
years old, translated his Diuine Weekes and Works (§ 35, 52). 
Sylvester had begun in 1590, by publishing a translation of the 
poem of Du Bartas upon the Battle of Ivry, A Canticle of the 
Victorie obtained by the French King Henrie the Fourth at 
Yvry. Translated by Jostia Siluester, M archa?it-aduenturer. 



47^ A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1596 

He had added another piece to that in 1592. There had been 
other translators from the French poet. In 1584, Thomas 
Hudson had published at Edinburgh a translation of his History 
of Judith, made by command of James VI. Another of these 
translators was William Lisle, of Wilbraham, who published a 
part of The Second Week of Du Bartas in 1596, dedicated to 
Lord Howard of Effingham, added the Colonies in 1598, and 
translated, in all, four books. Another of the translators, at the 
end of Elizabeth's reign and beginning of the reign of James 
in England, was Thomas Winter. In verses of praise prefixed 
to Sylvester's translation, Joseph Hall said — 

" Bartas was some French angel, girt with Bayes : 
And thou a Bartas art in English Layes. 
Whether is more ? Mee seems (the sooth to say'n) 
One Bartas speaks, in Tongues, in Nations, twain." 

And Ben Jonson wrote (Du Bartas died in 1590) — 

" Behold ! the reverend shade of Bartas stands 
Before my thought and (in thy right) commands 
That to the world I publish for him, This : 
Bartas doth wish thy English now were His. 
So well in that are his inventions wrought, 
As his will now be the Translation thought, 
Thine the Original ; and France shall boast 
No more those mayden glories shee hath lost." 

But it is to be remembered that Du Bartas owed his repute 
with us not only to his skill as a writer according to the 
ephemeral taste of the time, but also as a French Huguenot for 
his accord with the religious feeling of the English people, and 
because his song was always upon sacred themes. 

94. Ben Jonson has just been quoted. In 1598 he had begun 
to write. He was ten years younger than Shakespeare, and in 
the closing year of Elizabeth's reign, when Shakespeare had 
risen to the fulness of his power, Ben Jonson was beginning his 
career. We have now to end the sketch of our literature in 
Elizabeth's reign with some account of the latter years of the 
Elizabethan Drama. To avoid confusion let us take that 
word to mean simply, the English drama during the reign of 
Elizabeth. It falls naturally into two sections, which we may 
call Earlier and Later Elizabethan. The Earlier Elizabethafi 
Drama dates from the first plays at the beginning of Elizabeth's 
reign to the date of Spenser's latest publications, the year of the 
second part of the Faerie Queene, 1596. It includes Gorboduc 
and the earliest plays, plays of Lodge, Peele, Lyly, Greene, 



to A.n.i 59 Z.'] LATER ELIZABETHAN DRAMA. SHAKESPEARE. 477 

Marlowe, and the early works of Shakespeare. The Later 
Elizabethan Drama, from 1596 to 1603, has in its centre Shake- 
speare, become master of his art ; a few of the elder writers who 
add to the number of their works ; with a few younger men, Ben 
Jonson, Marston, Dekker, and Hey wood, who began to write 
plays under Elizabeth ; and one older man, George Chapman, 
who started later in life as a playwright, and then took his place 
among Later Elizabethan dramatists. With Shakespeare, these 
younger men, and George Chapman, passed as active workers 
into the reign of James the First. But in that reign the number 
of the dramatists was soon increased by poets who had been 
young men or children under Elizabeth. These writers were 
educated more or less by the same influences that had produced 
the great Elizabethan poets. In their writing there was an 
Elizabethan character, but they wrote their plays in the reigns 
of James I. and Charles I. Such were Beaumont and Fletcher, 
Webster, Massinger, Ford, and Shirley. 

95. William Shakespeare (§ 37, 47, 71), in 1596, buried 
at Stratford his only son Hamnet, twelve years old. A grant of 
arms to his father in that year (about which there was another 
note in 1599) indicates that the poet was then prospering. In 
1597, three plays of his were published in quarto, Richard 1 Z, 
Richard III., and Romeo and Juliet. Those plays of Shake- 
speare which were printed in his lifetime were in quarto form, 
and known to students as the early quartos. They were not 
corrected by the author. Even Ariosto, as we have seen (ch. vi. 
§ 40), after the minutest care in writing his Orlando, had no 
oversight of the business of publication. In Easter term of the 
same year, 1597, Shakespeare began to form the home in his 
native town to which he had looked forward. He bought for 
sixty pounds, New Place, the best house in the line of the main 
street of the town, with two barns and two gardens behind, in 
the direction of the Avon. It had been built by Sir Hugh 
Clopton in the time of Henry VII., and it was bought by 
Shakespeare of William Underhill, a man of good position, 
whose home was close by, at Idlicote, but who was himself 
buying land about Stratford, and seeking to establish a family. 
Underhill died a few months after he had sold the house to 
Shakespeare. New Place was in Chapel Street, at the corner 
of a lane, Chapel Lane, leading towards the river. At the 
opposite corner was, and is, a church called the Guild Chapel, 
or Chapel of the Holy Cross, from which the street and lane 



47$ A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1597 

were named, and founded also in the reign of Henry VII. by 
Sir Hugh Clopton. On the other side of the Guild Chapel was 
the grammar school. Thus the church stood between Shake- 
speare and the schooh In 1597 also, while Shakespeare was 
establishing this home for himself in Stratford he was helping 
his father and mother, for there was a bill filed in Chancery 
by John Shakespeare and his wife to recover Ashbies (§ 37) 
from John, the son of Edward Lambert. There is also other 
evidence that by this time Shakespeare's prudent management, 
and his success in London, had enabled him — the first man in 
our literature who did so — to save money earned, not indirectly, 
by the free use of his genius. A record, dated October, 1598, 
shows him to have been assessed on property in the parish of 
St Helen's, Bishopsgate. The plays of his printed in quarto, in 
1598, were Love's Labour's Lost and Part I. of King Henry IV., 
but there is other evidence to show what plays of his had by 
that date been acted. 

John Bodenham published in 1598 a collection of senten- 
tious extracts from ancient moral philosophers, &c., called 
Politeuphnia {Wits' Co?mnonwealth). It was designed chiefly 
for the benefit of young scholars, was popular, and often after- 
wards reprinted. In the same year, 1598, Francis Meres, 
M.A., published Palladis Tamia {Wits' Treasury, being the 
Second Part of Wits' Commonwealth), i2mo, of 174 leaves, 
euphuistic, as its title indicates, and also designed for instruction 
of the young. This book contained a brief comparison of Eng- 
lish poets with Greeks, Latins, and Italians, and in the course 
of it Meres wrote : " As the soule of Euphorbus was thought 
to live in Pythagoras, so the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in 
mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare; witnes his Venus 
and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private 
friends, &c. As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for 
comedy and tragedy among the Latines, so Shakespeare among 
the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage ; for 
comedy, witnes his Gentleme?i of Verona, his Errors, his Love's 
Labor's Lost, his Love's Labour's Wofine" [probably a former 
name of All's Well that Ends Well], " his Mids7immers Night 
Dreame, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy, his Richard 
the 2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King John, Titus 
Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet. As Epius Stolo said 
that the Muses would speake with Plautus' tongue, if they 
would speak Latin, so I say that the Muses would speak 



to a.d. 1600.] WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 479 

with Shakespeare's fine filed phrase, if they would speake 
English." 

In 1598 Shakespeare was thirty-four years old; he had 
been at work in London for about twelve years, of which the 
first six had been years of patient upward struggle, and the 
other six had been years of increasing power and prosperity. 
He had written chronicle plays, in which his muse did " like 
himself heroically sound ;" had dealt playfully in Love's Labour's 
Lost with the euphuism of his time; had found out the mar- 
vellous wealth of his imagination " glancing from heaven to 
earth, from earth to heaven " in the Midsummer Night's Dream; 
had shown in Romeo and Juliet the innocent beauty of young 
love breathing its harmonies among the petty feuds and hatreds 
of mankind ; and in the Merchant of Ve7iice he had risen to a 
pure expression of that spirit of religion which, for many in his 
time was obscured by passions of the conflict between creed 
and creed. What the Capulets and Montagues meant in 
Romeo and Juliet, the Jew and Christian meant in the Merchant 
of Venicej but in that play the central thought to which every 
scene relates gave prominence to the relation between Shylock 
and Antonio. 

When he had done his 'prentice work, and become master 
of his craft, every play of Shakespeare's became a true poem, 
and had the spiritual unity that is in every great work of art. 
Each play had its own theme in some essential truth of life, 
which is its soul expressed in action, and with which every 
detail is in exquisite- accord. 

96. In the Merchant of Venice, for example, Shakespeare 
dealt in his own way with the problem of life. It opens with a 
vague foreshadowing of evil in a merchant with his wealth upon 
the waves. There is rapid advance of the story, the very first 
lines pointing towards the event on which the action of the play 
depends ; but the narrative all springs up naturally in a dialogue 
that represents the cheerful intercourse of life. This genial air 
is, as it were, the atmosphere of the whole play, softens all its 
didactic outlines, and pervades especially its opening and close. 
The dialogue in the first scene, while firm, as it is throughout, to 
the story-telling, abounds chiefly in suggestion of the different 
ways in which men variously tempered take what comes to 
them in life, including those 

" Whose visages 
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond, 



4§0 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. i 59 S 

And do a wilful stillness entertain, 
With purpose to be dress'd in art.opinion 
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit, 
As who should say, ' I am. Sir Oracle, 
And when I ope my lips let no dog bark.' " 

The social geniality deepens at the end of the first scene into 
the close intercourse of friendship between Antonio and Bassanio. 
There is here a double purpose answered. It pertains to the 
essence of the play that a firm friendship between man and man 
should be at the root of it, but this friendship unites also the 
two men, who serve as centres to the two parts of the story : 
the old story of the caskets, used by Shakespeare for a solving 
of life's problem from its human side ; and the old story of the 
pound of flesh, through which he added the diviner sense of 
duty. 

Bassanio sought Portia, that lot in life which is the ideal of 
us all: 

" Nor is the wide world ignorant of her worth, 
For the four winds blow in from every coast 
Renowned suitors, and her sunny locks 
Hang on her temples like a golden fleece ; 
Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchos' strand, 
And many Jasons come in quest of her." 

When we pass in the next scene to Belmont the story-telling 
is continued rapidly, and there is the light genial air of playful 
intercourse still softening the firm expression of the main idea. 
Thus the dialogue between Portia and Nerissa plays over the 
conditions of life and temper that affect right search for a good 
life. They, it is lightly suggested, who have a right love for it 
will choose their way in the pursuit of it according to God's 
meaning, and then follow whimsical sketches of some national 
ideas of happiness proper to the Neapolitan, the Bavarian, 
Frenchman, Englishman. The scene ends with mention of 
Bassanio, " a scholar and a soldier," whole worker, mind and 
body, through whom we shall get the solution of this part of the 
problem. 

Still never forgetting that he has a story to tell, and that this 
must not stand still, all thought being expressed in it and none 
merely scattered round about it, Shakespeare then takes up 
the second of the two threads from which the plot is woven, 
advancing rapidly the story of the bond, while he subtly prepares 
the mind of spectator or reader for the reverse of Antonio's 
fortune and for the antagonism to come. Then Jew and 



toa.d. 1600.] SHAKESPEARE'S "MERCHANT OF VENICE." 48 1 

Christian are brought face to face, and there is strong marking 
of the enmity of each to each. Wrongs suffered by Jews at the 
hands of Christians are, in Shylock's speech beginning, " Signor 
Antonio, many a time and oft," given as ground for Shylock's 
bitterness. Antonio replies with Christian disdain and in- 
tolerance. He has called Shylock dog, and says, — 

" I dm as like to call thee so again, 
To spit on thee again, and spurn thee too." 

The first act closes with Antonio's acceptance of the bond, 
suggested in the idleness of malice when there is little or no 
prospect of its enforcement. But the scene opens and closes 
with a pointing of attention to the ships that bear Antonio's 
wealth upon the waves. 

In developing his plot Shakespeare produces a fine climax 
by so interweaving its two threads that the one which leads to 
the human lesson of the way to the true life comes to its end 
in the third act; the other is ready to add, in the fourth act, 
its diviner lesson, and the fifth act then rises to the height of 
heaven itself in expressing the full thought of the whole play. 

At the opening of the second act we are in Belmont, and the 
vain-glorious Prince of Morocco is to make his choice. Why 
Prince of Morocco ? Because he is to represent the man whose 
choice is of the golden casket, as determined by the outside 
pomp and glory of the world ; and this view of life men associate 
with Eastern splendour. The scene changes to Venice, and 
Lancelot Gobbo, the clown — whose change of service is of great 
use to the story — stands also, in his relation to the inner thought 
of the play, for the raw material of humanity ; good-natured, as 
Shakespeare always felt men and women, on the whole, to be, 
and with the rudiments of two helps to the higher life — conscience 
and natural affections. As Bassanio prepares to depart for 
Belmont, Gratiano will go too ; the genial temper is the right 
companion of earnest effort, but it must be kept within due 
bounds. Among the many sketches of forms and ways of life 
that belong as accessories to the working out of the main 
thought in the Merchant of Venice, Bassanio's counsel to 
Gratiano, " Thou art too wild, too rude, and bold of voice,'* 
balances Gratiano's former censure of an affected precision. In 
the next scene, between Lancelot and Jessica, we have again 
Lancelot's natural sympathies, and a suggestion of those cheer- 
less restraints of home which made it not unnatural for Jessica's 

F F 



482 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1596 

quick Eastern blood, nourished in Italy, to urge her beyond rule. 
After this scene, while only a masking is in question, there is 
preparation for the wrong that will stir Shylock's hatred of the 
Christian into fury, just at the time when Antonio's bond is 
forfeit. In the love between Lorenzo and Jessica there is 
Shakespeare's practical suggestion, as in the love between the 
Capulet and Montague, that we all are of one race, and should 
feel our kindred. So when, in Cymbelirie, Arviragus says 
to Imogen, " Brother, stay here : are we not brothers ? " She 
replies — 

" So man and man should be ; 
But clay and clay differs in dignity, 
Whose dust is both alike." 

It is the clay in us, and not the nobler part, that makes the 
separation. 

In the scene between Shylock and his daughter, again, there 
are the ungenial home conditions which serve to make her 
conduct less unnatural, and the story is continued to the flight 
of Jessica during Bassanio's parting festivities, and to the rapid 
departure of Bassanio's ship. Then we return to Belmont, and 
see the Prince of Morocco trust his hope of happiness to that 
golden casket, which is inscribed, " Who chooseth me shall gain 
what many men desire." His choice is that of all who place 
the happiness of life in money-making, or in the luxurious en- 
joyment of what money buys. Within the golden casket is a 
carrion death, with the lesson : 

" Many a man his life hath sold 
But my outside to behold." 

Shakespeare takes us back to Venice, shows us the Jew's 
fury at the abduction of his daughter — his own flesh has been 
torn from him, " I say, my daughter is my flesh and blood." His 
claiming of the bond while in the passion of this wrong brings 
within bounds of nature an extravagant fable that had been 
used only as a parable. Suggestion of peril to Antonio in 
Salanio's 

" Let good Antonio look he keep his day, 
Or he shall pay for this, 

is immediately followed by the first indication of the fall of 
the merchant's fortunes, coupled with a fresh suggestion of his 
friendship for Bassanio. 

We pass then to Belmont, and see the silver casket chosen 
Oy the Prince of Arragon. Why Prince of Arragon ? Because 



toa.d. i6oo.] SHAKESPEARE'S "MERCHANT OF VENICE." 483 

the Spaniard was the common type of self-asserting pride, and 
through the silver casket choice was made of a life happy by 
attainment of one's own deserts. He will not choose with those 
whom the gold tempts : 

" I will not choose what many men desire, 
Because I will not jump with common spirits, 
And rank me with the barbarous multitudes." 

But he accepts the condition on the silver treasure-house : 
li Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves." We all 
know the man, not base of mind, who only wants his deserts, 
and loses precious time over lamenting that he has never got 
them. If the critics had been just to his books, or his pictures ; 
if this, and it that, and 

Oh, that estates, degrees, and offices 

Were not derived corruptly, and that clear honour 

"Were purchased by the merit of the wearer." 

But the true life is not so to be won. The silver casket reveals 
only a fool's head, with a legend that reminds the chooser of 
the shadow's bliss of him who was in love with his own shadow. 
The second act ends with the landing of Bassanio at Belmont, 
and again a glancing forward at the hope inspired by him. 

The third act opens with the loss of all Antonio's wealth on 
the waves, whereby the passion of Shylock is suddenly supplied 
. with power of revenge. Let Antonio look to his bond. What 
kindness can he ask ? 

"He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million ; laughed at my losses 
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, 
heated mine enemies ; and what's his reason ? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes ? 
Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the 
same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the 
same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is 
If you prick us, do we not bleed ? if you tickle us, do we not laugh ? if you poison 
us, do we not die ? and it you wrong us, shall we not be revenged ? If we are like 
you in the rest we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his 
humility ? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be, by 
Christian example ?" 

Shylock is ready to stand upon the letter of the law, and tne 
story is now ripe for a full expression of the innermost thought 
of the play, which, deepening as it goes, continues to the end. 

Bassanio's choice of the leaden casket is preluded with a 
song, ringing the knell of trust in the delight of the eyes only.. 
" Who chooseth me, must give and hazard all he hath." That 
. is the legend on the casket of lead, threatening more than it. 

F F 2- 



484 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1596 

promises, by which alone the true life may be won. The human 
lesson of life summed up in it, is like that of the parable of the 
talents. A man must exert all his powers ; be the best and do 
the best that it is in him to be or do ; give all that he hath, 
and hazard all : not making conditions of reward according to 
desert ; not asking whether he shall be rich, or praised, or 
happy, for the simple hearty doing of his duty ; but doing it and 
taking what may come. So is Portia won, and plighted to 
Bassanio, as Nerissa to Gratiano, with a ring, never to be lost 
or given away. The severe outline of the higher lesson of life 
is here softened again by the pervading atmosphere of genial 
intercourse ; but from the human truth so far expressed, Shake- 
speare passes on at once to the divine truth which is its crown. 
Antonio's letter to Bassanio arrives at Belmont. In Antonio, 
man — subject to fortune, changeful as the waves — is about to 
stand between the two principles of justice and *3iercy, of the 
Old Testament and of the New, as Shakespeare read them. 
Out of the lips of Portia, who has represented, in some sense, 
the natural life, will come most fitly a recognition of the spirit 
which makes earthly power likest God's. In the fourth act 
Shy lock holds by the law and by his bond. When asked, " How 
shalt thou hope for mercy, rendering none ?" Shylock answers, 
still placing the letter above the spirit, " What judgment shall 
I dread, doing no wrong ? " He stands for law ; must he be 
merciful? "On what compulsion must I, tell me that?" 
Through Portia's famous answer, Shakespeare sets forth the 
divine side of his lesson, and 

"Therefore, Jew 
Though justice be thy plea, consider this. 
That, in the course of justice, none of us 
Should see salvation : we do pray for mercy 
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render 
The deeds of mercy." 

But Shylock says, — 

" My deeds upon my head ! I crave the law." 

Saint Paul had said, what Shakespeare is here teaching, "By 
the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified ;" and, 
" Now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein 
we were held ; that we should serve in newness of Spirit, and 
not in the oldness of the Letter." Shylock is made to feel that 
even by the strict letter of his bond he cannot stand : his pound 
of flesh must be an exact pound, not a hair's weight more or 



toa.d. T600.3 SHAKESPEARE'S " MERCHANT OF VENICE." 48 5 

less ; and there must be no blood shed, because the letter of the 
bond does not give him one drop of blood. Shylock is foiled, 
and sentenced ; not harshly, except in the requirement that he 
undergo the form of being made a Christian ; and the genial 
atmosphere again softens the sharp didactic outline. The 
manner of this — the success of the disguised ladies in getting 
from their husbands, as gifts to the learned counsel and his 
clerk, the rings they had vowed never to part with— prepares the 
way for a genial close to the whole play. It will supply means 
for a pleasant, quick, and sure identification ; while the incident 
of the giving of the rings is still, in its own lighter form, in unity 
with the grand scene on which it follows. For its meaning is, 
that in little things as in great — even in little promises — we owe 
allegiance rather to the spirit than to the letter. Bassanio and 
Gratiano, true as they were pledged to be, had yielded, in spite 
of the letter of their pledge, all that was due elsewhere to 
courtesy and friendship. 

The great lesson of life is taught, and the last act of the play 
opens with the Jew and Gentile, representing any two forms of 
bitter antagonism, in embrace of love under the calm expanse 
of heaven. The act opens genially, with playful words of love, 
and rises soon to a sublime earnestness, as Lorenzo looks from 
earth up to God's universe, of which it is a part : 

" Look how the floor of heaven 
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold ; 
There's not the smallest orb that thou behcld'st 
But in his motion like an angel sings, 
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims ; 
Such liarmony is in immortal souls ; 
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay 
Doth grossly close us in, we cannot hear it." 

Then the musicians, who had been sent for, enter, and with soft 
strain represent to the ear, as Shakespeare often in his plays has 
made it represent, immortal harmony. Lorenzo's answer to 
Jessica's " I am never merry when I hear sweet music," " The 
reason is your spirits are attentive," &c, still uses music as type 
of that higher harmony which is within our souls. To want that 
is to be "the man that hath no music in himself, nor is not 
moved with concord of sweet sounds." Because of that want, he 

" Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils ; 
The motions of his spirit are dull as night, 
And his affections dark as Erebus : 
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music." 



486 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1596 

The music, thus associated with the harmony of human souls 
and of the great visible universe under which the lovers sit, 
still plays. Then enters Portia, with Nerissa, and the train of 
thought is continued in their first natural words by an image 
that brings the deeper sense of the play to its fit close. Its 
meaning is, that man's endeavour to establish the kingdom of 
heaven within him shines royally, till it has blended with, and 
is lost in, the supreme glories of eternal love. 

" Portia. That light we see is burning in my hall. 
How far that little candle throws his beams • 
So shines a good deed in a naughty world. 

" Nerissa. When the moon shone, we did not see the candle. 

"Portia. So doth the greater glory dim the less : 
A substitute shines brightly as a king 
Until a king be by, and then his state 
Empties itself, as doth an island brook 
Into the main of waters. Music ! Hark !" 

And then we pass to the playful end, in unaffected chatting of 
good fellowship — again the kmdly air of life encircling^all. 

John Fox, with controversial bitterness, had registered the 
pangs of martyrs, and believed all ill of the opponents of his 
form of faith. Spenser, with sweetness of voice, had expressed 
the fierceness of the conflict from which Shakespeare rose to 
a full sense of the divine harmonies and to a quiet, all-embracing 
charity. But there could have been no Shakespeare without the 
conflict that had stirred men to their depths, or in a country 
yielding no such combatants as those who, in Tudor times, had, 
through infirmities of human character, employed their highest 
energies, given and hazarded all they had, and, zealous to serve 
God, striven day after day to do their duty. 

97. In 1 599 appeared an improved edition of Romeo and Juliet 
and The Passionate Pilgrim — a small collection of love poems, 
all ascribed on the title page, by an adventurous publisher, to 
Shakespeare, who objected to this use of his name. The volume 
includes, with pieces by Shakespeare, others which it is known 
that he did not write. 

In 1600 the plays of Shakespeare first printed in quarto were 
The Merchant of Ve?iice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much 
Ado About Nothing, and Henry V. 

Shakespeare's father died early in September, 1601. 

The Merry Wives of Windsor was the only play of Shakes- 
peare's printed in 1602. There was a tradition current at the 
beginning of the eighteenth century that this was written at the 



TOA.D. -i6c 3 .] WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. GEORGE CHAPMAN. 487 

request of Queen Elizabeth, who was so much pleased with 
Falstaff, in the two parts of King Henry IV, that she com- 
manded a play upon Falstaff in love, being, moreover, in such 
haste for it that it was to be written in fourteen days. This 
may or may not be true. " The Diary of John Manningham," a 
member of the Middle Temple, makes known to us that Shakes- 
peare's Twelfth Night was acted in the Middle Temple on the 
2nd of February, 1602. In that year Venus and Adonis reached 
a fifth edition. 

In May, 1602, Shakespeare continued the investment of his 
earnings in his native place, by buying of William and John 
Combe 107 acres of arable land, in the parish of Old Stratford, 
for ^327 ; and later in the year he made two more purchases, 
one of a cottage and its ground near New Place, the other, for 
sixty pounds, of a messuage with two barns, two gardens, and 
two orchards. He was extending his grounds behind New Place 
towards the river. 

It seems to have been in the earlier part of this year, 1602, 
that Shakespeare's Hamlet was first acted. It was entered by a 
bookseller on the Stationers' Register on the 26th of July, 1602, 
to be published " as it was latelie acted." Thus, by the date of 
the death of Elizabeth, March 24, 1603, Shakespeare had risen 
to the full height of his genius. 

98. Of the new dramatists rising around him one, George 
Chapman, was as old as Elizabeth's reign ; and he was not a 
dramatist only. He was born in 1557 or 1559, at Hitchin, in 
Hertfordshire. He was called afterwards by William Browne, 
" The Shepherd of fair Hitching Hill." About 1574 he was 
sent to Trinity College, Oxford, where he fastened with especial 
delight on the Greek and Roman classics. After two years at 
Oxford, he left without a degree. Nothing is known of him as 
a writer before 1594, when he published 'Zkio.vvktos, The Shadow 
of Night: co7itaining two poetical hy nines devised by G. C, Gent. 
In the next year, 1595, this was followed by Ouid's Banquet of 
Sence, a Coronet for his Mistresse Philosophic, atid his amorous 
Zodiacke. In 1598 appeared the first section of the main work 
of George Chapman's life, his translation of Homer in Seaven 
Bookes of the Iliades of Hotnere, Prince of Poetes, translatea 
according to the Greeke, in Judgment of his best Comment aries, 
by George Chapman, Gent. The seven books were the first and 
second, and the seventh to the eleventh. They are in the four- 
teen-syllabled measure, to which he adhered throughout the 



488 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.h. 1590 

Iliad and Odyssey ; but there was a separate issue by him of a 
version of The Shield of Achilles, in 1598, in ten-syllabled 
verse. 

Chapman had now also begun his career as a dramatist, and 
in 1598 appeared his first printed comedy, the Blind Beggar of 
Alexandria, which had been acted sundry times by the Earl of 
Nottingham's servants. The same company acted his second 
comedy, printed in 1599, An hzi?nerous Dayes Myrth. At the 
end of Elizabeth's reign, Chapman was at work still on his 
Homer, but had not yet issued another section of it. 

99. Thomas Heywood was a native of Lincolnshire and a 
Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He joined the players, and 
was a young man when writing for them in 1596. In 1598 he 
produced War without Blows and Love without Suit, and imme- 
diately afterwards Joan as good as ??iy Lady. Heywood passed 
into the next reign as one of the most prolific playwrights of the 
time. Of about the same age as Heywood was 

Thomas Middle ton, a gentleman's son, born in London 
in 1570. He was admitted of Gray's Inn in 1593, and published 
in 1597 the Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased j probably he was 
also the author of Microcynicon, six snarling Satires, published 
in 1599. In the same year he joined "William Rowley in 
writing his first play, the Old Law. In 1602, Middleton wrote 
the tragedy of Randall Earl of Chester, without help, and the 
Two Harpies in partnership with others ; in 1602, also, his 
Blurt, Master Constable, or the Spaniard's Night Walk was 
printed. 

Thomas Dekker, who was also born about 1570, began 
to write in the days of the later Elizabethan drama. His 
Phaeton was acted in 1597 ; other plays rapidly followed. His 
comedies of Old Fortunatus and the Shoemaker's Holiday were 
printed in 1600, and his Satiromastix, presently to be spoken 
of, in 1602. 

John Marston, who was educated at Oxford, began in 
1598 as a satirist with the Scourge of Villanie, three Books of 
Satires, and the Metamorphoses of Pigmaliorfs Image, and 
certaine Satyres, one of the books burnt by Whitgift and Ban- 
croft (§ 92) when they forbade the writing of more satire. 
Marston wrote a tragedy, Antonio a?id Mellida, which had a 
sequel, Antonio's Revenge, and these plays were both printed in 
1602. 

100. But foremost among these writers of the later Elizabethan 



TOA.D. i6o 3 .] OTHER DRAMATISTS. BEN JONSON. 489 

drama, was Ben Jonson. He was of a north country family, 
son of a gentleman who was ruined by religious persecution in 
the reign of Mary, who became a preacher in Elizabeth's reign, 
and who died a month before the poet's birth, in 1573. Ben 
Jonson's mother took a bricklayer for second husband, and at 
some time during Ben's childhood she was living in Hartshorn 
Lane, near Charing Cross. The boy was first taught in the 
parish school of St. Martin's, and then owed to the kindness of 
William Camden (§ 82) an admission to Westminster School. 
He is said to have tried his stepfather's business for a little while, 
before he went to fight against Spain as a volunteer in the Low 
Countries. When he came home he joined the players and 
married. In 1597, when he was twenty-four years old, he was 
a sharer in the company of the Rose at Bankside. In these 
early days Ben Jonson acted the old Marshal Jeronimo in 
Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, and enriched the play with 
an effective scene between mad old Jeronimo and a painter, in 
the manner of the earlier Elizabethan drama. In 1596 Ben 
Jonson's comedy, Every Man i?i his Humour was produced, 
with Italian characters and a scene laid at Florence. He then 
revised it, made the characters all English, and laid the 
scene in and between Coleman Street and Hoxton. In this, its 
present shape, it was performed in 1598 by the company to 
which Shakespeare belonged, the name of Shakespeare himself 
standing at the head of the list of actors. Every Man in His 
Humour is a true comedy carefully constructed. Its action, 
contained within a single day, opens at six in the morning and 
ends with a supper. The course of time is unobtrusively but 
exactly marked as the story proceeds, and the plot is not only 
contrived to show varieties of character, each marked by a special 
humour or predominance of one peculiar quality, but the inci- 
dents are run ingeniously into a dramatic knot which the fifth 
act unties. But Ben Jonson's next three plays were of another 
character ; they were not so much true comedies as bright 
dramatic satires, based on a noble sense of life and of the poet's 
place in it. Every Man out of his Humour, produced in 1599, 
Cynthia) s Revels, in 1600, and the Poetaster, in 1601, were 
annual satires, the first touching especially the citizens, the 
second the courtiers, and the third the poets, in as far as any 
of these lived for aims below the dignity of manhood. Ben 
Jonson was at that time of his life tall, meagre, large-boned, 
with a pock-marked face and eager eyes ; a poet and keen satirist, 



49° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1599 

with a true reverence for all that was noble, a lofty sense of the 
aims of literature, and a young zeal to set the world to rights, 
with a bold temper and an over-readiness for self-assertion. In 
Cynthia! s Revels he jested scornfully at the euphuisms and shal- 
low graces of the Court, at lives spent in the mere study of airs 
and grimaces. " Would any reasonable creature," he asked 
through one of his characters, " make these his serious studies 
and perfections, much less only live to these ends, to be the 
false pleasure of a few, the true love of none, and the just 
laughter of all ? " He urged for the Court idlers, in words 
characteristic of the mind that made him, next to Shakespeare, 
foremost among English dramatists, — ■ 

' That these vain joys in which their wills consume 
Such powers of wit and soul as are of force 
To raise their beings to eternity, 
May be converted on works fitting men ; 
And for the practice of a forced look, 
An antic gesture, or a fustian phrase, 
Study the native frame of a true heart, 
An inward comeliness of bounty, knowledge, 
And spirit that may conform them actually 
To God's high figures, which they have in power. 

When Dekker and Marston considered themselves to have been 
pointed at in the Poetaster, they resolved to give a taste of his 
own whip to the too ardent satirist, whose vivid impersonations 
of the follies of society were looked upon as personal attacks by 
all the men in whom such follies were conspicuous. Dekker 
wrote his Satiromastix (whip for the satirist), and it was acted 
as a retort on Jonson's Poetaster. But although Ben Jonson's 
own admirable bully, Captain Tucca, was reproduced and let 
loose upon him to abuse him roughly, yet through the characters 
of Demetrius and Crispinus, by whom Dekker and Marston held 
themselves to have been attacked, and who were also reproduced, 
the retort was made in a tone that showed the quarrel to be, as 
a Latin motto to the printed book expressed, among friends 
only. The motto said, " I speak only to friends, and that upon 
compulsion." One passage will serve as sufficient evidence of 
this. Ben Jonson, as Horace Junior, is made to plead for his 
satires of citizens and others : — 

" Horace. What could I do, out of a just revenge, 
But bring them to the stage ? They envy me, 
Because I hold more worthy company. 

" Demetrius. Good Horace, no. My cheeks do blush foi thine 
As often as thou speaks't so. Where one true 



to a.d 1603.] BEN JON SON. DEKKER. MARS TON. 49 1 

And nobly virtuous spirit for thy best part 
Loves thee, I wish one ten with all my heart. 
I make account I put up as deep share 
In any good man's love which thy worth earn* 
As thou thyself. We envy not to see 
Thy friends with bays to crown thy poesie. 
No, here the gall lies, we that know what stuff 
Thy very heart is made of, know the stalk 
On which thy learning grows, and can give life 
To thy (once dying! baseness, yet must we 
Dance antics on your paper 

"Horace. Fannius 

" Crispinus. This makes us angry, but not envious. 
No, were thy warpt soul put in a new mould, 
I'd wear thee as a jewel set in gold." 

In that spirit Dekker resolved to let his eager, positive friend 
Ben feel in his own* person how he liked being held up to the 
town as the butt of satire. Jonson replied with an Epilogue to 
his Poetaster, and urged, as he had always urged, that his books 
were taught "to spare the persons and to speak the vices." 
But, in fact, he generously yielded, and said, 

" Since the comic Muse 
Hath proved so ominous to me, I will try 
If tragedy have a more kind aspect. 
Her favours in my next I will pursue, 
When, if I prove the pleasure of but One, 
So he judicious be, he shall be alone 
A theatre unto me." 

Thus it happened that Ben Jonson's last work in Elizabeth's 
reign was upon his first tragedy Sejanus. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

FROM ELIZABETH TO THE COMMONWEALTH. 

A. — REIGN OF JAMES I. 

I. When Elizabeth died, on the 24th of March, 1603, and 
James VI. of Scotland became James I. of England, Shake- 
speare was thirty-nine years old and Bacon forty-two. Spensei 
had been dead about four years, Richard Hooker three. Robert 
Greene had been dead about eleven years and Christopher 
Marlowe ten. George Peele was dead, and Thomas Nash had 
been dead a year or two. Thomas Sackville, the author of our 
first tragedy (ch. vii. § 8), now Lord Buckhurst, aged seventy- 



49 2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1603 

six, was one of those who, after the queen's death, administered 
the affairs of the kingdom and proclaimed King James. A year 
later Sackville was created Earl of Dorset, and he died in 1608. 
John Lyly, author of Eufihues (ch. vii. § 20), was living at the 
accession of James I., fifty years old, and had three years to 
live. Gabriel Harvey (ch. vii. § 24), also aged fifty, lived 
throughout James's reign, a Doctor of Civil Law, practising as 
advocate in the Prerogative Court.. Thomas Lodge (ch. vii. § 42),. 
aged forty-eight, lived on, as a physician in good practice. John 
Stow (ch. vii. § 82) was seventy-eight years old, and " as a 
recompense for his labours and travel of forty-five years, in 
setting forth the chronicles of England and eight years taken up 
in the survey of the cities of London and Westminster, towards 
his relief now in his old age," he asked for, and obtained, the 
king's letters patent empowering him " to gather the benevolence 
of well-disposed people within this realm of England ; to ask r 
gather, and take the alms of all our loving subjects." He lived 
only till 1605 on this boundless reward of his enthusiasm. 

Among men who had written in the past reign there also 
were still alive : Richard Stanihurst (ch. vii. § 53), aged about 
fifty-eight, he died in 161 8; William Camden (ch. vii. § 82), fifty- 
two; Sir Walter Raleigh (ch. vii. § 84), fifty-one; Anthony 
Munday (ch. vii. § 54), forty-nine, he lived on until 1633; George 
Chapman (ch. vii. § 98), forty-six ; William Warner (ch. vii. § 65), 
forty-five, he died in 1609; Samuel Daniel (ch. vii. § 79), forty- 
one ; Michael Drayton (ch. vii. § 80), forty ; Joseph Hall (ch. vii. 
§ 92), twenty-nine; Ben Jonson (ch. vii. § 100), twenty-nine; and 
Marston, Middleton, Heywood, Dekker (ch. vii. § 100), of about 
Ben Jonson's age. 

Among the dramatists born in the reign of Elizabeth who 
began to write under the Stuarts there were, at the accession of 
James I., John Fletcher, twenty-seven years old; Francis Beau- 
mont, seventeen; John Webster, perhaps t wenty- three ; Cyril 
Tourneur, perhaps twenty; Philip Massinger, nineteen; John 
Ford, seventeen ; James Shirley, nine. These were Stuart 
dramatists, and not Elizabethan. But they were born in Eliza- 
beth's reign, and their plays retain much of the Elizabethan 
character. 

2. We have given the name of Elizabethan Drama tists 
only to those who wrote in the reign of Elizabeth; and we 
have seen these divided into two sections, the Earlier and Later 
Elizabethan (ch. vii. § 94). That part of the work of any of 



to a.d. 1606.3 AT THE ACCESSION OF JAMES I. 493 

them which was done under the Stuarts we may now place in 
a third section and call it Stuart- Elizabethan. Thus Marlowe's 
plays are Earlier Elizabethan ; Shakespeare's, except his 'prentice _ 
work in the Earlier Elizabethan time, rank with the Later 
Elizabethan if written before March, 1603; after that date they 
are Stuart-Elizabethan. 

Next to these will come the dramatists who wrote all their 
works under the Stuarts. The oldest of them, those who were 
born under Elizabeth, form a distinct class of ElizabethaN- 
Stuart Dramatists. Those who were also born and bred 
under the Stuarts are the Stuart Dramatists ; the Common- 
wealth dividing Earlier from Later Stuart. Thus the division 
becomes : — 

I. Elizabethan, a. Earlier; b. Later; c. Stuart- Eliza- 
bethan. 

II. Elizabethan-Stuart. 

III. Stuart, a. Earlier; b. Later. 

3. Among writers with their work before them wno were 
men or children at the accession of James I., were Lancelot 
Andrewes, thirty-eight years old; John Donne, aged thirty; 
Robert Burton, twenty-seven; George Sandys, twenty-six; 
Edward Herbert of Cherbury, twenty -two ; James Usher, 
twenty-three; Richard Corbet, twenty-one ; John Selden, nine- 
teen; Phineas and Giles Fletcher, twenty-one and perhaps 
nineteen ; William Drummond of Hawthornden, eighteen ; 
George Wither, fifteen; Thomas Hobbes, fifteen; Thomas 
Carew, about fourteen ; William Browne, thirteen ; Robert 
Herrick, twelve; Francis Quarles, eleven; George Herbert, 
ten; and Izaak Walton, ten. For so many years had each 
received his training while Elizabeth was queen. 

4. Shakespeare was the great living writer at the accession 
of James I., when his company became that of the King's 
Players instead of the Lord Chamberlain's. The children of 
the chapel, who had acted Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels and 
the Poetaster at the Blackfriars' Theatre, became at the same 
time Children of his Majesty's Revels, and usually acted at 
Blackfriars when the King's Servants were at the Globe. The 
plays produced by Shakespeare in the reign of James I., and 
their probable dates, were Othello, perhaps ; — it was played at 
Court November 1, 1604; — and Measure for Measure, performed 
in December, 1604; Macbeth, early in 1606; King Lear, acted 
before James, December 26, 1606 (first printed, 1608) ; Pericles 



494 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1603 

(on work by another hand), 1607 or 1608 (first printed, 1609) ; 
Antony and Cleopatra, 1608 [in this year Milton was born]; 
Troilus and Cressida, early in 1609 (two editions were printed 
in that year, one of them before the play had been acted). 
There were no more of Shakespeare's plays printed in quarto 
during his life. Cymbeline was probably first acted about 1609; 
Coriolanns and Ti?non of Athens, 16 10. The earliest notice of 
a performance of the Tempest is of 161 1. It is one of Shake- 
speare's latest plays, perhaps his last, and there may be a 
reference to this in Prospero's breaking of his wand, burning of 
his books, and departure from the magic island. The notion of 
the play is, indeed, that man, supreme in intellect, master of 
the powers of earth and air, yet yearns for and needs the natural 
life with its affections. Bad as the world might be, and ill as it 
had used him, Prospero brought it to his island, with all its 
incidental treacheries and all its incidental grossness, bound 
himself with it again, and went home to it. Shakespeare felt 
only more keenly than his neighbours all the ties of home and 
kindred. He had been using the profits from his art to make 
himself a home at Stratford, and while he had still power to 
enjoy the home life that he had denied himself in part while he 
was earning, he broke his magic rod, and went home finally to 
his wife and children when his age was about forty-eight. King 
Henry VIII. was the play being acted when the Globe Theatre 
was burnt down, June 29, 1613, by the discharge of "chambers'" 
in Act i. sc. 4. Because Sir Henry Wotton speaks of the 
play then acted as " a new play, called All is True" some 
think that Shakespeare's career closed with the production of 
Henry VIII., in 1613. It has been said also that Shakespeare's 
versification falls into three periods : an early period, in which 
he seldom took liberties with the metre of his ten-syllabled line; 
a second period, in which eleven-syllabled lines are more 
frequent; and a late period, in which he used much greater 
freedom. In Henry VIII. extra syllables are more frequent 
than in any other play, and so distinctly marked, that they are 
not seldom monosyllables. This peculiarity was introduced 
deliberately. It is strongly marked in the most characteristic 
passages, as in the speech of Buckingham before his execution, 
and in Wolsey's farewell to his greatness. The pomp of the 
heroic line is broken at its close, and falls succeed each other 
making a sad music, in harmony with the feeling of the scene 
and of the play. For the whole play is a lesson on the changing 



to a.d. 1616.] WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 495 

fortunes of men and their one trust in God. Henry VIII. stands 
in the centre as the earthly Fortune, by whose smile or frown 
earthly prosperity is gained or lost ; scene after scene shows rise 
and fall of human fortunes as of waves of the great sea, and each 
fall — Buckingham's, Katherine's, Wolsey's— leads to the same 
thought — 

" Farewell 
The hopes of Court! My hopes in heaven do dwell." 

The play is as true as any sermon could be to such a text on the 
world and its pomps as this from the 39th Psalm, " Man walketh 
in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain : he heapeth 
up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them. And now,. 
Lord, what is my hope : truly my hope is even in thee." 

Shakespeare had prepared for retirement by an investment 
which would cause him to draw even a main part of his income 
from his native place. This was the purchase, in 1605, of a 
moiety of a lease granted in 1 544 for 92 years — therefore, with 
53 years yet to run — of the tithes, great and small, of Stratford, 
Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe. The price paid 
for this was ^440, and the tithes would produce him £60 a 
year, an income with the buying power of, say ^300 or ^400 a 
year at the present value of money. In 1607, on the 5th of 
June, Shakespeare married his elder daughter, Susanna, to John 
Hall, a prosperous medical practitioner at Stratford. In 
February, 1608, the birth of Mrs. Hall's only child, Elizabeth, 
made Shakespeare a grandfather; and in September of that 
year his mother died. In 161 2, at which time probably Shake- 
speare had retired to New Place, he was engaged in a lawsuit 
arising out of his share of the tithes. His brother Richard died 
in February, 161 3. A month afterwards he bought a house 
near the Blackfriars Theatre for ^140, paying £%o and mort- 
gaging for the rest, then paying the mortgage off, and leasing 
the house to John Robinson. In June of the same year, 1613, 
the Globe Theatre was burnt down while Henry VIII. was 
being acted, but he seems then to have had no share in the 
property. In 16 14 Shakespeare was active, with others of his 
neighbourhood, in protecting the rights to common lands near 
Stratford against an enclosure scheme. In 161 5 he was still 
interested in the enclosure question. In 161 6, he married his 
other daughter, Judith, to Thomas Quiney, a vintner and wine 
merchant at Stratford, who was four years younger than herself. 
Shakespeare had given directions for his will in the preceding 



496 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1603 

January, but it was executed on the 25th of March. He died on 
the 23rd of the following April, 161 6, aged fifty-two. An after- 
thought of a bequest to his wife of " the second best bed " has 
been weakly taken as evidence of want of affection. It would 
be at least as reasonable to say that, as the best bed in most 
houses is that of the guest chamber, the second best becomes 
that of the husband and wife, and the special bequest was, 
therefore, dictated by a feeling of domestic tenderness. 

Shakespeare's wife survived until 1623. That was the year 
in which his plays were first collected in a folio, as Mr. William 
Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Published 
according to the True Originall Copies. The other three folios 
appeared in 1632, 1663 (with Pericles and six spurious plays 
added, namely, The London Prodigal, The History of Thomas 
Lord Cromwell, Sir John Oldcastle Lord Cobham, The 
Puritan Widow, A Yorkshire Tragedy, and the Tragedy of 
Locrine), and 1685 (also including the spurious plays). 

Shakespeare's Sonnets, mentioned by Meres in 1598 (ch. vii. 
§ 95)s were first published in 1609. They are 154 m number, 
and their chief theme is friendship. Various attempts have 
been made to build sentimental theories upon the sonnets of 
Shakespeare, as upon those of Surrey (ch. vi. § 46) and of 
Sidney (ch. vii. § 61). From what has been said in former 
chapters of the character of sonnet writing, from its origin to the 
Elizabethan time, it will be understood that I have here nothing 
to do but endorse (dropping its " well-nigh ") the opinion arrived 
at by one of the most thorough Shakespeare students of our 
time, Mr. Dyce, who says, " For my own part, repeated perusals 
of the Sonnets have well-nigh convinced me, that most of them 
were composed in an assumed character on different subjects, 
and at different times, for the amusement, if not at the sugges- 
tion, of the author's intimate associates (hence described by 
Meres as ' his sugred sonnets among his private friends ') ; and 
though I would not deny that one or two of them reflect his 
genuine feelings, I contend that allusions scattered through the 
whole series are not to be hastily referred to the personal cir- 
cumstances of Shakespeare." They are exquisite little pieces, 
not in the true sonnet measure (ch. vi. § 46), but with a form of 
their own ; for each of them consists merely of three four-lined 
stanzas of alternate rhyme with a couplet added. Spenser's 
sonnets keep to the five rhymes, and although they have their 
own method of interlacement, it is one in full accord with the 



toa.d. i6i6.] SHAKESPEARE. BENJONSON. AffJ 

nature of this kind of poem. In a sonnet of Shakespeare's there 
are seven rhymes. It is in fact simply a little poem in three 
four-lined stanzas and a couplet. 

5. The "Mermaid" was a tavern by Cheapside, between 
Bread Street and Friday Street, accessible from either ; and 
here Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have established a club, at 
which Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and other 
wits of the time met. The club founded by Raleigh is mythical, 
but the "Mermaid" was a famous tavern, and that the wits of 
the time frequented it we have witness in Beaumont's lines to 
Jonson, which recall — 

" What things we have seen 
Done at the ' Mermaid !' Heard words that have been 
So nimble and so full of subtile flame, 
As if that every one from whom they came 
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, 
And had resolved to live a fool the rest 
Of his dull life." 

Ben Jonson, under James I., gradually became the con- 
vivial centre of a group of men of genius, and owed his pre- 
dominance to a real intellectual power. The playhouse audience 
was losing its old national character. Secession of those men 
who might have said " Amen " at the close of the Looking-glass 
for London and England (ch. vii. § 70), meant the gradual loss of 
a main element in the audience — that part of it on which a 
dramatist who is intensely earnest can rely for sympathy. The 
shallowness of the king's character made his patronage of the 
stage no remedy for this. Fewer men came to the playhouse 
with their souls ready to answer to the touch of genius. The 
range of Shakespeare's plots was wide as humanity, and in the 
true Elizabethan drama there is throughout variety of motive 
for the action of the dramas. But we have not gone far into the 
reign of James I. before we find this range becoming narrowed. 
The lower standard of the audiences for whom the playwright 
worked limited the expression of his highest power. In the 
Elizabethan-Stuart drama the plots nearly all turn upon animal 
love. Ben Jonson did not stoop to this. His plays had variety 
of theme, and through their wit and humour a vigorous mind 
was often uttering its wisdom to the deaf. He and his hearers 
were out of accord. He spoke of them and to them with an 
arrogant disdain, which they in part deserved ; and at last, after 
years of impatient service, while their degradation had been 
steadily proceeding, he turned from them with bitter words of 

G G 



49^ A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERA TURE. [a.d. i6o* 

loathing. Ben Jonson's self-assertion went too far ; but that which 
provoked it was a real change in the character of the dramatist's 
public. The growth of Puritanism outside the theatre with- 
drew, as has been said, an important element from the play- 
house audience. Plays were then written to please the class of 
men who were left as patrons of the stage, and the change thus 
made in the plays would quicken the defection of the better sort 
of playgoers. But while Ben Jonson disdained the judgment of 
these later audiences, there was no disdainful spirit in his 
dealing with true men. He looked up to Shakespeare, and the 
fittest eulogy of Shakespeare's genius that any Englishman had 
written came from Ben Jonson. In his later life young men of 
genius gathered about him and looked up to him ; he called 
them heartily his sons, and had frank pride in their achieve- 
ments. Of Shakespeare it was Ben Jonson who sang, 

" How far thou didst our Lyly outshine, 
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line. 
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek, 
From thence to honour thee I will not seek 
For names : but call forth thundering iEschylus, 
Euripides, and Sophocles to us, 
Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova, dead 
To live again, to hear thy buskin tread 
And shake a stage ; or, when thy socks were on, 
Leave thee alone for the comparison 
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome 
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. 
Triumph, my Britain ! thou hast one to show, 
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe. 
He was not of an age, but for all time ! 
And all the Muses still were in their prime 
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm 
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm. 
Nature herself was proud of his designs, 
And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines.** 

Ben Jonson's tragedy of Sejanus, produced in 1603, with 
work in it from another hand, was not very successful, but it 
succeeded better after he had recast it in part and made it all 
his own. It was printed in 1605, and the small criticisms of a 
pedantic age Ben Jonson forestalled with footnotes citing the 
authority for all that he had worked into a harmonious and 
very noble play. Because the footnotes were there, and looked 
erudite, the superficial thing to do was to pronounce the play 
pedantic. But it is not pedantic. Jonson was no pedant; he 
had carried on for himself the education received at Westminster 
School, was a good scholar, delighted in his studies, and accu- 



A.D. 1603.] BEN JONSON'S "SE JANUS." 499 

mulated a good library, which, in the latter part of his life was 
burnt. But he was true poet and true artist. His lyrics rank with 
the best of a time when nobody wrote dramas who was not poet 
enough to produce musical songs. No man can be a dramatist, 
in any real sense of the word, who cannot produce good lyrics. 
The greater includes the less. As dramatist Jonson had not 
Shakespeare's wealth of fancy, his sense of kindred with all 
forms of life— one source of that more than insight into cha- 
racter, of that power of being in imagination all that man can 
be, which caused his character painting to stand quite alone in 
the world's literature. Nobody but Shakespeare ever made men 
speak as from within, and one might say, betray themselves, 
as men and women do in real life, so that in his mimic world the 
persons are as variously judged and tried by as many tests as if 
one were discussing words and deeds of living people. All other 
dramatists have painted men and women as they saw them and 
we see them, from without ; not reproducing life, but drawing 
pictures of it. 

Ben Jonson judged himself aright, and wrote only two 
tragedies. But each of them has a clear artistic structure, with 
dignity in its main thought, and vigorous dramatic scenes from 
which, though it be tragedy, the humour of the satirist is not 
entirely absent. Sejanus rises by base arts ; he spurns the gods, 
but has within his house a shrine to Fortune. He scorns the 
spiritual aims of life, works grossly for material success, and 
from his pinnacle of state falls to be dashed in pieces. 

" Let this example move the insolent man 
Not to grow proud and careless of the gods." 

There is a scene at the opening of the second act in which 
Eudemus, the physician, is painting the cheeks of Livia, The 
dialogue blends meanest frivolity v/ith a light planning of the 
most atrocious crime, and shows how Ben Jonson, following his 
own bent, could join a stern sense of the tragic in life with the 
humour of the comic poet. There is a very light touch of the 
spirit of comedy, suggesting the relation of small men to great 
events, in the fidgetty movements of Consul Regulus, who has 
been called out of his bed, in the third scene of the fifth act. 
In some character of a rough, honest censor, Ben Jonson him- 
self often walked abroad through his own plays. Thus, in 
SejanuS) he may be said to have embodied himself in the part 
of Arruntius. 

G G 2 



500 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d 1603 

In these first years, also, of James's reign there was so little 
of the ill-will of small minds following the stage controversy 
raised by Marston and Dekker in Saiircmastix (ch. vii. § 100), 
that Jonson and Dekker were working together, in 1603, at a 
masque for the City of London on his Majesty's accession ; and 
one of Marston's best plays — the Malcontent, written probably 
in 1603, and certainly published in two editions in 1604 — was 
dedicated to Ben Jonson as his liberal and cordial friend. In 
1605, when Sejanus was printed, Marston's friendship for Ben 
Jonson appeared in the front of it ; and in that year also (1605) 
Ben Jonson was fellow-worker with Marston and Chapman in 
the play of Eastward Hoe. The play contained a sentence — 
afterwards expunged — that offended the king and brought the 
writers into trouble; but its whole character of Sir Petronel 
Flash was a satire upon his Majesty's great cheapening of the 
honours of knighthood. The play itself, with some freedom of 
detail, was supremely moral in its design, being a contrast 
between the careers of the Idle and Industrious Apprentice. 

Ben Jonscn, who had many friends among the abler men of 
rank at Court, began at the outset of James's reign to find 
employment as a writer of Court Masques. In this form of 
writing — which had been untouched by Shakespeare — he was 
in his own day easily the first. But his true strength was in a 
form of comedy exclusively his own, broad and deep, generous 
in its aim, with scorn for all that is base, lively in its painting of 
a great variety of characters, each with some one predominating 
feature which he called its humour, and strong throughout with 
a manly vigour of thought that gives a bracing sense of intel- 
lectual energy to every scene. The reader's mind, after a ramble 
through Volpone or the Alchemist, feels as his body might after 
a wholesome walk in the sea breeze. Ben Jonson, about thirty 
years old at the accession of James I., was about thirty-two when, 
after Sejamis, he produced Volpone ; or, the Fox, in 1605 ; then 
followed two more of his masterpieces, Epicene ; or, the Silent 
Woman, in 1609, and the Alchemist, in 1610. His other tragedy 
came next, the Catiline, in 161 1. For twelve years, during this 
earlier part of his life, Ben Jonson had been a Roman Catholic ; 
but he had by this time rejoined the Church of England, In 1613 
he was in Franc? as companion and tutor to Sir Walter Raleigh's 
son. When he came home he poured scorn upon the outside 
show of Puritanism in his Bartholomew Fair, and produced, in 
161 6, the year of Shakespeare's death, a comedy called The Devil 



to a.d. 1619.3 BEN JONSON. BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 501 

is an Ass, in which the imp Pug, having obtained a holiday on 
earth, went back a lost fiend as to his character, for said Satan 
to him : 

" Whom hast thou dealt with, 
Woman or man, this day, but have outgone thee 
Some way, and most have proved the better fiends." 

Each party in the rising controversy of the day had its mean 
rout of camp-followers, serving the times for their own advantage. 
If Zeal-in-the-Land Busy in Bartholomew Fair represented one 
of the untruths of the time, the truth he parodied was in the 
good men of all parties. It was in Ben Jonson among the rest, 
and he uttered it in his own way as a comedian, very distinctly 
in this play, which followed next after " Bartholomew Fair." In 
the same year, 1616, Ben Jonson published a folio as the 
first volume of his Works, including not plays only, but epigrams 
and miscellaneous poems gathered under the title of The Forest. 
In this year of Shakespeare's death, Jonson ceased to write for the 
playhouse. He continued to produce Court Masques, but wrote 
no more plays for the public stage until after the death of James I. 
The degree of M.A. was conferred on him in 161 9, by the 
University of Oxford ; and, at the cost of some trouble, Ben 
Jonson escaped being knighted by King James. 

6. Francis Beaumont and John Metcher, whose plays 
belong entirely to the reign of James I., first appeared together 
as friends of Ben Jonson, each of them furnishing verses prefixed 
to the first publication of Volpone, in 1607. John Fletcher, the 
elder of the two friends, was born at Rye, in 1579, when his 
father — ten years afterwards a bishop (ch. vii. § 91) — was vicar 
there. He was educated at home and at Benet College, Cam- 
bridge ; afterwards came to London, and began his career as a 
dramatist, at the age of about twenty-seven, with The Woman 
Hater and Thierry and Theodoret, both perhaps written before 
he entered into literary partnership with Beaumont. 

Francis Beaumont was five years younger than Fletcher. He 
was the third son of Sir Francis Beaumont, Justice of the Com- 
mon Pleas, was born in 1584, admitted in his thirteenth year a 
gentleman commoner of Broadgate Hall (now Pembroke College), 
Oxford, left the University without a degree, and at the age of 
about seventeen was entered of the Inner Temple. Before he was 
nineteen he published a paraphrase of Ovid's tale of Salmacis and 
Hermaphroditus j and in 1607, when he was twenty-three and 
Fletcher twenty-eight, he wrote his lines in praise of Ben Jonson's 



502 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1603 

Volpone. Thenceforth, until the year of Shakespeare's death, 
Beaumont and Fletcher, close friends, worked together for the 
players. Beaumont had private means, and married. Fletcher 
depended on his earnings. Beaumont died a few weeks before 
Shakespeare, in March, 1616; all plays, therefore, that are 
the joint work of Beaumont and Fletcher, were produced 
during the ten years between 1606 and 161 6. John Fletcher 
was not only five years older than Beaumont, but he sur- 
vived him nine years, and was sole author of many of the 
plays known as Beaumont and Fletcher's. Beaumont, as 
dramatist, wrote probably no work that was all his own, 
except in 161 3 a masque on the marriage of the Princess Eliza- 
beth. Fletcher wrote a play or two of his own before the part- 
nership began ; probably four plays wholly his own were produced 
during the partnership ; and he continued to write during the 
nine or ten years between Beaumont's death, in March, 1616, and 
his own death by the plague, in August, 1625. Omitting a few 
doubtful works, about forty plays were written entirely by John 
Fletcher, and thirteen were the joint work of the partners. These 
were Philaster, The Maid's Tragedy, A Ki?ig a?id 710 King, The 
Knight of the Burning Pestle, Cupid's Revenge, The Coxcomb, 
Four Plays in One, The Scornful Lady, The Honest Man's 
Fortttne, The Little French Lawyer, Wit at Several Weapotis, 
A Right Woman, and The Laws of Candy. In verses " On 
Mr. Beaumont, written presently after his death," by his friend 
John Earle, then a young man, credit is given to Beaumont for 
the first three plays named in this list. Francis Beaumont and 
Ben Jonson were hearty friends. The elder poet wrote of the 
younger, 

" How I do love thee, Beaumont, and thy Muse, 
That unto me dost such religion use ! 
How I do fear myself, that am not worth 
The least indulgent thought thy pen drops forth ! " 

Tradition, dating from their own time, gave pre-eminence to 
Fletcher for luxuriance of fancy and invention, and to Beaumont 
for critical judgment, to which it was said that even Ben Jonson 
submitted his writings. The wit and poetry of these plays were 
spent chiefly on themes of love. Their authors, capable of higher 
flights, so far accommodated their good work to the lower tone 
of the playhouse as to earn praise for having " understood and 
imitated much better than Shakespeare the conversation of 
gentlemen whose wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in 



toa.d. 1616.] BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. 503 

repartees no poet can ever paint as they have done. Humour, 
which Ben Jonson derived from particular persons, they made it 
not their business to describe ; they represented all the passions 
very lively." So Beaumont and Fletcher were praised by Dryden 
in the time of Charles II., when their plays were "the most 
pleasant and frequent entertainments of the stage, two of theirs 
being acted through the year for one of Shakespeare's or 
Jonson's." We shall see how in that later Stuart time The Maid's 
Tragedy was dealt with. As first produced, in 1609, it ended 
tragically for a king of Rhodes, and its last words were : 

" On lustful kings 
Unlook'd for sudden deaths from Heav'n are sent 
But curst is he that is their instrument." 

Here was the good Elizabethan sense of common right and 
duty, guarded by aline in recognition of the sacredness of royal 
persons. The Faithful Shepherdess, by Fletcher alone, pro- 
duced early in 1 6 10, was above the playhouse standard of taste 
and morality, being a pastoral play in praise of maiden inno- 
cence, daintily versified and most pure in its design, although 
its moral is sometimes enforced by scenes which, as men now 
judge, depict too freely the evil they condemn. That is a ques- 
tion only of change in conventional opinion ; the true mind of 
the play is absolutely pure. 

7. The Knight of the Burning Pestle, by Beaumont and 
Fletcher, was a lively burlesque on the taste for high-flown 
romances, which Cervantes had attacked only six years before in 
his " Don Quixote." A citizen, speaking from among the audience, 
stops the actors at their prologue, says there shall be a grocer in 
the play, and he shall do admirable things. The citizen's wife says 
he shall kill a lion with a pestle ; and their man, Ralph, is the 
man to do it. Ralph, being thus forced on the players, burlesques 
the taste for Palmerin of England, appears, with squire and 
dwarf, as a knight, who swears by his ancestor Amadis of Gaul, 
has an inn described to him by his squire as an ancient castle 
held by the old knight of the most holy order of " The Bell," 
who has three squires — Chamberlino, Tapstero, and Ostlero 
— and when the tapster answers a lance-knock at the door, 
addresses him in this fashion : 

" Fair Squire Tapstero, I, a wandering knight, 
Hight of the Burning Pestle, in the quest 
Of this fair lady's casket and wrought purse, 
Losing myself in this vast wilderness. 



504 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1603 

Am to this castle well by fortune brought, 
Where hearing of the goodly entertain 
Your knight of holy order of ' The Bell' 
Gives to all damsels and all errant knights, 
I thought to knock, and now am bold to enter." 

This earliest burlesque in our dramatic literature was evidently 
following the lead of " Don Quixote." It was in 1605, at a time 
corresponding to the second year of the reign of James I. in 
England, that Cervantes published the first part of his Do?i 
Quixote; the second part, still better than the first, was published 
in 161 5. Beaumont and Fletcher's burlesque on the affected 
forms into which tales of chivalry had degenerated, appeared in 
1611. 

In the conflict that brought Spain and England into opposition 
and that touched all Europe to the quick, the two great centres of 
activity were London and Madrid. The quickened energies 
developed in each city a vigorous intellectual life, and the 
Spanish drama rose at the same time with ours to its full height. 
The great developer of Spanish drama, Lope de Vega, was but 
seventeen months older than Shakespeare. He sailed in the 
great Spanish Armada, he exulted in a poem of ten cantos — the 
" Dragontea " — upon the death of Drake, and he called Queen 
Elizabeth the " Scarlet Lady of Babylon." Lope de Vega lived 
till 1635, and was writing throughout the reign of James I., 
while C alder on, the next great Spanish dramatist, born at the 
end of Elizabeth's reign, was growing up to manhood. 

8. During the best years of Shakespeare's life as a dramatist, 
William Alexander, of Menstrie, afterwards Sir William 
Alexander and first Earl of Stirling, wrote four weak plays — 
Darius, first printed in 1603 ; Crossits, in 1604; the Alexandrian, 
in 1605, and Julius Ccesar, in 1607, when the series was pub- 
lished together as The Monarchic Tragedies. William Alexander 
was then a Gentleman of the Chamber to Prince Henry, and a 
Scotchman in much favour with King James. 

Cyril Tourneur, a dramatic poet with real tragic power, 
of whose life little is known, and whose remaining plays are The 
Revenger's Tragedy, The Atheist's Tragedy, andThe Nobleman, 
wrote only in the reign of James I. 

William Rowley, who during the last three years of 
Shakespeare's life was at the head of the Prince of Wales's com- 
pany of comedians, wrote, or took part in writing, many plays, 
chiefly comedies, during the reign of James I. He published 
also, in 1609, a lively picture of London life / called A Search 



toa.d. 1625.] OTHER DRAMATISTS UNDER JAMES I. 505 

for Mo?iey; or, the Lamentable Complaint for the Losse of the 
Wandering Knight, Monsieur l y Argent. 

Thomas Middleton (ch. vii. § 99) was a dramatist through- 
out the reign of James I., whom he did not long survive. He 
died in July, 1627. 

Thomas Dekker (ch. vii. § 99) remained throughout the 
reign of James I. an active dramatist and pamphleteer. He lived 
on into the next reign, and died an old man, not earlier than 1637. 

Nathaniel Field was one of the Children of the Revels 
who, in 1601, played in Ben Jonson's " Poetaster." He became 
known as a very good actor in the Blackfriars company, also as a 
dramatist. Before 161 1 he wrote two plays of his own, Woman 
is a Weathercock, and a second part, called Amends for Ladies. 
He lived, and so did that busiest of playwrights, Thomas 
Heywood (ch. vii. § 99), until about 1641. 

9. John Webster and Philip Massinger, true poets both, and 
dramatists of higher mark than those just named, were nearly 
of like age. Philip Massinger was born at Salisbury, in 1584. 
His father was in the household of Henry Earl of Pembroke. 
In the last year of Queen Elizabeth's reign, Massinger became a 
commoner of St. Alban's Hall, Oxford ; but the death of his 
father, in 1606, obliged him to leave the University and support 
himself as he could. Many of his plays are lost, and there is no 
record of work of his earlier than 1622, when The Virgin Martyr 
was printed. The Duke of Milan was printed in 1623. In 
December, 1623, Massinger's name first appeared in the office 
book of the Master of the Revels, when his Bondman was acted. 
That play was first printed in 1624. Twelve of Massinger's 
plays were printed in his lifetime, but only these three in the 
reign of James I. Massinger remained an active dramatist 
during fifteen years of the reign of Charles I. 

John Webster, a master poet in the suggestion of tragic 
horror, produced in the reign of James I. two of his finest plays, 
The White Devil; or, Vittoria Corombona, printed in 161 2 ; and 
The Duchess of Malfi, first acted about the time of Shakespeare's 
death, but printed in 1619. Webster also wrote in the reign of 
Charles I. He lived on into the time of the Commonwealth, 
and died about 1654. 

10. George Chapman, during the reign of James I., was 
an active dramatist. In 1606, besides Eastward Hoe (§ 5), in 
which he had a hand, his comedy of All Fools was printed ; in 
1606 Monsieur d' Olive and The Gentleman Usher j in 1607 his 



506 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1610 

tragedy of Bussy d'Ambois, which kept the stage for some time 
after his death. Other tragedies and comedies followed. But 
his chief work was still at the translation of Homer (ch. vii. § 98), 
on which he was engaged throughout the reign of James I. 
Twelve books of Homer's Iliad, translated by George Chap- 
man, appeared about 1610 ; and in the following year, the whole 
twenty-four books of The Iliads of Homer, dedicated to Prince 
Henry, who died in November, 161 1. This was followed by the 
twelve first books of the Odyssey, about 1614, and in 161 5, the 
whole twenty-four books of Hotner's Odysses, translated accord- 
ing to the Greek. About the year of Shakespeare's death (Chap- 
man's folios are not dated), Chapman's " Iliad " and " Odyssey " 
appeared together as The Whole Works of Homer, P?'ince of 
Poets. Chapman proceeded then to translate the Homeric Hymns, 
and "Battle of the Frogs and Mice,' ascribed to Homer. This 
translation appeared at the end of the reign of James I., as The 
Crown of all Homer's Workes, Batrachomyomachia, his Hymns 
and Epigrams, translated by George Chapman. Because of the 
vigour of the Elizabethan time, and the fact that Chapman was 
a poet, this translation is the crown of the works of Chapman. 

" He leapt upon the sounding earth, and shook his lengthful dart, 
And everywhere he breathed exhorts, and stirr'd up every heart. 
A dreadful fight he set on foot. His soldiers straight turned head. 
The Greeks stood firm. In both the hosts the field was perfected. 
But Agamemnon foremost still did all his side exceed, 
And would not be the first in name unless the first in deed." 

Thus sang George Chapman, who was himself the Agamemnon 
of the host of the translators of Homer. 

11. Another good translator of this time was George 
Sandys, second son of the Sandys, Archbishop of York, whom 
Aylmer succeeded in the Bishopric of London. George Sandys 
was born at Bishopsthorpe, in 1577, and educated at Oxford. In 
1610 he set out upon the travels of which he published an 
account in 161 5, as A Relation of a Journey begun A.D. 1610. 
Four Books containing a description of the Turkish Empire, of 
Egypt, of the Holy Land, of the Remote Parts of Italy , and 
Islands adjoining. He then worked at his translation of Ovid's 
Metamorphoses j The first Five Books appearing in the reign of 
James I. Sandys' travels are told gracefully, in a style less 
laboured than that of Richard Knolles' General History oj 
the Turks, which first appeared in the year of King James's 
accession. 



TO A.D. 1618.] CHAPMAN'S HOMER. SANDYS. CAMDEN. $°7 

12. Apart from their direct value as record, there is the 
charm also of an unaffected method in William Camden's 
Latin annals of the reign of Queen Elizabeth — Annates Rerum 
Anglicarum et Hibernicarum regnante Elizabetha — of which 
the first part, ending at 1589, was first published in 161 5, and 
the second part early in the reign of Charles I., in 1627. An 
English translation, as The Historie of the Life and Reigne of the 
most renowned and victorious Princesse Elizabeth, late Queen 
of England. . . . Composed by way of Annates by the most 
learned Mr. William Camdeii, was published 1630. The work 
had been suggested to Camden, the most fit man living, by Lord 
Burghley, who, says the annalist, " set open unto me first his own 
and then the Queen's rolls, memorials, records, and thereout willed 
me to compile in a historical style the first beginnings of the reign 
of Queen Elizabeth." He studied carefullyto carry out this design, 
procured access to charters, letters patent, letters, notes of con- 
sultations in the council chamber, instructions to ambassadors ; 
looked through Parliamentary diaries, acts, and statutes, and 
read over every edict or proclamation ; for the greatest part of 
all which he was beholden, he said, to Sir Robert Cotton, " who 
hath with great cost and successful industry furnished himself 
with most choice store of matter of history and antiquity ; for 
from his light he hath willingly given great light unto me." 
Camden chose to take, for clearness and simplicity, the form of 
Annals for his work ; but endeavoured so to tell his facts that 
their relation to each other might be understood, for he liked, 
he said, that saying of Polybius, " Take from history, why, how, 
and to what end, and what hath been done, and whether the 
thin - done hath succeeded according to reason, and whatsoever 
is else will rather be an idle sport than a profitable instruction : 
and for the present it may delight, but for the future it cannot 
profit." Samuel Daniel (ch. vii. § 79) wrote also as Annals, but 
in English, his Collectiofi of the History of England, first pub- 
lished in 1 61 3 and 161 8. It begins with Roman Britain, and 
ends with the reign of Richard III. 

13. Robert Bruce Cotton, born at Denton, Huntingdon- 
shire, in 1570, and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, 
was knighted by James I. In 161 1, when his Majesty had in- 
vented the rank of baronet, and began to trade in the new 
article, Sir Robert Cotton became one of his first customers. 
King James was aided in his controversies by Sir Robert 
Cotton's learning, and the treasures of literature rescued by him 



508 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1603 

from the scattered waste of the monasteries, were at the service 
of all who could make good use of them. It was in the reign of 
James I, that an older man, Sir Thomas Bodley, founded the 
Bodleian Library at Oxford. He was born at Exeter, in 1544, 
the son of that John Bodley who, in exile at Geneva, had been 
a chief promoter of the translation known as the Geneva Bible 
(ch. vii. § 15). Thomas Bodley had come to England at 
Elizabeth's accession, entered at Magdalene College, Oxford, 
became Fellow of Merton, had been employed by the queen on 
embassies, was for nine years ambassador at the Hague, but in 
1597 he retired from public life, and made it the work of his 
last years to give to the University of Oxford a library in place of 
that which it had lost. In 1602 he refitted the dismantled room 
which had been used for the library founded by Humphrey Duke 
of Gloucester, and furnished it with ten thousand pounds' worth 
of books. In July, 1610, he laid the foundation-stone of a new 
library building; and died in 161 2, about a year before the 
building was completed. 

14. The development of England at a time when men felt 
they were living history, and the lively controversy upon ques- 
tions in which authority of the past was being constantly 
appealed to, gave great impulse to historical research. John 
Stow was followed by another patriotic tailor chronicler, John 
J i>-^ a Speed, born in 1555. at Farington, in Cheshire, who, with 
little education, became enthusiastic in the study of the anti- 
quities of his own country. In 1608 and 1610 he published 
fifty-four maps of England and Wales. In 161 1 he published, in 
royal folio, his Chronicle, as The Histo,y of Great Britaine tinder 
the Conquests of the Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans. In 
161 1 appeared, in folio, his Theatre of the Empire of Great 
Britaine j and in 1616 the religious side of his English character 
was shown by the publication of A Cloud of Witnesses j and 
they the Holy Genealogies of the Sacred Scriptures, confirming 
tmto us the truth of the histories of God'' s most holie Word. Speed 
married when young, had eighteen children, and passed his 
golden wedding-day, his wife dying in 1628, and he in 1629. 

There were two brothers, William and Robert Burton, of 
Lindley, in Leicestershire, who both went to school at Sutton 
Coldfield, and to college at Brazenose, Oxford. William 
Burton became a lawyer, gave his mind to antiquities, and 
published, in J622, in folio, a Description of Leicestershire : 
containing Mattel's of Antiquity e, Histoiye, Armory e, and 



toa.d. 1621.] COTTON. BODLEY. SPEED. BURTON. RALEIGH. 509 

Genealogy. Robert Burton became a clergyman, and had 
the livings of St. Thomas, Oxford, and Segrave, in Leicester- 
shire ; but he still lived a quiet scholar's life at his college, 
and in 1621, published the Anatomy of Melancholy, by 
Deinocritus Junior. This discussion of all forms of melan- 
choly, and their remedies, is very quaint and ingenious in 
thought and expression, and so crammed with pleasant erudite 
quotations that the book has been to many later writers, who 
desired to affect knowledge of books they had never seen, the 
storehouse of their second-hand learning. Although an original 
book, its manner was in the fashion of the time, and it is said 
to have made the fortune of its Oxford publisher. It went 
through five editions before its author's death, in 1639. 

History moralised in the Mirror for Magistrates, remained 
popular after the accession of James I. The last edition of that 
work appeared in 16 10, edited by Richard Niccols, newly 
enlarged with a last Part, called a Whiter Night's Vision, being 
an addition of such Tragedies, especially famous, as are exempted 
in the former Historie, with a Poem annexed, called England's 
Eliza. This final edition contained ninety-one legends. 

15. There was a poet's mind in Sir Walter Raleigh, 
though he shone most as a man of action. Spenser had taken 
pleasure in his verse. A poet's sense of the grand energies of 
life was in Raleigh's conception of a History of the World, to 
keep his busy mind astir during imprisonment. Raleigh's 
good fortune was at an end when James I. became king. In 
November, 1603, he was tried at Winchester — there being the 
plague then in London — and unjustly found guilty of participation 
in an attempt to place Arabella Stuart on the throne, and of a 
secret correspondence with the King of Spain. Raleigh was 
sentenced to death, but reprieved. His personal property, for- 
feited by the attainder, was also restored, and he was detained a 
prisoner in the Tower, where his wife obtained permission to 
live with him, and where his youngest son was born. It was 
during these twelve years in the Tower that Sir Walter Raleigh 
wrote his fragment of a History of the World, which fills a sub- 
stantial folio. It contains five books of the first part of the 
History, beginning at the Creation and ending with the Second 
Macedonian War. The theme of its opening chapter is " Of 
the Creation and Preservation of the World," and the argument 
of its first section, " that the Invisible God is seen in His 
creatures." Raleigh even discusses fate, foreknowledge, and 



510 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1607 

free-will, before he begins the story of man's life on earth, and 
proceeds with historical detail that includes reasonings upon 
the origin of law and government. This folio was published in 
1614, and in 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death, Raleigh, by 
bribing the king's favourite, and exciting other hopes of gain, 
obtained liberty without any formal pardon, and a patent under 
the Great Seal for establishing a settlement in Guiana. The 
expedition failed, and Raleigh was too faithful to the old tradi- 
tions of his life. He returned in July, 161 8, having lost his eldest 
son in an attack on the new Spanish settlement of St. Thomas ; 
and to oblige Spain, James I. then caused him, at the age of 
sixty-six, to be executed, without trial, by carrying out of the 
fifteen-year-old sentence, on the 29th of October, 1618. English 
regard for the Elizabethan voyagers was maintained in this 
reign by the Rev. Samuel Purchas, vicar of Eastwood, in 
Essex. The Rev. Richard Hakluyt's manuscripts came into his 
hands, and he resigned his vicarage to his brother, to devote 
himself to a continuation of the work of Hakluyt. His first 
volume appeared in folio in 1613, and it was continued with 
four volumes in 1625, as Hakluytus ' Posthumus ; or, Purchas 
his Pilgri?nes. 

Descriptions of strange lands suggested to Joseph Hall 
(ch. vii. § 92) his Latin satire, first published at Hanover in 
1607, Mujidus Alter et Idem. Another world and the same, 
which places in the Southern region hitherto unknown, the 
imagined continent about the south pole, a satirical image of the 
hitherto known world which occupies the other half of the 
author's map. In that mirrored southern world there is a Holy 
Land said to be still unknown, a Crapulia divided into Pampha- 
gonia, the land of gluttons ; with whimsical subdivision into 
provinces, an account of its laws, religion, and manner of elect- 
ing a chief ; and Yvronia, the land of drunkards, described in 
like manner. The land of women is described as Viraginia. 
Moronia, the land of fools, with its subdivisions, covers a large 
space. The other region is Lavernia, the land of thieves. The 
piece has the fault of all L-ttire that dwells exclusively upon 
the baser side of human life. { 

16. History and antiquities were much studied by the con- 
troversial writers in the reign of James. At the beginning of 
the reign there was some revival of the old controversy as to the 
relation of the pope to kings ; and this was quickened by the 
discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, in November, 1605. In 1608, 



toa.d. 1618.] PURCHAS. HALL, LANCELOT. ANDREWES, 511 

Cardinal Bellarmin, under the name of his secretary, Matthew 
Tortus, answered King James's Triplici nodo, triplex Cun&usj 
or, an Apologie for the Oath of A llegiance against the two 
Breues of Pope Pavlvs Qvintvs, and the late Letter of Cardinal 
Bellarmine to C. Blackwel, the Arch Priest (1607). Robert 
Bellarmin, an Italian Jesuit, born in Tuscany, in 1542, was 
the great controversialist on the side of Rome. He had 
taught divinity at Louvain, and read lectures at Rome on points 
of controversy, had been sent also as legate to France, when, 
in 1599, he was made cardinal, and, in 1602, Archbishop of 
Capua. In 1605 he resigned the archbishopric that he might 
be near the pope, and do battle for the papacy on the great ques- 
tions of the day. He was learned, acute, and so honest in avoid- 
ing misrepresentation of the arguments he sought to answer, that 
his works, in three folio volumes, put very fairly upon record 
the positions of his opponents as well as his own. In these 
controversies the men of the Reformed Church had hitherto 
allowed citations of authority to weigh against them. They had 
not matched their antagonists in knowledge of Church history 
and of the writings of the fathers ; but a great demand for know- 
ledge of this kind was now producing the supply of it. Lancelot 
Andrewes, on whom the king called for an answer to Bel- 
larmin, and who produced as answer his Tortura Torti (1609), 
was in this way the most learned Churchman of the days of 
James I. He was born in London, in 1555, educated at Mer- 
chant Taylor's School, sent for his ability to Pembroke Hall, 
Cambridge (Spenser's College), obtained a fellowship, studied 
and taught divinity with great success, and was consulted as a 
profound casuist. Henry Earl of Huntingdon took him to the 
North of England, and there he persuaded some Roman Catholics 
to change their faith. Sir Francis Walsingham gave him the 
Parsonage of Alton, in Hampshire, and he was then successively 
vicar of St. Giles's, Cripplegate, Prebendary of St. Paul's — 
where he read divinity lectures three times a week in term time — 
Master of Pembroke Hall, Chaplain in Ordinary to Elizabeth, 
and Dean of Westminster. The queen would not raise him 
higher, because his ecclesiastical view of the rights of bishops 
forbade him to alienate episcopal revenues. James I. delighted 
in his preaching, which was that of a religious man strongly 
tinged with the pedantry of the time, and made him, in 1605, 
Bishop of Chichester. He was promoted afterwards through 
the bishopric of Ely to that of Winchester, in 161 8, and he died 



512 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1603 

in 1626, aged seventy-one. Ninety-six Sermons of his were 
published by command of Charles I., in 1631. 

17. James Usher, twenty-five years younger than Bishop 
Andrewes, succeeded to his repute as a theologian, and excelled 
him in learning. Usher was born at Dublin, in 1580, son to one 
of the six clerks in chancery. He was taught to read by two 
aunts, who had been blind from their cradle, but who knew 
much of the Bible by heart. Trinity College, Dublin, owes its 
existence to a grant made by Queen Elizabeth, in 1591, of the 
Augustine monastery of All Saints. The first stone was laid on 
New Years-day, 1593. It began work in the same year, and 
James Usher was one of the first three students admitted. He 
had delight in history, made chronological tables as a boy, and, 
as a youth, when the Church controversies became interesting 
to him, he resolved to read for himself the whole works of the 
fathers whose authority was so continually cited. He began 
at the age of twenty, and, reading a portion daily, finished at the 
age of thirty-eight. Usher's father died when he was about to 
be sent to London to study law. He then abandoned to his 
brothers and sisters his paternal inheritance, reserving only 
enough for his own support at college in a life of study, obtained 
a fellowship, at the age of twenty-one took holy orders, argued 
and preached against the Catholics, and opposed toleration of 
them. At the accession of James I. James Usher was twenty- 
three years old. He came to London to buy books for the library 
of the new college at Dublin, and found Sir Thomas Bodley 
(§ 13) buying books for Oxford. While he was in London 
Usher's mother became Roman Catholic, and all his contro- 
versial skill failed afterwards to reconvert her. In 1606, and 
afterwards at regular intervals of three years, Usher was again 
book-buying in England. In 1607, he was made— aged twenty- 
seven — Professor of Divinity at Dublin, and Chancellor of St. 
Patrick's Cathedral. In 1612 he became Doctor of Divinity. 
In 161 3, he published in London, and dedicated to King James 
his first book, in Latin, continuing from the sixth century the 
argument of Jewel's Apology (ch vii. § 14), to prove that the 
tenets of the Protestants were those of the primitive Christians. 
In the same year Usher married the well-dowered daughter of 
his old friend and associate in book-buying, Luke Chaloner. In 
161 5, a convocation of the Irish clergy drew up by Usher's 
hand a set of 104 articles for the Irish Church. Their theology 
was Calvin's, and they included an injunction to keep holy the 



toa.d. 1624.] JAMES USHER. 513 

Sabbath-day : for this and his strong opposition to the Roman 
Catholics, it was represented to King James that Usher was a 
Puritan. A correspondent of Usher's at this time observed 
how easily the king could be set against a clergyman by styling 
him a Puritan, u whence it were good," he said, " to petition His 
Majesty to define a Puritan, whereby the mouths of those scoffing 
enemies would be stopt ; and if His Majesty be not at leisure, 
that he would appoint some good men to do it for him." His 
Majesty hated a Puritan as one who did not bow down to the 
divine right of rule in bishops and archbishops, and, therefore, 
would have but a weak faith in the divine authority of kings. 
James had spoken his own mind as a " free king," with weak 
notions of freedom in a people, when, in 1598, he published The 
True Law of Free Monarchies j or, the Reciprock and Mutual 
Dtttie betwixt a Free King a?id his Nattirall Sub/ectes, and he 
had a sufficiently shrewd sense of the tendencies of Puritan 
opinion. When Usher came to England next, in 1619, he 
found it necessary to bring with him a certificate of orthodoxy 
from the Lord Deputy and his Council, and he had to submit to 
the infliction of a private theological examination, with his most 
conceited Majesty for the examiner. But Usher was a strong 
and conscientious supporter of authority in Church and State, 
and passed his examination so well that the king gave him the 
bishopric of Meath. As bishop, Usher was still active against 
Catholicism, and he published, in English, in 1622, A Discourse 
on the Religion Ancie?itly Professed by the Irish and British, 
to show that Protestant opinions were those of the ancient faith, 
and point out how at successive times the practices of the Church 
of Rome had been introduced. This work caused King James 
to command that Bishop Usher should produce a larger work, 
in Latin, on the antiquities of the British Church, with leave of 
absence from his diocese for consultation of authorities. He 
was a year in England, returned to Ireland in 1624, and. in 
reply to William Malone, published an Answer to a Challenge 
of a Jesuit in Ireland to disprove uniformity of doctrine in the 
Roman Catholic Church; thus giving more evidence of his 
knowledge of ecclesiastical antiquities. He then returned to 
England, and as the Archbishop of Armagh died at that time, 
King James, in the last year of his reign, gave the archbishopric 
to Usher. 

18. The accusation of Puritanism made at one time against 
Usher was, as we have seen, partly grounded on the Calvinism 

H H 



514 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1003 

of the articles drawn up by him for a convocation of the Irish 
Church. The Established Church of England was in Eliza- 
beth's time chiefly Calvinist in doctrine; under the Stuarts if 
was chiefly Arminian. Puritans held generally by the faith 
of Calvin, but by each road England went the way to her 
own liberties. Anninius was the Latinised name of Jacob 
Harmensen, who was born in 1560, at Oudewater, in South 
Holland, where his father was a councillor. Left early an 
orphan, Arminius was helped by friends to study at Leyden, 
Marburg, Geneva, and Basle. He went also to Padua and 
Rome before he returned to Holland, and preached in pulpits 
of the Reformed Church. In 1588 he became pastor at Am- 
sterdam. Some clergy at Delft then published a volume against 
Calvin's doctrine of predestination. Arminius was asked to 
refute their book, examined its arguments, was convinced, and 
ended not merely by accepting but by developing and enforcing 
its opinions. Great controversy then arose, but the chair of 
theology vacant at Leyden by the death of Francis Junius 
(ch. vii. § 26) was offered to Arminius. There he had to meet 
the assaults of a Calvinist colleague, Francis Gomarus, and 
the two parties formed were called Arminians and Gomarists. 
The good man's life was embittered by this controversy, and he- 
died in 1609, leaving many disciples, who, in 1610, set forth by 
five articles the opinions of their founder in a Remonstrance to 
the Estates of Holland. This gave them the name of The 
Remonstrants. They had freedom of opinion until 161 8, when 
it was taken from them by their religious and political enemies 
at the Synod of Dordrecht, and was not recovered again till the 
death of Maurice, Prince of Orange, in 1625, the year also of 
the death of James I. 

19. John Selden was born in December, 1584, at Salvington, 
about two miles from Worthing, in Sussex. His father was a 
musician, who sent him to the free school at Chichester, whence 
he was sent by the master's advice to Hart Hall, Oxford. In 
1602 he became a member of Clifford's Inn; and a year after the 
accession of King James, being then aged nineteen, he removed 
to the Inner Temple. John Selden had a strong body, able to 
sustain incessant studies; he had also a wonderful memory. 
He practised little at the bar, but was consulted for his know- 
ledge ; gathered many books, inquired through them freely, and 
wrote on the front leaf of most of them, as his motto, in a Greek 
sentence, " Above all, Liberty." He very soon became solicitor 



toa.d. 1618.] JOHN S ELD EN. 515 

and steward to the Earl of Kent, and found also a good friend 
in Sir Robert Cotton, to whom he dedicated his first book, 
finished in 1607, but not published till 161 5, the Analecton 
Anglo-Britannicon Libri Duo, two books of collections, giving 
a summary chronological view of English records down to the 
Norman Invasion. In 1610, besides two little treatises, one 
Latin and one English, on the antiquities of English law, he set 
forth some results of his reading in a short piece on The Duello, 
or Single Combat, extra-judicial and judicial, but chiefly judicial, 
with its customs since the Conquest. In 1614, Selden produced 
his largest English work, Titles of Honour, a full study of the 
history of the degrees of nobility and gentry, derived from all 
ages and countries, but applied especially to England. In 1617 
appeared, in Latin, Selden's treatise on the gods of Syria — De 
Deis Syris — a learned inquiry into polytheism, mainly with 
reference to that of Syria, for special study of the false gods 
named in the Old Testament. This book and the Titles of 
Honour had raised and extended beyond England Selden's 
character for learning, when, in 16 18, his way of research crossed 
dangerous ground, for he then highly offended James I., by 
publishing The History of Tithes. The churchmen who dwelt 
most upon obedience to authority, whom, therefore, the king 
preferred, had upheld a divine right of tithes, inherited by the 
Christian from the Jewish priesthood. Selden's book was not 
written, he said, to prove a case on either side ; it was not " any- 
thing else but itself, that is, a mere narrative, and the history of 
tithes." But in his dedication of it to Sir Robert Cotton he had 
rightly said that study of the past is to be cherished only for its 
fruitful and precious part, " which gives necessary light to the 
present ; " and condemned " the too studious affectation of bare 
and sterile antiquity, which is nothing else than to be exceeding 
busy about nothing." When, therefore, it appeared that Selden 
had carefully marshalled and verified authorities on both sides, 
and that, although he himself gave no opinion, his facts against 
the theory of a divine right of tithes outweighed his facts in 
favour of it, there was outcry, and His Majesty had argument 
with Mr. Selden, who was introduced to him by two friends, one 
of them Ben Jonson. Selden was called also before members of 
the High Commission Court, who compelled him to a declara- 
tion in which he did not recant anything, but was sorry he spoke. 
He admitted error in having published " The History of Tithes," 
in having given " occasion of argument against any right of 

H H 2 



5l6 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1603 

maintenance, jure divino, of the ministers of the gospel," and 
expressed grief at having incurred their lordships' displeasure. 
Selden's book was prohibited ; all men were free to write against 
it. Richard Mountagu, afterwards Bishop of Norwich, was 
encouraged by the king to confute Selden, to whom His Majesty- 
said, " If you or any of your friends shall write against this 
confutation I will throw you into prison." Dr. Mountagu had 
it all his own way when, in 1 621, he issued his Diatribe upon the 
First Part of the late History of Tithes. Selden confined 
himself to private comments, and sent to Edward Herbert, 
afterwards Lord Herbert of Cherbury, some notes on the work 
of one of his antagonists. He sought also to appease His 
Majesty by giving him three tracts, to make amends for his 
inadvertent rudenesses, i. His Majesty concerned himself 
about the number of the Beast, and Selden had spoken 
slightingly of the attempts to calculate it. In one of the 
three tracts he now restricted his censure, and spoke 
respectfully of a most acute deduction of His Majesty's. 2. 
Selden had spoken of Calvin's confession that he could not 
interpret the Book of Revelation as " equally judicious and 
modest." But King James was a confident interpreter, and was 
not he also judicious and modest? Selden explained that all 
men had not ignorance to confess, and that King James's ex- 
planations were " the clearest sun among the lesser lights." 
3. Selden had referred in his " History of Tithes " to the want of 
evidence that Christmas-day was a true anniversary. " This," 
said King James, " countenances Puritan objection to our way of 
keeping Christmas." To please the king, Selden in his third 
tract produced evidence to support the date of the anniversary. 
It was at the close of James's reign, in 1624, that John Selden 
first entered Parliament, as member for Lancaster. 

20. The keen spirit of inquiry that formed part of the new 
life of England made, in Edward Herbert (afterwards known 
as Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury), a bold stride towards 
denial of all revelations in religion. Edward Herbert was born 
at Montgomery, in Wales, educated at Oxford, visited London 
in 1600, went abroad, joined English auxiliaries in the Nether- 
lands, was an intrepid soldier, was knighted on the accession of 
James I., was sent in 161 6 as ambassador to France, was re- 
called for a bold saying, sent back again, and in 1624 published 
at Paris a Latin treatise upon Truth — De Veritate — in which he 
denounced those who did not hold his own five fundamental 



toa.d. 1624.] ADVANCE OF SCIENCE. 517 

truths of natural religion. He argued that heaven could not ■ 
reveal to a part only of the world a particular religion. Yet he 
said that, to encourage himself to oppose revelation, he asked 
for a sign, and was answered by a loud yet gentle noise from 
heaven. 

21. The rising spirit of inquiry was now active also for 
advance of science. John Napier, of Merchistoun, used the 
same mind which had spent its energies, in 1593, upon "A Plaine 
Discovery of the whole Revelation of St. John," upon the dis- 
covery of the use of Logarithms, and set forth his invention, in 
1 614, as Mirifici LogaritJwiorum Canonis Descriptio. In the 
following year, 161 5, William Harvey first brought forward, 
in lectures at the College of Physicians, his discovery of the 
Circulation of the Blood, afterwards more fully established and 
set forth in a small book, early in the reign of Charles I. 
Harvey lost practice by his new opinions, and his doctrine was 
not received by any physician who was more than forty years 
old ; but he was made, in 1623, Physician Extraordinary (which 
is less than Ordinary^ to James I. 

22. Advance of scientific inquiry is a marked feature in the 
literature of the Stuart times, and it was aided greatly by 
Francis Bacon (ch. vii. § 85), who during the reign of James I. 
set forth his philosophy. Bacon now prospered. He was made 
Sir Francis by his own wish, in July, 1603, that he might not 
lose grade, because new knights were multiplying, and there 
were three of them in his mess at Gray's Inn. Essex had been 
active for James. Bacon told the Earl of Southampton that he 
" could be safely that to him now which he had truly been 
before ;" and adapted himself to the new political conditions by 
writing a defence of his recent conduct, as Sir Francis Bacon 
his Apologie in certain Imputations concerning the late Earle of 
Essex. To the first Parliament of King James, Bacon was 
returned by Ipswich and St. Albans. He was confirmed in his 
office of King's Counsel in August, 1604 ; but when the office of 
Solicitor-General became vacant again in that year, he was not 
appointed to it. In 1605, about the time of the discovery of 
Gunpowder Plot, there appeared, in English, The Twoo Bookes 
of Francis Bacon. Of the Proficience and Adnauncement of 
Learning, Diuine a?id Humane. To the King. These two books 
of the Advancement of Learning — which, in 1623, towards the 
end of his life, reappeared in Latin, expanded into nine books, 
De Aug?nentis Scientiarum^ Libri IX.— form the first part, or 



5l8 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d 1605 

the groundwork of his Instauratio Magna, or " Great Recon- 
struction of Science." It was dedicated to King James, as from 
one who had been "touched, yea, and possessed, with an extreme 
wonder at those your virtues and faculties which the philo- 
sophers call intellectual ; the largeness of your capacity, the 
faithfulness of your memory, the swiftness of your apprehension, 
the penetration of your judgment, and the facility and order of 
your elocution." Of the "universality and perfection" of His 
Majesty's learning, Bacon said, in this dedication, " I am well 
informed that this which I shall say is no amplification at all, 
but a positive and measured truth ; which is, that there hath not 
been since Christ's time any king or temporal monarch which 
hath been so learned in all literature and erudition, divine and 
human." His Majesty stood " invested of that triplicity which 
in great veneration was ascribed to the ancient Hermes ; the 
power and fortune of a king, the knowledge and illumination of 
a priest, and the learning and universality of a philosopher," It 
was fit, therefore, to dedicate to such a king a treatise in two 
parts, one on the excellency of learning and knowledge, the other 
on the merit and true glory in the augmentation and propagation 
thereof. In his first book Bacon pointed out the discredits of 
learning from human defects of the learned, and emptiness of 
many of the studies chosen, or the way of dealing with them. 
This came especially by the mistaking or misplacing of the last 
or furthest end of knowledge, as if there were sought in it " a 
couch whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit ; or a 
terrace for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down 
with a fair prospect ; or a tower of state for a proud mind to 
raise itself upon ; or a fort or commanding ground for strife and 
contention ; or a shop for profit or sale ; and not a rich store- 
house for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate." 
The rest of the first book was given to an argument upon the 
Dignity of Learning ; and the second book, on the Advance- 
ment of Learning, is, as Bacon himself described it, " a general 
and faithful perambulation of learning, with an inquiry what 
parts thereof lie fresh and waste, and not improved and con- 
verted by the industry of man; to the end that such a plot 
made and recorded to memory may both minister light to any 
public designation and also serve to excite voluntary endeavours." 
Bacon makes, by a sort of exhaustive analysis, a ground-plan of 
all subjects of study, as an intellectual map, helping the right 
inquirer in his search for the right path. The right path is that 



-toa.d. 1614.J FRANCIS BACON. 519 

by which he has the best chance of adding to the stock of know- 
ledge in the world something worth labouring for, as labour for 
" the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate." 

In May, 1606, Bacon, aged forty-six, married Alice Barnham, 
daughter of a London merchant who was dead, and whose 
widow had taken in second marriage Sir John Packington, of 
Worcestershire. The lady had ,£220 a year, which was settled 
on herself. In June, 1607, Sir Francis Bacon became Solicitor- 
General. While rising in his profession he was still at work on 
writings that set forth portions of his philosophy. In 1607 he sent 
to Sir Thomas Bodley his Cogitata et Visa — a first sketch of the 
Novum Organum. In 1608 — the year of John Milton's birth — 
Bacon obtained the clerkship of the Star Chamber, worth ,£1,600 
or ,£2,000 a year, of which the reversion had been given him 
in 1589. In 1612 appeared, in November or December, Bacon's 
Second Edition of the Essays; there had been, since the first, 
two unauthorised editions, in 1598 and 1606. In Bacon's own 
second edition the number of the essays was increased from 
ten to thirty-eight, and those formerly printed had been very 
thoroughly revised. The range of thought, also, was widened 
(ch. vii. § 85), and the first essay was "Of Religion." The 
purpose of dedicating this edition to Prince Henry was stopped 
by the prince's death, on the 6th of November. In February, 
1 61 3, Bacon contrived, for the gentlemen of Gray's Inn and the 
Inner Temple, a Masque of the Marriage of the Thames and 
the Rhine, on the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth to the 
Elector Palatine. In October, 1613, Bacon was made Attorney- 
General. The dispassionate mind that his philosophy required 
Bacon applied somewhat too coldly to the philosophy of life. 
Without hatreds or warm affections, preferring always a kind 
course to an unkind one, but yielding easily to stubborn facts in 
his search for prosperity, Bacon failed as a man, although he 
had no active evil in his character, for want of a few generous 
enthusiasms. Seeking to please a mean master, who was the 
dispenser of his earthly good, in 1614 Bacon was official pro- 
secutor of Oliver St. John, a gentleman of Marlborough, who 
had written a letter to the mayor of his town on the illegality of 
the king's act in raising money by benevolences. In December 
of the same year the Rev. Edmund Peacham, a clergyman 
seventy years old, rector of Hinton St. George, Somersetshire, 
was deprived of his orders by the High Commission for accusa- 
tions against his diocesan. In searching his house a manuscript 



520 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1^14 

sermon was found, which had been written but not preached. 
It censured acts of the king — as sale of Crown lands, gifts to 
favourites— and seems to have suggested that the recovery of 
Crown lands to the people might cost blood. The old clergyman 
was, by the king's desire, accused of treason, and was twice put 
to the rack, that accusation of himself or others might be wrung 
from him. As Attorney-General, Bacon, serving his master, dis- 
cussed privately with the judges in furtherance of the king'* 
desire that Peach am might be convicted of treason for the com- 
position of the sermon without any act of publication. They 
would not see with the king's eyes, or follow Bacon, who wrote 
to the king of his foregone conclusion as the truth, and expressed 
his hope of the judges that " force of law and precedent will 
bind them to the truth ; neither am I wholly out of hope that my 
Lord Coke himself, when I have in some dark manner put him 
in doubt that he shall be left alone, will not continue singular." 
As nothing could be done in London, the old clergyman was 
sent to Taunton assizes, where a conviction was secured in 
August, 1 615 ; but the sentence of death was not carried out, 
because many of the judges were of opinion that Peacham's 
offence was not treason. He died, in 1616, a prisoner in Taunton 
gaol. In 1616 — the year of Shakespeare's death — Bacon was 
made a Privy Councillor. While the Attorney- General was thus 
obedient to his master, he was suitor for the office of Lord- 
Keeper, which the bad health of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere 
would probably soon cause him to resign. This office Bacon 
obtained in March, 161 7. In January, 161 8, he became Lord 
Chancellor ; six months afterwards he was made Baron Verulam. 
In October, 1620, he presented to the king his Novum Orgamun, 
a fragment on which he had worked for thirty years, and which 
formed the second and main part of his " Instauratio Magna." 
Three months later he was made, on the 27th of January, 1621, 
Viscount St. Albans, and had reached his highest point of great- 
ness. Then came his memorable fall. 

On the 15th of March the report of a Parliamentary Com- 
mittee on the administration of justice charged the Lord Chan- 
cellor with twenty-three specified acts of corruption. Bacon's 
final reply was : " Upon advised consideration of the charge, 
descending into my own conscience, and calling my memory to 
account as far as I am able, I do plainly and ingenuously confess 
that I am guilty of corruption, and do renounce all defence, and 
put myself on the grace and mercy of your lordships." He then, 



to a. d. 1626. ] FRA NCIS BA CON. 5 2 1 

as he had been required to do, replied upon each case, and 
pleaded guilty to each. The Lords sent a committee of twelve 
to the Chancellor, to ask whether he had signed this, and would 
stand by his signature. He replied to the question : " My lords, 
it is my act, my hand, and my heart. I beseech your lordships 
to be merciful to a broken reed." He was sentenced by the 
House of Lords, on the 3rd of May, 1621, to a fine of ,£40,000, 
which the king remitted ; to be committed to the Tower during 
the king's pleasure, and he was released next day ; thenceforth 
to be incapable of holding any office in the State, or sitting in 
Parliament. It was decided by a majority of two that he should 
not be stripped of his titles. Of worldly means there remained 
what private fortune he had, and a pension of ,£1,200 a year 
that the king had lately given him. The rest of his life Bacon 
gave to study, only applying, unsuccessfully, in 1623, for the 
provostship of Eton. In 1622 he published, in Latin, as the 
third part of his " Instauratio Magna," his Natural and Experi- 
mental History — Historia Naturalis et Experimentalis, and his 
Historie of the Raigne of K. Henry VII., dedicated to Charles, 
Prince of Wales. In 1623 appeared, in Latin, his History of 
Life and Death, as well as the Latin expansion into nine books 
of " The Advancement of Learning," as a first volume of his 
works. In 1625, Bacon published his own Third Edition of the 
Essays, with their number increased to fifty-eight, and again 
with revision and rearrangement of the earlier matter. The first 
essay in this final edition was " Of Truth ;" and the Essay " Of 
Religion," with its title changed to " Of Unitie in Religion," was 
much enlarged and carefully modified, to prevent misconception 
of its spirit. On the 9th of April, 1626, ten years after Shake- 
speare, Francis Bacon died. 

Bacon arranged his writings for the " Instauratio Magna" into 
six divisions : — 1. The books on the "Dignity and Advancement 
of Learning" — the ground-plan. 2. The " Novum Organum," of 
which only the first part was executed, showing what was the new 
instrument, or method of inquiry, which he substituted for the old 
instrument, the " Organon" of Aristotle. 3. The "Experimental 
History of Nature ; or, Study of the Phenomena of the Universe." 
In this division Bacon's most complete work was the Silva 
Silvarum; or, Natural History in Ten Centuries. Then came 
the science raised on these foundations, in, 4, the Scala foitel- 
lectus ; or, Ladder of the Understanding, which leads up from 
experience to science. 5. The Prodromi; or, the Anticipations 



522 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1614 

of the Second Philosophy — provisional anticipations founded on 
experience, which the investigator needs as starting-points in his 
research ; and, 6, Active Science — experiment in the fair way to 
such gains of knowledge as may benefit mankind. 

Bacon opposed to the " Organon " of Aristotle, which only 
analysed the form of propositions, his " New Organon," which 
sought a method of analysis that would attain discoveries 
enlarging the dominion of man. "Human science," he said, 
" and human power coincide." Invention must be based upon 
experience ; 'experience be widened by experiment. Bacon's 
highest and purest ambition was associated with his life-long 
endeavour to direct the new spirit of inquiry into a course that 
would enable men " to renew and enlarge the power and 
dominion of the human race itself over the universe. . . • 
Now the dominion of men over things depends alone on arts 
and sciences; for Nature is only governed by obeying her." 
Bacon had no sympathy whatever with research that consists 
only in turning the mind back on itself. For him the mind was 
a tool, and nature the material for it to work upon. The only 
remaining way to health, he said, " is that the whole work of 
the mind be begun afresh, and that the mind, from the very 
beginning, should on no account be trusted to itself, but con- 
stantly directed." All knowledge comes to men from without, 
and the laws to which we can subject natural forces are to be 
learnt only from the interpretation of nature. In former days 
invention had been left to chance, and science had been 
occupied with empty speculations. A way of inquiry should be 
used that will lead — be inductive — from one experience to 
another, not by chance, but by necessity. Hence Bacon's method 
has been called inductive ; but the second and main part of his 
philosophy was, after arriving by this method at a truth in 
nature, to deduce therefrom its uses to man. Having found, for 
example, by inductive experiment, a general truth about elec- 
tricity, the crowning work of the Baconian philosophy would be 
to deduce from it the Atlantic cable. 

Bacon taught that the inquirer was to take as frankly as a 
child whatever truths he found. He compared human know- 
ledge with divine, of which it is said, " Except ye become as 
little children ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." 
And he too said, " Little children, keep yourselves from idols." 
" The idols," Bacon said, " and false notions which have hitherto 
occupied the human understanding and are deeply rooted in it, 



to a.d. 1626.3 BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 523 

not only so beset the minds of men that entrance is hardly open 
to truth, but even when entrance is conceded, they will again 
meet and hinder us in the very reconstruction of the sciences, 
unless men, being forewarned, guard themselves as .much as 
possible against them." He therefore classified the common 
forms of false image within the mind to which men bow down. 
They are Idols (i) of the Forum or Market-place {Idola Fort), 
when we take things not for what they are, but for what the 
common talk, as of men in the market-place, considers them to 
be ; they are Idols (2) of the Theatre {Idola Theatri), when we 
bow down to authority, or fear to differ from those who have 
played great parts on the world's stage ; Idols (3) of Race or 
Tribe {Idola Tribus) are " founded/' says Bacon, " in the very 
tribe or race of men. It is falsely asserted that human sense is 
the standard of things," for the human intellect, blending its 
own nature with an object, distorts and disfigures it. There are 
Idols also (4) of the Cave or Den {Idola Specus) ; these are the 
accidental faults and prejudices of the individual inquirer. 

On his guard against these idols, the philosopher who follows 
Bacon's teaching trusts to pure experience. Everything in 
Nature appears under certain conditions. Comparative experi- 
ments can be made to determine which of these conditions are 
essential and which accidental. Thus we may advance from 
fact to fact, till, by successive testings and comparisons of facts, 
we reach one of the laws by which the course of nature is 
determined. So we ascend, by the method of induction, from 
the experiment to the axiom. But experiment may seem to 
have found a law with which some fact — some " negative in- 
stance " — is at odds. This contradiction must not be put out of 
sight, but taken simply as against acceptance of the law till it 
be reconciled with it. Nay, more, the investigator must use all 
his wit to invent combinations able to disprove his fact, if it be 
no fact; he must seek to invent • negative instances, acting as 
counsel against himself until assured that his new fact will stand 
firm against any trial. " I think," said Bacon, " that a form of 
induction should be introduced which from certain instances 
should draw general conclusions, so that the impossibility of 
finding a contrary instance might be clearly proved." When so 
assured that it stands firm, the inquirer may announce his new 
truth confidently, and either deduce from it himself or leave 
others to deduce its use to man. 

In this philosophy Bacon did no more than express formally, 



524 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1605 

distinctly, and with great influence over the minds of others,, 
what had always been the tendency of English thought. His 
namesake, Roger Bacon, in the thirteenth century, had pursued 
science very much in the same spirit, and had nearly anticipated 
Francis Bacon's warning against the four idols, in his own four 
grounds of human ignorance (ch. iii. § 33). We must not forget, 
also, when we find feebleness in the scientific experiments of 
Bacon and his followers, with the retention of much false 
opinion about nature, that what Bacon professed was to show, 
not grand results, but the way to them. He bade his followers 
" be strong in hope, and not imagine that our ' Instauratio ' is 
something infinite and beyond the reach of man, when really it 
is not unmindful of mortality and humanity ; for it does not 
expect to complete its work within the course of a single age, 
but leaves this to the succession of ages ; and, lastly, seeks for 
science, not arrogantly within the little cells of human wit, but 
humbly, in the greater world." 

23. We finish the sketch of our literature in the reign of 
James I. with a glance at some of the poets who were not 
dramatists. Michael Drayton (ch. vii. § 80) wrote, at the 
king's accession, To the Majestie of King James : a Gratidatore 
Poem, but turned from the king disappointed ; published, in 
1604, his fable of The Owle ; and in 1607 the Legetid of Great 
Cromwell, which appeared again in 1609 as The Historie of the 
Life and Death of the Lord Cromwell, some time Earl of Essex 
and Lord Chancellor of England. In 161 3 appeared his Poly- 
olbion (the word means Many-ways-Happy), a poetical de- 
scription of his native land, in nearly a hundred thousand lines 
of Alexandrine verse, with maps of counties, and antiquarian 
notes by the author's friend, John Selden. This poem was 
another illustration of the quickened patriotism of the English. 
Thus Drayton sang when he came to his own county of War- 
wick, that he and Shakespeare loved : 

" My native country, then, which so brave spirits hast bred, 
If there be virtues yet remaining in thy earth, 
Or any good of thine thou bredst into my birth, 
Accept it as thine own, whilst now I sing of thee, 
Of all the later brood the unworthiest though I be." 

William Browne, born in 1590, at Tavistock, in Devon- 
shire, studied at Exeter College, Oxford, then went to the Inner 
Temple, and in 161 3, the year of the appearance of Drayton's 
" Polyolbion," produced, at the age of twenty-three, the first 



toa.d. 1625.] DRAYTON. W.BROWNE. G.FLETCHER. 525 

part of his Britannia! s Pastorals, partly written before he was 
twenty. The Shepherd's Pipe, in seven eclogues, followed in 1614. 
In 161 6, the year of Shakespeare's death, appeared the second 
part of Browne's Britannia's Pastorals. The two parts were 
published together about the end of James's reign, and about 
the same time their author went back to Exeter College as tutor 
to Robert Dormer, Earl of Carnarvon. His pleasant pastoral 
strain touched but lightly upon the realities of life. The rustic 
manner showed the influence of Spenser, but in James's reign 
this influence was greatest on Giles Fletcher. 

24. Giles Fletcher (ch. vii. § 91), was at Trinity College, 
Cambridge, when he contributed a canto on the death of Queen 
Elizabeth to the collection of verses Sorrow's jfoy, on the death 
of Elizabeth and accession of James, published by the printer 
to the University in 1603. He took the degree of B.D. at 
Trinity College, and held the living of Alderton, in Suffolk, till 
his death, in 1623. It was not until after the death of Giles 
that his elder brother, Phineas, appeared in print as a poet, 
though at the close of his own early poem Giles spoke of his 
brother as young Thyrsilis, the Kentish lad that lately taught 

" His oaten reed the trumpet's silver sound" 

Giles Fletcher's poem was published at Cambridge, in 1610, 
when the author's age was about six-and-twenty. It was a devout 
poem on Christ's Victory and Ti'iumfth in Heaven and Earth 
over and after Death, in an original eight-lined stanza, suggested 
by Spenser's, but not happily constructed. For five lines the 
stanza followed Spenser, and then came a triplet, of which the 
last line was an Alexandrine, as in the Spenserian stanza. Thus : 

"At length an aged sire far off he saw 

Come slowly footing ; every step he guess'd 
One of his feet he from the grave did draw ; 

Three legs he had, that made of wood was best ; 
And all the way he went he ever blest 

With benedictions, and with prayers store; 
But the bad ground was blessed ne'er the more : 
And all his head with snow of age was waxen hoar." 

Christ's Victory in Heaven heralded the work of Christ with 
long personifications and speeches of Justice and of Mercy, to 
whom finally all bowed ; the Victory on Earth painted Christ 
in the wilderness, approached by Satan (the aged sire above 
mentioned) in the guise of an old Palmer, who so bowed " that 
at his feet his head he seemed to throw," who led Christ to 



526 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. Ta.d. 1603 

echoes of Spenser to the cave of Despair, which he would 
entice him to enter ; to the top of the Temple, also, where per- 
sonified Presumption tempted in vain ; and then to Pangloretta, 
on the mountain top, where Giles Fletcher faintly recalled notes 
from Spenser's bower of Acrasia. The other two books on the 
Triumph over Death and the Triumph after Death were in like 
manner. 

Joshua Sylvester (ch. vii. § 93), about 1620, gratified His 
Majesty, who had published in 1604 a Counterblaste to Tobacco, 
with a poem of his own, called Tobacco Battered and the Pipes 
Shattered {about their Ears that idlely Idolise so Base and 
Barbarous a Weed; or at least-wise Over-love so Loathesome 
Vanitie), by a Volley of Holy Shot thundered from Mount 
Helicon. This poem was as wise as its title, and suggests the 
form into which Euphuism degenerated in the time of James I. 

25. Strain for ingenious alliteration, and for unexpected 
turns of phrase or thought, losing much of the grace and strength 
it had in the Elizabethan time, became more pedantic in the 
wise, more frivolous in the foolish, often obscure by the excess 
of artifice and the defect of sense. There was the same 
degeneration everywhere of the Earlier Euphuism, bright with 
fresh invention and poetical conceits, into the Later Euphuism 
that had to a great extent lost freshness of impulse, and was 
made obscure by poets who, with less to say than their prede- 
cessors, laboured to outdo them in ingenuities of thought and 
speech. There is no reason in or out of metaphysics why the 
Later Euphuistic poetry, of which Donne's verse is a type, should 
be called " metaphysical." It was so called in an age that knew 
little or nothing of the character of English poetry before the 
Commonwealth. There is as little reason for the assertion 
that a change for the worse was made in our literature by 
the influence of Donne. He only represented change, and he 
was popular because he followed cleverly the fashion of his day. 
Precisely what has been said of Donne, in his relation to our 
English literature, has been said also of Gongora, who died in 
1627, and of Marino, who died in 1625 — men who went with 
the same current of literature, one in Spain, the other in Italy, 
during the reign of James I. in England. In Spain the writers 
corresponding to our Earlier and Later Euphuists are known 
as the Conceptistas, or " Conceited School," and the Cultos, who 
cherished what they called a " Cultivated Style " in poems and 
romances. Our later Euphuism was English cousin to the 



toa.d. 1625.] JOSHUA SYLVESTER. JOHN DONNE. S 2 7 

cultismo of Spain, and to the style called, after Marino, by- 
Italians the stile Marinesco. Here, also, we are at the beginning 
of the history of the false worship of diction. 

26. John Donne was born in 1573, the son of a London 
merchant. He was taught at home till, in his eleventh year, he 
was sent to Hart Hall, Oxford. At fourteen he left Oxford for 
Cambridge, where he remained till he was seventeen, but took 
no degree, because his family was Roman Catholic, and would 
not let him take the required oath. He left Cambridge for 
London, and studied law at Lincoln's Inn. His father died at 
that time, leaving him three thousand pounds. His mother 
sought to bring him to the faith of his parents ; and unsettlement 
of mind caused him to make a special study of the controversies 
of the time between the Roman Catholics and the Reformers. 
As a storehouse of opinion on the controversy, young Donne 
fastened upon the works of Cardinal Bellarmin (§ 16). He 
went with the expeditions of the Earl of Essex, in 1596 and 
1597, and spent afterwards some years in Italy and Spain, 
returned to England, and became chief secretary to Lord 
Chancellor Ellesmere. He held that office five years, during 
which he fell in love with Anne More, a niece of Lady Elles- 
mere, who lived in the family. Her father, Sir George More, 
heard of this, and carried away the young lady to his house in 
Surrey ; but a secret marriage was effected. When this was 
told to Sir George, he caused Lord Ellesmere to dismiss his 
secretary, whom apparent ruin could not keep from a play on 
words, according to the fash : on of the time ; for in writing the 
sad news to his wife he added to his signature the line, " John 
Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done." Donne was imprisoned for a 
time, and when he was free his wife was kept from him. He 
sued at law to recover her. She came to him when his means 
were almost gone, and a family grew fast about the young 
couple, who were living in the house of a kinsman, Sir Francis 
Woolly, of Pirford, Surrey. It was then urged upon Donne 
that he should take orders in the Church, but he hesitated, and 
preferred study of civil and canon law. Sir Francis Woolly died, 
but before his death he had persuaded Donne's father-in-law to 
cease from wrath and pay a portion with his daughter, at the 
rate of £Zo a year. Donne remained very much dependent on 
the liberality of friends, and was still studying points of con- 
troversy between the English and the Romish Church, when a 
home was given to him in the house of Sir Robert Drury, in 



528 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1608 

Drury Lane. Donne came now into contact with King James, 
discussed theology with him, and wrote, at his request, a book 
on the taking of the oaths of supremacy and allegiance, called 
Pseudo Martyr, published in 1610. This pleased the king so 
much that he required Donne to be a clergyman. Donne made 
what interest he could to have the king's good-will shown in the 
form of secular employment ; but James had made up his mind 
that Donne should be a preacher, and, in spite of himself, he was 
forced into the Church as the only way by which he was allowed 
a chance of prospering. When Donne had at last taken orders, 
King James made him his chaplain, and in the same month 
called on Cambridge to make him Doctor of Divinity. In this 
first year of his prosperity Donne's wife died, leaving him with 
seven children. Outward prosperity increased. He became a 
famous preacher and a fashionable poet, was lecturer at Lincoln's 
Inn till he was joined in a mission to Germany, and about a 
year after his return was made by the king, in 1623, Dean of St. 
Paul's, while the vicarage of St. Dunstan's in the West, and yet 
another good thing, fell to him almost at the same time. Donne 
survived King James, and died in the year 1631. His lighter 
occasional poems were not published until after his death. In 
James's reign he, like other poets, published in 1613 "An Elegy 
on the Untimely Death of the Incomparable Prince Henry." A 
severe illness of his own led also to the publication in 1624 of 
his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, and Seuerall Steps in 
Sickness; and in 1625 he published a poem upon mortality, 
since that was not out of harmony with his sacred office. It 
was called An Anatomy of the World, wherein^ by the untimely 
Death of Mrs. Rlis. Drury, the Frailty and Decay of this 
whole World is represented. From this poem we take, for 
specimen of artificial diction, a passage that contains by rare 
chance one conceit rising in thought and expression to the 
higher level of Elizabethan poetry : 

" She, in whose body (if we dare preferre 
This low world to so high a marke as shee) 
The Western treasure, Easterne spicery, 
E jrope, and Afrique, and the unknowne rest 
Were easily found, or what in them was best ; 
And when we have made this large discoverie 
Of all, in her some one part then will bee 
Twenty such parts, whose plenty and riches is 
Enough to make twenty such worlds as this ; 
Shee, whom had they knowne, who did first betroth 
The tutelar angels, and assigned one, both 



toa.d. 1625.] DONNE. CORY AT. JOHN TAYLOR. $2$ 

To nations, cities, and to companies, 

To functions, offices, and dignities, 

And to each several man, to him, and him, 

They would have given her one for every limbe; 

Shee, of whose soule, if we may say, 'twas gold, 

Her body was th' Electrum, and did hold 

Many degrees of that ; wee understood 

Her by her sight ; Iter pure a?id eloqtce?it blood 

Spoke in her cheekes, and so distinctly wrought 

That one might almost say, her body thought. 

Shee, shee, thus richly and largely hous'd, is gone." 

Unreality of a style that sacrifices sense to ingenuity is 
most felt in Sonne's lighter poems. The collection of the verse 
of the late Dean of St. Paul's published in 1635, as Poems by 
J\ D., with Elegies o?i the Author's Death, opens with an inge- 
nious piece, of which the sense is, so far as it has any, that a 
woman's honour is not worth a flea. Donne was unquestionably 
a man with much religious earnestness, but he was also a poet 
who delighted men of fashion. 

27. The literary affectations of the time were reduced to 
absurdity by Thomas Coryat, and John Taylor, the Water Poet. 
Thomas Coryat, son of George Coryat, rector of Odcombe, 
Somerset, and educated at Gloucester Hall, Oxford, lived a 
fantastic life at court for the amusement of Prince Henry. In 
1608 he travelled on foot for five months in France, Italy, and 
Germany, walking 1,975 miles, and more than half the distance 
in one pair of shoes, which were only once mended. The shoes, 
when he came home, were hung up in Odcombe Church, and kept 
there as the "thousand mile shoes" till 1702. The travel in 
them was described in a book published in 161 1, as Coryafs 
Crudities hastily Gobbled Up in Five Months' T?'avel in France, 
Qr*c. Introduced by An Odcombian Banquet of nea7'ly Sixty 
Copies of Verses, which were praises written in jest by nearly all 
the poets of the day. This book was followed by Coryat' s 
Crambe ; or, hts Colewort Twise Sodden, and now Served with 
other Macaronicke Dishes as the Second Course to his Crudities. 
In 16 1 2, Coryat gathered the people of Odcombe at their 
market cross, and took leave of them for a ten years' ramble. 
He visited Greece, Egypt, India, and died at Surat, in 161 7. 
There was the English love of sturdy enterprise and adventure 
underlying Coryat's endeavour to delight his public. 

Jolin Taylor was a poor man's son from Gloucestershire, 
who became a Thames waterman, after he had served under 
Elizabeth in sixteen voyages ; he was with Essex at Cadiz and 

I I 



53° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1612 

the Azores. He read many books, and he wrote sixty-three 
booklets to amuse the public with their oddities. He made 
presents of his little books to customers and courtiers, and took 
whatever they might give in return. One of his books told 
how he won a bet that he would row in his boat to the Continent 
and back again within a certain time. It appeared as Taylor's 
Travels in Germanie; or, Three Weekes Three Dazes and Three 
Hours' Observations and Travel from London to Hamburg. 
. . . Dedicated for the present to the abse?it Odco?nbian 
knight errant. Sir Thomas Coriat, Great Britain's Error 
and the World's Mirror. This appeared in the year of 
Coryat's death at Surat. Another of Taylor's freaks was a 
journey on foot from London to Edinburgh, " not carrying 
any money to and fro, neither begging, borrowing, nor asking 
meat, drink, or lodging." This yielded, in 1618, a book, The 
Pennyles Pilgrimage j or, the Money lesse Perambulation of John 
Taylor, alias the King's Majes tie's Water Poet, from London to 
Edenborough on Foot. Another of his adventures was a voyage 
from London to Queenborough in a paper boat, with two stock- 
fish tied to two canes for oars. It was celebrated, in 1623, by 
The Praise of Hempseed, with the Voyage of Mr. Roger Bird 
atidthe Writer hereof in a Boat of Brown Paper, from London 
to Quinborough in Kent. As also a Farewell to the Matchless 
Deceased Mr. Thomas Coriat. Conchtding with Commendations 
of the famous River of Thames. All this was a little tract of 
twenty-four leaves. So we come down from Elizabethto James I. ; 
from Frobisher, and Drake, and Raleigh, to poor Tom Coryat 
and John Taylor, His Majesty's Water Poet. But although the 
court lost dignity, the spirit of the people was unchanged. 

28. George Wither was born in 1588, at Bentworth, near 
Alton, in Hampshire. At the beginning of the reign of James I. 
he was sent to Oxford, but was soon recalled to attend to the 
Hampshire farm land. In 1612, Wither first appeared as a poet 
by joining in the lament for Prince Henry, adding to his Elegies 
a " supposed interlocution between the ghost of Prince Henry 
and Great Britaine;" and in 161 3, being then twenty-five years old, 
he spoke out boldly for England in Abuses Stript and Whiptj or, 
Satirical Essayes, by George Wyther, divided into Two Bookes. 
The successive satires are under the heads of human passions, 
as Love, Lust, Hate, Envy, Revenge, and so forth : 

" What ? you would fain have all the great ones freed; 
They must not for their vices be controll'd ; 



to a.b. 1625.] GEORGE WITHER. 53I 

Beware ; that were a sauciness indeed ; 
But if the great ones to offend be bold, 
I see no reason but they should be told. " 

Wither was bold in condemnation as others in offence. 
While he continued the attack upon self-seeking of the higher 
clergy, he maintained the office of the bishop, and gave high 
praise to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London. 
The Satires, although sharp, were generous ; their style was dif- 
fuse, but simple, earnest, often vigorous, for Wither had the 
true mind of a poet. He would tell what he knew, 

"And then if any frown (as sure they dare not) 
So I speak truth, let them frown still, I care not." 

The great ones did frown, and Wither was locked up in the 
Marshalsea. But he was not to be silenced. He sang on in 
his cage, and sang plain English, contemning the pedantry of 
fashion. Wither translated in his prison a Greek poem on " The 
Nature of Man," besides writing the most manly pastorals pro- 
duced in James's reign, The S heft heards? Hunting : being certain 
Eclogues written during the time of the Author's Imprisonment 
in the Marshalsey, and a Satire to the King, in justification of 
his former Satires. In the "Shepheard's Hunting," we learn 
how Wither, as Philarete (lover of Virtue), had hunted with ten 
couple of dogs (the satires in " Abuses Stript and Whipt ") those 
foxes, wolves, and beasts of prey that spoil our folds and bear 
our lambs away. But wounded wolves and foxes put on sheep's 
clothing, complained of the shepherd's hunting, and caused his 
imprisonment. In his prison, Philarete talked with his friends, 
kept up his spirit, and was comforted by song. Withers Motto, 
Nee habeo, nee careo, nee euro (" I have not, want not, care 
not") — a line in it says, " He that supplies my want hath took 
my care" — was published in 161 8. In 1622 Wither's poems 
were collected as Juvenilia j and in the same year he published 
Faire- Virtue, the Mistresse of Philarete, written by Hi?n-selfe. 
Virtue is here described as a perfect woman, mistress of Phila- 
rete (lover of Virtue). This long poem, in seven-syllabled 
verse, is musical with interspersed songs, including the famous — 

" Shall I, wasting in despair, 
Die because a woman's fair ?" 

and delicately playful with the purest sense of grace and 
beauty. George Wither takes his own way still, saying : 

112 



532 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1608 

" Pedants shall not tie my strains 
To our antique poets' veins, 
As if we in latter days 
Knew to love, but not to praise. 
Being born as free as these, 
I will sing as I shall please, 
Who as well new paths may run 
As the best before have done." 

Wither remained an active writer in the reign of Charles I. ; 
and Francis Q/uarles, who was four years younger than 
"Wither, produced his best work after the death of James I. 
Ouarles was born in 1592, at Romford, in Essex, educated at 
Christ's College, Cambridge, and at Lincoln's Inn. He was 
cupbearer to James's daughter, the Queen of Bohemia, and 
afterwards served in Ireland as secretary to Archbishop Usher 
(§ ,17). His first publication was in 1620, A Feast for Wo?'mes 
in a Poem 011 the Histo?y of Jonah, with Pentalogiaj or, the 
Quintessence of Meditation. In 1621 followed Hadassaj or, the 
History of Quee?i Esther, these histories being in ten-syllabled 
couplets, and, in the same measure, Argalus and Parthenia, 
a poem in three books, founded on a part of Sidney's " Arcadia " 
(ch. vii. § 44). Then came in 1624, fob Militant, with Medita- 
tions Divine and Moral j also Sion's Elegies, wept by Jere7iiie 
the Prophet j and, in 1625, Sion's Sonnets, sung by Solomon the 
King , and periphrased. The writing of Ouarles in the reign 
of James I. consisted, then, of Argalus and Parthenia, and 
those pieces which were collected into one volume, in 1630, as 
Ouarles's Divine Poems. 

29. William Drummond, M.A. of Edinburgh, after four 
years in France, inherited, in 16 10, at the age of twenty-five, his 
paternal estate of Hawthornden, gave up the study of law, took 
his ease, and wrote poetry. He joined in the lament for the 
death of Henry, Prince of Wales ; published at Edinburgh, 
in 16 16, Poems: A7norous, Funerall, Divi?ie, Pastor all, in 
Sonnets, Songs, Sextains, Madrigals, by W. D., the Author 
of the Teares 071 the Death of Me Hades, (Meliades was the 
anagram made for himself by the prince from " Miles a Deo ") ; 
and in 1617, upon James's visit to Scotland, published Forth 
Feastitig: a Panegyric to the King's Most Excellent Majestic. 
During the greater part of April, 1619, Drummond had Ben 
Jonson for a guest, and took ungenial notes of his conversation. 
In 1623 he published Flovvres of Sion, to which is adjoyned his 
Cypresse Grove. His sonnets were true to the old form of that 



toa.d. 1625.] QUARLES. DRUMMOND. OVERBURY. 533 

kind of poem, and they were not all of earthly love and beauty, 
for sonnets in the spirit of Spenser's Hymns of Heavenly Love 
and Beauty (ch. vii. § 77) are among the spiritual poems in 
Drummond of Hawthornden's " Flowers of Sion." 

Sir Thomas Overbury was murdered in 161 3, when but 
thirty-two years old. As a follower of the king's favourite, Can*, 
he opposed his marriage with the Countess of Essex. The king, 
wishing to send Overbury out of the way, offered him an embassy 
to Russia. He refused it, and was committed to the Tower for 
contempt of the king's commands. There, by the connivance of 
Lady Essex, Overbury died of poison ten days before the judg- 
ment of divorce ; and this was followed, as the year closed, by 
the creation of Carr as Earl of Somerset, and his marriage to 
the Countess in the Chapel Royal. Bacon devised a masque at 
Gray's Inn in honour of the marriage. He also took part, in 
May, 1 616, in the trial of the earl and countess for the murder 
of Sir Thomas Overbury. The victim of this crime was in 
repute among the writers of his day for a poem on the choice 
of a wife, called A Wife now a Widowe, published the year 
after his murder, in 16 14, and reprinted in the same year with 
the addition of twenty-one characters. To write compact 
and witty characters of men and women was a fancy of the 
time, derived in the first instance from Theophrastus, and 
associated with the quick growth of the drama. Such pithy 
character writing had been prefixed formally as " The Character 
of the Persons " to Ben Jonson's " Every Man Out of his 
Humour ; " and the dialogue of the second act of his " Cynthia's 
Revels," produced in 1600, is chiefly made up of such character 
writing as that in which Sir Thomas Overbury showed his 
skill in 1614, and John Earle showed his in 1628. It was the 
manner of this character writing that suggested to young 
Milton his lines on the death of Hobson, the University 
carrier. 

30. John Milton was seventeen years old at the end of 
James's reign, and we may now pass with him into the reign of 
Charles I. He was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, on the 
9th of December, 1608. His father, also a John Milton, was 
son to a Catholic, of Oxfordshire, perhaps a husbandman, per- 
haps an under-ranger of Shotover Forest, who had cast him off 
for changing his religion. Thus the poet's father had settled in 
London as a scrivener, and prospered. He had a taste for 
music. In 1601 he had been one of twenty-two musicians who 



534 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1608 

published twenty-five madrigals, as The Triumphs of Oriana. 
In 1614, when the poet son was about six years old, the musician 
father was joined with others in providing music to the Tears and 
Lamentations of a Sorrowful Soul. Seven years later, as con- 
tributor to a book of Psalms, he furnished the tunes still popular 
as " Norwich" and "York." Of the tenor part of York tune, it 
has been said that at one time " half the nurses in England were 
used to sing it by way of lullaby." Thus the poet's father had 
musicians among his friends, as well as men like himself earnest 
in religious feeling. One of these, Thomas Young, of Loncarty, 
in Perthshire, afterwards a minister in Suffolk, and a man of 
note among the Puritans, was the boy's first teacher. In 1622, 
Young, aged thirty-five, went to be pastor of the congrega- 
tion of English merchants at Hamburg; his pupil had then 
been for a couple of years at St. Paul's School (ch. vi. § 10), 
where Mr. Gill was head master, and his son, Alexander Gill, 
taught under him. Milton was a schoolboy at St. Paul's from 
1620 until a few months before the close of the reign of James I. 
His father too readily encouraged the boy's eagerness for study ; 
he had teaching at home as well as at school, suffered headaches, 
and laid the foundation of weak sight by sitting up till midnight 
at his lessons. 

At St. Paul's School Milton found a bosom friend in Charles 
Diodati. The friendship outlasted their boyhood, only death 
interrupted it. Charles was the son of Theodore Diodati, a 
physician in good practice in London, who had been born in 
Geneva, the son of Italian Protestants. His younger brother, 
Giovanni, uncle of Milton's friend, was still at Geneva, professor 
there of theology, and had published translations of the Bible 
into Italian and French. Of such a household came the friend 
to whom young Milton spoke his inmost thoughts. Charles 
Diodati left school more than two years before Milton, and 
went to Trinity College, Oxford, where, in November, 1623, he 
joined in writing Latin obituary verse upon the death of William 
Camden. But John Milton and Charles Diodati had their 
homes in the same town, and their friendship was easily main- 
tained by visits and correspondence. There is a Greek letter 
written in London from Diodati to Milton, hoping for fine 
weather and cheerfulness in a holiday the two friends meant to 
have next day together on the Thames. The surviving children 
in Milton's home were Anne, the eldest; John; and Christopher, 
seven years younger than John. Towards the close of 1624 



toa.d. 1625.] JOHN MILTON. BENJONSON. 535 

Milton's sister. Anne, married Mr. Edward Phillips, of the Crown- 
Office in Chancery. 

In February, 1625, John Milton was admitted at Christ's 
College, Cambridge, aged two months over sixteen ; but he had 
returned to London before the end of the term, and was there on 
the 26th of March, writing to his old tutor, Thomas Young, an 
affectionate letter : " I call God to witness how much as a 
father I regard you, with what singular devotion I have always 
followed you in thought." The next day, March 27, 1625, was 
the day of the death of James I. 

B. — REIGN OF CHAELES I. 

31. Charles I. came to the throne at the age of twenty-five. 
Ben Jon son was then fifty years old, Milton not seventeen, and 
Bacon sixty-four, with but another year to live. Francis Beaumont 
(§ 6) died five months after the accession of Charles I. 

At the accession of Charles I., Dr. Donne (§ 26) was fifty-two 
years old, and he lived until 1631; George Chapman (ch. vii. 
§ 98, ch. viii. § 10) was sixty-eight years old, and lived till 1634. 
John Marston (ch. vii. § 99, 100) died about the same time as 
Chapman. Thomas Dekker and Thomas Hey wood (ch. vii. 
§ 99), who continued to write plays, lived on till about 1641. 
Heywood had " an entire hand or a main finger " in 220 plays. 
John Webster (§ 9) lived throughout the reign of Charles I., and 
died under the Commonwealth, about 1654. 

32. Ben Jonson (ch. vii. § ioo, ch. viii. § 5), after the death 
of James I., was driven to the stage again by poverty. The 
town did not receive his play, The Staple of News, produced 
in 1625, with much favour, and at the close of that year the 
poet had a stroke of palsy. He had bad health during 
the rest of his life. His play of The New Inn, acted in 
January, 1630, was driven from the stage; and it was then 
that Jonson turned upon the playhouse audiences with an 
indignant ode. At the end of 163 1 a quarrel with our first 
great architect of the Renaissance, Inigo Jones, who invented 
the machinery for the court masques, deprived Jonson of all 
court patronage, and in 1632 and 1633 he was compelled to 
write feebly for the public stage his last plays, The Magnetic 
Lady and The Tale of a Tud. But after this, court favour 
and city favour, which also had been withdrawn, were re- 
gained for him. He had a pension from court of ^100 and 
a tierce of canary. The favour of all the good poets of the 



536 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. |a.d. 1625 

time was with him always. In the latter part of James's reign 
Jonson had lodged at a comb-maker's, outside Temple Bar. 
Just within Temple Bar, and between it and the Middle Temple 
gate, was a tavern, which had for its sign Dunstan, the saint of 
the parish, with the devil's nose in his tongs. It was called, 
therefore, the " Devil Tavern." Here Ben Jonson gathered about 
him the new generation of poets, in the Apollo Club. In his last 
days, when disease was closing in upon him, he was all poet 
again, at work on his pastoral play of The Sad Shepherd; or, a 
Tale of Robin Hood, which he left unfinished. He died in August, 
1637, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. There was ques- 
tion of a monument, but none was raised. One Jack Young 
gave a mason eighteenpence to cut on the stone over the grave 
" O rare Ben Jonson." 

33. Philip Massinger (§ 9) lived until 1640, writing many 
plays, of which only eighteen remain. The public stage under 
Charles I. was not strongly supported by the king and court, 
and it was strongly contemned by the Puritans. Good plays 
were often ill received, and then good poets might hunger. In 
1633, when Ben Jonson made his last struggle to please a play- 
house audience, Massinger printed that one of his plays which 
has held the stage to our own time, A New Way to Pay Old 
Debts. In the same year also Ford's Broken Heart was first 
printed. 

John Ford, born in 1586, at Ilsington, in Devonshire, and 
bred to the law, began to write plays only two or three years 
before the accession of Charles I., and was one of the chief 
dramatists of Charles's reign until his death in 1639. ^ n Ford, 
as in Massinger, men born in Elizabeth's reign, with grandeur 
of poetical conception, there is still the ring of Elizabethan poetry. 

There is enough of it also in James Shirley, who was 
only about nine years old when Elizabeth died, and who lived 
into Charles II.'s reign, to justify his place among Eliza- 
bethan Stuart dramatists. The reign of Charles I. was 
Shirley's work-time as a dramatist. He was a Londoner born, 
educated at Merchant Tailors' School and St. John's College, 
Oxford, when Laud was its president. He removed to Cam- 
bridge, took orders, had a cure near St. Albans, left that because 
he turned Romanist, and taught, in 1623, at the St. Albans 
Grammar School. Then Shirley came to London, became a 
dramatist, and was not unprosperous ; his genius and his 
Catholicism recommended him to Charles's aueen. He went to 



TOA.D. 1649.] MASSINGER. FORD. SHIRLEY. MAY. $37 

Ireland in 1637, the year of Ben Jonson's death, and wrote plays 
for a theatre then newly built, the first in Dublin. When he 
came back, a clever dramatist and blameless gentleman, James 
Shirley took part on the king's side in the 'Civil War; and when 
the stage would no longer support his wife and family he taught 
boys again. 

34. In the versification of many Elizabethan Stuart drama- 
tists, and noticeably in Massinger and Shirley, there is further 
development of the ten-syllabled blank verse into a free measure, 
with frequent use of additional syllables, often monosyllables 
(ch. vi. § 47). The breaks of lines also are often so made 
as to compel such running of two lines together as deprives 
the verse of some of its character. We have begun the descent 
from poetical blank verse to a loosely metrical form of dialogue, 
when we find writing like this in Massinger : 

" Speak thy griefs. 

I shall, sir; 
Eut in a perplexed form and method, which 
You only can interpret : would you had not 
A guilty knowledge in your bosom of 
The language which you force me to deliver." 

35. Thomas May, born in Sussex, in 1594, came from 
Cambridge to Gray's Inn, and was the one among Elizabethan 
Stuart dramatists whose work was least Elizabethan. His 
comedy of The Heir was printed in 1622, when he also published 
a translation of Virgil's Georgics. In 1627 appeared his transla- 
tion of Lucau's Pharsalia, which had been preceded, in 1614, by 
that of Sir Arthur Gorges. In 1633, May added, in seven books, 
his own Continuation to the death of Julius Cassar. May's 
Lucan caused Charles I. to command of him two original 
historical poems. These were, The Reigne of King Henry 
the Second, in Seven Bookes (1633), and, also in seven books, 
The Victorious Reigne of King Edward the Third. In the 
Civil War, May took part with the Parliament, and was made its 
secretary and historiographer. In this character he published, 
in 1647, in folio, The History of the Parliament of England 
which began Nov. 3, M.DC.XL.y with a Short and Necessary 
View of some Precedent Years; an abridgment of this, in three 
parts, appeared in 1650, the year of his death. May also trans- 
lated a selection from Martial's Epigrams and Barclay's "Argenis" 
and " Icon Animarum." 

36. Stuart dramatists born within a year or two after the 



53^ A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1625 

death of Elizabeth were Jasper Mayne, Thomas Randolph, and 
William Davenant. Jasper Mayne, born in 1604, at Hather- 
leigh, Devonshire, was educated at Westminster School and 
Christ Church, Oxford. He held the livings of Cassington and 
Pyrton, in Oxfordshire, till he was deprived of them in 1648. He 
wrote in the time of Charles I. a comedy called The City Match 
(printed in 1639), and the tragi-comedy of The Amorous War 
(printed in 1648). After the Restoration he became Archdeacon- 
of Chichester and chaplain to Charles II. He lived till 1672. 

Thomas Randolph, born at Newnham, Northamptonshire,, 
in 1605, was at Westminster School with Mayne. He went to 
Trinity College, Cambridge, became M.A. and Fellow of his; 
College, was a good scholar and good wit, lived gaily, and died 
in 1639, before he was thirty. In honour of sack and contempt 
of beer, he wrote a lively dramatic show, called Aristippus (1630), 
in which the jovial philosopher — whose name was given to sack 
(sec) or dry sherry — lectured to scholars on the virtues of that 
source of inspiration till the scholars sang : 

" Your ale is too muddy, good sack is our study, 
Our tutor is Aristippus." 

Yet in another of Randolph's plays, The Muses' Looking-Glass 
— " the Ethics in a Play " — there is a moralising of the uses of 
the drama for the benefit of Puritan objectors ; and after a dance- 
of the seven sins, the opposite extremes which have a virtue in 
the mean — as servile Flattery and peevish Impertinence, extremes 
on either side of Courtesy; impious Confidence and overmuch 
Fear, extremes of Fortitude; swift Quarrelsomeness and the 
Insensibility to Wrong, extremes of Meekness — are cleverly 
illustrated in successive dialogues. The Golden Mean appears 
at last, with a masque of Virtues, replying to the Puritans who 
said that the stage lived by vice — 

" Indeed, 'tis true, 
As the physicians by diseases do, 
Only to cure them." 

This was far more rational than Laud's way of answering" 
Prynne. William Prynne, born in 1600, at Swainswick, near 
Bath, educated at Oriel College, Oxford, and then a barrister of 
Lincoln's Inn, represented Puritan opinion by writing, in 1628,. 
Health's Sickness, on the Sinfulness of Drinking Healths, and a 
tract on The Unloveliness of Lovelocks. His tracts in the- 
reign of Charles I. were very numerous, and upon every point- 



toa.d. 1639.] MAYNE. RANDOLPH. PRYNNE. DAVENANT. 539 

of controversy maintained by the Puritans. In 1633 he pub- 
lished, against plays, masques, balls, and other such enter- 
tainments, Histrio-mastix : the Players' Scourge or Actors' 
Tragedie. For this book Prynne was committed to the Tower, 
prosecuted in the Star Chamber, and sentenced to pay a fine 
to the king of ,£5,000, to be expelled from the University of 
Oxford, from the Society of Lincoln's Inn, and from his pro- 
fession of the law; to stand twice in the pillory, each time 
losing an ear; to have his book burnt before his face by the 
hangman ; and to suffer perpetual imprisonment. 

Thomas Randolph wrote also a comedy, The Jealozis 
Lovers, acted, in 1632, before Charles and his queen by the 
students of Trinity College; and a graceful pastoral play, 
Afiiyrttas (1638), acted before the king and queen at Whitehall. 
Among Randolph's songs and poems is one to Ben Jonson, 
who loved him and other of the bright young poets of the day, 
and called them sons. I was not born, he says, to Helicon, 

But thy adoption quits me of all fear, 

And makes me challenge a child's portion there. 

I am akin to heroes heing thine, 

And part of my alliance is divine." 

.William Davenant, son of an Oxford innkeeper, was 
born in 1605, was educated at the Oxford Grammar School and 
at Lincoln College, went to court as page to the Duchess of 
Richmond, and was then in the household of Sir Philip 
Sidney's friend, Pulke G-reville, Lord Brooke, until his 
murder in 1628. Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes, by 
Fulke Greville, were published in 1633, including his tragedy 
of Alaham Miistafiha, of which a fragment had been printed 
in 1609. He left behind him also a short life of Sir Philip 
Sidney, which was published in 1652. Davenant, after his 
patron's death, turned to the stage, and began, in 1629, with 
a tragedy, Albovine, King of the Lombards, followed next year 
by two plays, The Cruel Bi'other and The Just Italian. In 
1634, Davenant wrote a masque, The Temple of Love, to be 
presented at Whitehall by the queen and her ladies. In 1635 
he published with other poems Madagascar, in couplets of ten- 
syllabled lines, on an achievement at sea by the king's nephew, 
Prince Rupert. Davenant remained in favour at court for his 
Masques and Plays ; and after the death of Ben Jonson, Davenant 
took his place. Small-talk has it that disappointment at this 
turned Thomas May from the king. In 1639, William Davenant 



54° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1625 

was made governor of the king and queen's company acting 
at the Cockpit in Drury Lane. Outbreak of civil war brought 
him into danger. He escaped, returned, was the Earl of New- 
castle's Lieutenant-General of the Ordnance, and, in 1643, was 
knighted for his service at the siege of Gloucester. As exile 
in Paris, Sir William Davenant was at the end of the king's 
reign writing Gondibert, an heroic poem. Davenant resumed 
his post as a leading dramatist, and was poet-laureate after the 
Commonwealth. 

37. William Habington, who, like Mayne, Randolph, 
and Davenant, was born soon after Elizabeth's death, and was 
about twenty at the accession of Charles I., wrote a tragi- 
comedy of The Queen of Arragon, published in 1640. In that 
year appeared also his Historie of Edward the Fourth, King of 
England, written at the king's request. Habington's father was 
a Worcestershire Roman Catholic, condemned to abide always 
in Worcestershire, for having concealed in his house persons 
accused of complicity in Gunpowder Plot. The father, since he 
was to see so much of Worcestershire, wrote a history of the 
county. The son, educated at St. Omer's, came home and 
married Lucy, daughter of William Herbert, first Lord Powis. 
In the name of Castara he paid honour to her through some 
lyrics of pure love, as the type of moaest, spiritual womanhood. 
Habington's Castara first appeared in two parts, in 1634; the 
second edition, adding three prose characters and twenty-six new 
poems, appeared in 1635 ; and a third in 1640, enlarged with a new 
part, containing a Character of " The Holy Man " and twenty- 
two poems, chiefly sacred. John Earle (§ 29), M.A., Fellow 
of Merton, had published, in 1628, his collection of Characters, 
as Micro-cosmographie j or, a Peece of the World Discovered, in 
Essay es and Characters. Earle was then twenty-seven years old. 
He became afterwards chaplain to the Earl of Pembroke, and 
was Bishop of Salisbury when he died, in 1665. 

38. We leave the line of the playwrights, which we have fol- 
lowed down to the young writers of the time of Charles I., and turn 
back to the elder men who were in that reign writing poetry. 

Dr. Barten Holyday, chaplain to Charles, was born in 
1593, the son of an Oxford tailor. He was educated at Christ 
Church, took orders, went to Spain with Sir Francis Stewart, 
and after his return was chaplain to the king and Archdeacon of 
Oxford. He was a learned man and timid politician. He is 
hardly to be called a dramatist, although he wrote a comedy, 



toa.d. 1649.] HABINGTON. ELDER POETS. 54I 

published in 1630, called Techno garni a; or, the Marriage of the 
Arts. But he left behind him when he died, in 1661, a transla- 
tion of Juvenal and Persius into poor verse, with many learned 
illustrative notes. George Sandys (§ n) published his com- 
plete translation of Ovid's Meta?norphoses in 1626, and in 
1636 a Paraphrase of the Psalms, with music of tunes by Henry 
James. Sandys died in 1644. 

Thomas Carew, born in Devonshire in 1589, was gentle- 
man of the privy chamber and sewer in ordinary at the court of 
Charles I., a lively man, whose little poems were in good request, 
but, except when set to music, were not published in his lifetime. 
He died in 1639. The musicians William and Henry Lawes 
set many songs of Carew's, and were the chief writers of music 
for the poems that abounded in this reign. 

William Drummond of Hawthornden (§ 29) lived 
through the reign of Charles I., and died soon after the king's 
execution, in 1649. There has been ascribed to him a mock- 
heroic macaronic poem (ch. vi. § 42) on a country quarrel over 
muck-carts — Polemo-Middinia inter Vitervam et Nebernam — 
blending Latin with the Scottish dialect in a coarse but comical 
example of that kind of writing. 

John Taylor, the Water Poet (§ 27), wrote on through the 
reign of Charles I., and took part in the Civil War by discharging 
squibs of verse against the Puritans. He had then an inn at 
Oxford. When the king's cause was lost, he set up an inn in 
London, by Long Acre, with the sign of " The Mourning Crown ;" 
but he was obliged to take that down, and set up his own por- 
trait in place of it. He died in 1654. 

39. George "Wither (§ 28), at the beginning of the reign of 
Charles, was in London during a great plague time, bravely 
helping its victims, and he published, in 1628, a poem upon his 
experiences, . as Britain's Remembrancer: containing a Narra- 
tion of the Plague lately Pasty a Declaration of the Mischiefs 
Present, and a Prediction of Ivdgments to Come {if Repe?itance 
Prevent not). It is Dedicated {for the Glory of God) to Pos- 
ter i tie y and to these Times {if they please), by Geo. Wither. 
Wither tells the reader of this book : " I was faine to print every 
sheet thereof with my owne hand, because I could not get 
allowance to doe it publikely." His verse translation of The 
Psalms was printed in the Netherlands, in 1632; his Emblems, 
with metrical illustrations, in 1635 ; his Hallelujahy or, Britain's 
Second Remembrancer, in 1641. Wither, of course, was active 



542 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1625 

in the Civil War, body and mind, becoming captain and major in 
the army of the Parliament. When his " Emblems " appeared he 
was the king's friend. He was the king's friend even when 
opposing him in the first incidents of civil war, as one who hoped 
for reconciliation between king and parliament. Wither lived 
on, and was an old man in London at the time of the great fire. 
He died in 1667. 

Francis Quarles (§ 28) produced in 1632 Divine Fancies, 
Digested into Epigrammes, Meditations, and Observations j and 
the quaintest and most popular of his books of verse, Emblems 
Divine and A/oral, appeared in the same year (1635) with the 
" Emblems " by George Wither. The taste for emblem pictures, 
with ingenious and wise interpretation of them, had been 
especially established by the Latin verse "Emblems" of the 
great Italian lawyer, Andrea Alciati, who died in 1550. These 
"Emblems" were translated into Italian, French, and German, 
and read in schools. The taste they established was widely 
diffused throughout the seventeenth century. The prevalent 
taste for ingenious thought, blending with the religious feeling 
of the people, helped especially to a revival of emblem writing 
in Holland and England, and in Holland the Moral Emblems of 
Jacob Cats, statesman as well as poet, who was born in 1577, 
came twice as ambassador to England and outlived Quarles, 
were in very high repute. Quarles, in Ireland with Archbishop 
Usher, suffered by the Irish insurrection of 1641. He came to 
England, took part with the royal cause in a book called The 
Loyal Convert, joined the king at Oxford, and was ruined in 
the Civil War. He had been twice married, and had by his 
first wife eighteen children. Quarles died, overwhelmed with 
troubles, in 1644. 

40. George Herbert, born at Montgomery Castle, in 1593, 
was the fifth of seven sons in a family of ten. His eldest 
brother was Edward Herbert (§ 20), who returned from 
France to England at the beginning of the reign of Charles I., 
was made an Irish baron, and in 1631 an English peer, as Lord 
Herbert of Cherbury. In the Civil War, Edward Herbert first 
sided with the Parliament, and then went to the king's side at 
great sacrifice. He died in 1648, and in the following year 
appeared his History of the Life and Reign of Henry VIIL., 
in which little attention is paid to the religious movements of 
the time. George Herbert, who was consumptive, died in 
1633, fifteen years before his elder brother. His father died 



fro a. d. 1644. ] FRANCIS QUARLES. GEORGE HERBERT. 543 

when he was four years old, and till he was twelve he was in 
the care of a very good mother at home, with a chaplain for 
tutor. He was then sent to Westminster School, and at fifteen 
elected from the school for Trinity College, Cambridge. In 
161 5, George Herbert became M.A. and Fellow of his College. 
In 161 9 he was chosen orator for the University, and so re- 
mained for the next eight years. His wit in use of the laboured 
style of the time delighted King James ; for when his Majesty 
made the University a present of his " Basilicon Doron," which 
had been published in 1599, George Herbert ended for the 
•Cambridge authorities his acknowledgement of the royal 
.gift, with the remark, put neatly in Latin verse, that they could 
not now have the Vatican and the Bodleian quoted against 
them ; one book was their library. James, upon this, observed 
that he thought George Herbert the jewel of the University. 
The Cambridge Public Orator, who was skilled in French, Italian, 
.and Spanish, thought he might rise at court, and was often in 
London. The king gave him a sinecure worth .£120 a year. 
With this, his fellowship, his payment as Orator, and private 
income, he could make a good figure at court, and he was usually 
near the king. But the death of two of his most powerful 
friends, and soon afterwards of King James himself, put an end 
to George Herbert's ambition to become one day a Secretary of 
State. He resolved then to follow his mother's often-repeated 
counsel, and at the beginning of the reign of Charles I., George 
Herbert took orders. He obtained, in 1626, the prebend of 
Layton Ecclesia, in the diocese of Lincoln, and with help of his 
own friends handsomely rebuilt the decayed church of that vil- 
lage. The Rev. George Herbert, cheerful and kind, tall and 
very lean, was ill for a year with one of his brothers, at Wood- 
ford, in Essex, and then again recruiting health in Wiltshire, at 
the house of the Earl of Danby, whose brother had become his 
mother's second husband. He then married, three days after their 
first interview, a young kinswoman of the earl's, who had been 
destined for him by her father, and in April, 1630, three months 
after the marriage, which proved a most happy one, George 
Herbert was inducted into his living of Bemerton, a mile from 
Salisbury. He was then thirty-six years old. The pure beauty 
of the evening of George Herbert's life — the three years at 
Bemerton before his death in 1633 — was expressed in his verse 
as in his actions. With Hooker's faithful regard for the Church 
system, he maintained it in his parish according to his own 



544 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1625 

standard of purity, blended with love and a free-handed charity, 
with poetry and music. He was a skilful musician, and went 
into Salisbury twice a week on certain days for the- cathedral 
service. In 1631 George Herbert's poems appeared as The 
Temple : Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculatio7is. The forced 
ingenuity of the time is in them, but the ingenuity so forced is 
that of a quick wit, and the spirit glorifies the letter ; the words, 
too, are by the writer's sense of harmony tuned often exquisitely 
to the soul within them. Herbert's Priest to the Temple j or, 
Character of a Couiit?y Parson, was first printed under the 
Commonwealth, in 1652. 

41. Phineas Fletcher, who had the living of Hilgay, in 
Norfolk, was born at Cranbrook, Kent, in April, 1582, and went 
to Cambridge from Eton in 1600. He published in 1627 a satire 
against the Jesuits, The Locustes or Apollyonists,'\n Latin and 
English; in 1631, Sicelides, a Piscatory, in five acts, as it hath 
been acted in King's College, in Cambridge ; in 1632, a couple 
of religious pieces ; in 1633, Latin poems, Sylva Poetica and 
The Purple Island. Phineas Fletcher's "Purple Island" is 
" the Isle of Man," and the poem is a long allegory in ten 
cantos of man as the study of mankind, with an allegorical 
description of his structure, much larger and less poetical than 
Spenser's in (Book II. Canto 97 of) the " Faerie Queene : " with 
allegorical description of the passions, desires, virtues lodged in 
man, as " this Purple Island's nation," and, of course, not want- 
ing the dragon to be fiercely contended with. The poem was 
Avritten long before it was published, for its flight is said to be 
that of a " callow wing that's newly left the nest," and it repre- 
sents a young man's reverence for Spenser. Ouarles called its 
author "the Spenser of this age." The metre of "The Purple 
Island" is Giles Fletcher's eight-lined stanza (§ 24), with its 
fifth line gone. William Harvey published, in 1628, the little 
Latin book, De Mota Sanguinis et Cordis, which diffused 
through Europe his discovery of the circulation of the blood. In 
1633 the "thousand brooks," which represented veins and arteries, 
in Fletcher's " Purple Island," were described by Fletcher 
according to the old doctrine, without knowledge or without 
recognition of Harvey's discovery. In 1633 Fletcher's Piscatory 
play was followed by Piscatorie Eclogs and other Poeticall Mis- 
cellanies. They are seven pastorals, in which the old forms are 
applied to fishermen. " A fisher lad (no higher dares he look)," 
or " Myrtel fast down by silver Med way's shore," and 



to a.d. 1649.] PHINEAS FLETCHER. CORBET. WALLE 545 

" Ox^ a day 
Shepherd and fisherboys had set a prize 
Upon the shore, to meet in gentle fray, 
Which of the two should sing the choicest lay." 

Phineas Fletcher wrote of himself as Thirsil, and figured his 
father with his troubles at Cambridge as Thelgon of Chame. 
Among his other poems was Elisa, an Elegy for the early death 
of Mr. St. Antony Irby, as the lament of " his weeping spouse, 
Elisa." 

Richard Corbet, born in 1582, was of Phineas Fletcher's 
age. He was the son of a famous gardener, from whom 
he inherited some land and money. He was educated at 
Westminster School and Oxford ; became M.A. in 1605, and 
was in repute first as a University wit and poet, and then as 
a quaint preacher, who got patronage at James's court. He 
married in 1625, became Bishop of Oxford in 1629, of Norwich 
in 1632, and died in 1635. He was a stout royalist, worked with 
Laud, but was less bitter, and wrote merry squibs against the 
Puritans. A poem to his little son, and one on the death of his 
father, show his kindliness. One of sundry recorded jokes of 
Bishop Corbet's, is of the upsetting of his coach when he and 
his chaplain, Dr. Stubbings, who was very fat, were spilt into a 
muddy lane. Stubbings, the bishop said, was up to his elbows 
in mud ; and he was up to his elbows in Stubbings. A very 
small volume appeared in 1648, issued by Corbet's family, entitled 
Poetica Stromataj or, A Collection of Sundry Pieces in Poetry : 
Drawn by the known and approved hand of R. C. Written 
copies of short satires, songs, and other pieces, passed from 
hand to hand, so that a man might have high reputation in 
society as wit and poet without the printing of a line of his 
during his lifetime, except now and then, when Henry Lawes or 
some other composer had set a song to music. 

42. Edmund Waller was of the same age as Sir William 
Davenant, and, like Davenant, lived to take place among the 
writers under Charles II. He was born in 1605, at Coleshill, 
Herts. His father died in his infancy, and left him an income 
of ,£3,500 a year ; say, ten thousand in present value. His 
mother was John Hampden's sister. He was educated at 
Eton and Cambridge, entered Parliament when young, and 
soon became known at court as a poet. He added to his wealth 
by marrying a city heiress, who died leaving Waller, in 1630, a 
gay courtier of five-and-twenty, writing verse- worship of the 

J J 



J46 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [ad. 1625 

Earl of Leicester's eldest daughter, Lady Dorothea Sidney, as 
Sacharissa, and of another lady of the court, perhaps Lady 
Sophia Murray, as Amoret. The lady whom he took as second 
wife has no place in his verses. She became the mother to him 
of five sons and eight daughters. In the Civil Wars, Waller at 
first took part with his uncle Hampden ; but he opposed abolition 
of Episcopacy, showed goodwill to the king, spoke freely in the 
Parliament, — by which he was sent, in 1642, as one of the Com- 
missioners to the king at Oxford, — and, in 1643, plotted against 
it. He saved himself ignobly, and escaped, after a year's im- 
prisonment, with a fine of £10,000 and exile to France, where 
he lived chiefly at Rouen. 

43. Sir John Suckling was about four years younger than 
Waller, and a year younger than Milton. He was born in 1609, 
the son of the Comptroller of the Household to James I. Suck- 
ling was an overtaught child, who could speak Latin at the age 
of five ; but he cast aside, as a young man, his father's gravity, 
was on active service for six months in the army of Gustavus 
Adolphus, and in the days of Charles I. lived in London as 
light wit, light lyric poet, light dramatist, and liberal friend of 
men of genius. His plays were Aglaura, Brennoralt, and The 
Goblins. He spent ,£12,000 on rich equipment of a troop of 
100 horse to aid the king, and died in 1641, of a wound in the 
heel : a penknife was put into his boot by a servant who had 
robbed him and wished to delay pursuit. 

44. William Cartwright also wrote plays and lyrics, was 
about two years younger than Suckling, and also died at the age 
of thirty-two. He was the son of a Gloucestershire gentleman, 
who had wasted his means, and lived by innkeeping at Ciren- 
cester. William Cartwright was taught in the Cirencester 
Grammar School, at Westminster School, and Christ Church, 
Oxford. He became M.A. in 1635, took orders, and was a 
famous preacher. He studied sixteen hours a day, preached 
excellent sermons, wrote excellent lyrics, and also four plays ; 
one of them, The Royal Slave, a tragi-comedy, acted before the 
king and queen in 1637, by the students of Christ Church, Oxford. 
Cartwright was also an admired lecturer at Oxford on meta- 
physics, worked hard as one of the council of war to provide for 
the king's troops at Oxford, was beloved of Ben Jonson, who 
said of him, "My son Cartwright writes all like a man," and 
was praised by his bishop as " the utmost man could come to." 
He died in 1643, °f the camp fever that killed many at Oxford. 



TOA.P. 1649.] SUCKLING. CARTWRIGHT. DENHAM. CRASH AW. 547 

45. Oxford had Cartwright ; Cambridge had John Cleve- 
land, for nine years a Fellow of St. John's College, eminent in 
poetry and oratory, and the first to pour out from the Royalist side 
defiant verse against the Puritans. Turned out of his fellow- 
ship, he joined the king at Oxford ; then went to the garrison at 
Newark-on-Trent, where he was made Judge-Advocate, and re- 
sented the king's order to surrender. He was then in prison at 
Yarmouth till the Commonwealth, when he obtained his release 
from Cromwell, lived quietly in Gray's Inn, and died in 1658. 
Cleveland was the best of those Royalist poets who chiefly wrote 
partisan satire. The most popular, perhaps, was Alexander 
Brome, an attorney in the Lord Mayor's Court, who was not 
thirty at the date of the king's execution, and whose songs were 
trolled over their cups by Royalists of every degree. 

46. Sir John Denham was born "in Dublin in 161 5, son of 
a Baron of Exchequer. He was an idle student at Oxford, and 
joined gambling with study of law at Lincoln's Inn. But he 
checked himself, published an Essay on Gaming, and in 1636 
translated the second book of the " ^Eneid." In 1638 his father 
died. In 1641 he produced his tragedy of The Sophy, which 
was acted at a private house in Blackfriars, with so much suc- 
cess that Waller said he " broke out like the Irish rebellion, three 
score thousand strong, when nobody was aware, or in the least 
suspected it." The play was followed, in 1643, by his Cooper's 
Hill, a contemplative poem on the view over the Thames and 
towards London from a hill in the neighbourhood of Windsor 
Castle. Denham was actively employed in the king's service, 
but in the midst of his labours he found time to publish a trans- 
lation of Cato Major. Denham lived to receive homage among 
poets of the reign of Charles II. 

47. Richard Crashaw, son of a preacher zealous against 
Catholicism, was born about the year of Shakespeare's death, 
educated at the Charterhouse and Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. 
Before he was twenty he published anonymously sacred epi- 
grams in Latin. He graduated, became a Fellow of Peterhouse, 
was expelled from Cambridge in 1644, for refusing to subscribe 
the Covenant, became a Roman Catholic, and went to Paris. 
There in 1646, the year of the publication of his Steps to the 
Te7npie, he was found by Cowley, and commended to the 
friendship of Queen Henrietta Maria, from whom he had letters 
to Rome. At Rome he became secretary to a cardinal and 
Canon of the Church of Loretto. Crashaw died in 1650. 

JJ 2 



54$ FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1625 

With much more of the later Euphuism than is to be found 
in lyrics of those Cavalier poets who took active part in the 
stir of the Civil War, Crashaw's religious poems, " Steps to the 
Temple," are not less purely devotional, though they have less 
beauty and force than those of Herbert, whom he imitated, and 
of whose volume he wrote to a lady, with a gift of it, " Divinest 
love lies in this book." 

" And though Herbert's name do owe 
These devotions, fairest, know 
That while I lay them on the shrine 
Of your white hand they are mine.' 

Crashaw's Occasional Poems are collected as The Delights 
of the Muses. One of them was sent to his friend Cowley, 
with two green and backward apricots to point comparison with 
fruit of his genius so early ripe. 

'"Twas only Paradise, 'tis only thou, 
Whose fruit and blossoms both bless the same bough." 

48. Abraham Cowley was born in 1618, after the death 
of his father, who was a grocer in London. His mother, who 
lived to be eighty, struggled to educate him well, and he got his 
first impulse to poetry as a child from Spenser, whose works lay 
in his mother's parlour. His mother got him into Westminster 
School, where he wrote a pastoral comedy called "Love's 
Riddle," and in his fifteenth year (in 1633) appeared Cowley's 
Poetical Blossoms, with a portrait of the author at the age of 
thirteen, and including " The Tragical History of Pyramus and 
Thisbe," written at the age of ten, and " Constantia and 
Philetus," written at the age of twelve. In 1636 he went to 
Cambridge. In 1638 the play of Love's Riddle, written at 
school, was published ; and also a Latin comedy, Naufragiunz 
J ocular e, acted at Trinity College in that year. At the beginning 
of the Civil War, Cowley's play of The Guardian was acted 
before the prince as he passed through Cambridge. In 1643, 
Abraham Cowley, M.A., ejected from Cambridge, went to St. 
John's College, Oxford, and wrote satire against the Puritans. 
He went afterwards with the queen to Paris, and was employed 
in ciphering and deciphering letters between her and the king. 
His love-poems appeared in 1647, under the title of The 
Mistress. They are musical, ingenious, and free in tone, but 
strictly works of imagination. It is said that Cowley was in 
love but once, and that he was then too shy to tell his passion. 
Abraham Cowley lived into the reign of Charles II. 



to a.d. 1649.] ABRAHAM COWLEY. RICHARD LOVELACE. 549 

49. Richard Lovelace, the brilliant and handsome Cavalier 
poet, died miserably during the Commonwealth. He was born 
in the same year as Cowley, 161 8, the eldest son of Sir William 
Lovelace, of Woolwich, and was educated at Charterhouse 
School, and Gloucester Hall, Oxford. Lovelace was so hand- 
some that, in 1636, though a student of but two years' standing, 
he was made, at the request of a great lady, M.A., among 
persons of quality who were being so honoured while the court 
was for a few days at Oxford. He was the first and last under- 
graduate who was made Master of Arts for his beauty. Love- 
lace attached himself to the court, served in 1639 as an ensign 
in the Scottish expedition, afterwards as captain ; wrote a tragedy 
called The Soldier; retired to his estate of Lovelace Place, at 
Canterbury ; was elected to go up to the House of Commons 
with the Kentish petition. for restoring the king to his rights, and 
for this was committed to the Gatehouse Prison at Westminster, 
April 30, 1642. There he wrote his song, "To Althea, from 
Prison," which contains the stanza : 

" Stone walls do not a prison make, 

Nor iron bars a cage ; 
Minds innocent and quiet take 

That for an hermitage. 
If I have freedom in my love, 

And in my soul am free, 
Angels alone that soar above 

Enjoy such liberty." 

After some weeks of imprisonment, Lovelace was released on 
bail, and lived in London beyond his income, as a friend of the 
king's cause and of good poets. In 1646 he served in the 
French army, and was wounded at Dunkirk. Report of his 
death caused Lucy Sacheverell, the Lucasta {lux casta, " chaste 
light ") of his poetry, to disappoint him of her hand by marrying 
another. In 1648, Lovelace returned to England, and was soon 
a political prisoner in Peter House, Aldersgate Street, where he 
arranged his poems for the press — Lucasta ; Epodes, Odes, 
Sonnets, Songs, Q^c, published in 1649. Richard Lovelace died, 
it is said, in an alley in Shoe Lane, in 1658. 

50. To these poets who were battling, suffering, and singing 
in the days of Charles I., and out of whose midst rose the 
first music of Milton, there is one yet to be added — a man 
twenty-seven years older than Lovelace and Cowley, but who 
sang when they were singing, and outlived them both. This 
was the Rev. Robert Herrick, Vicar of Dean Prior, in Devon- 



550 A FIUS 7 SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1625 

shire. Robert Herrick, born in 1591, was the fourth son 01 

a silversmith in Cheapside. His University was Cambridge, and 
it was in 1629 that he was presented to his living, in the village 
of Dean Prior, four miles from Ashburton, where he spent the 
next seventeen years of his life, and said : 

" More discontents I never had 
Since I was born, than here ; 
Where I have been, and still am sad, 
In this dull Devonshire." 

There Herrick, with great nose and double chin, lived as a 
bachelor vicar, attended by his faithful servant, Prudence 
Baldwin, and a pet pig, whom he taught to drink out of a 
tankard. In 1648, Robert Herrick was ejected from his living, 
and betook himself to London, where he had wits and poets for 
companions, and published at once, for help to a subsistence, 
his delightful love lyrics, epigrams, and scraps of verse in many 
moods ; sometimes reflecting licence of the times, not of the 
man ; including also strains of deep religious feeling. These 
pieces — many of them only two or four lines long — he had 
written in the West of England, and therefore (from hesperis, 
" western ") he called them Hesperides j or, Works both Humane 
and Divine." His pious pieces were arranged under the name 
of Noble Numbers. The imaginary fair one whom Herrick 
celebrated in his lonely vicarage was Julia. 

" Cherrie ripe, ripe, ripe, 1 cry, 
Full and faire ones, come and buy, 
If so be you ask me where 
They doe grow, I answer, There, 
Where my Julia's lips doe smile, 
There's the land, or cherry-isle ; 
Whose plantations fully show 
All the yeere where cherries grow." 

51. John Milton (§ 30) returned to Cambridge and began 
his studies there twelve days after the accession of Charles I. 
In the following winter his sister's first-born, a daughter, 
died in infancy of a cough, and verses upon that family 
grief open the series of Milton's poems with a strain of 
love. He practised himself as a student, both in Latin and in 
poetry, by writing Latin elegies. One, written in September, 
1626, was on the death of Bishop Andrewes (§ 16), Through- 
out his college days Milton retained his old kindness for his 
teacher at St. Paul's School, young Alexander Gill, corresponding 
with him, praising verse of his, and submitting verse of his own 



to A. d. 1 649. ] R OBER T HER R ICK. JOHN MIL TON. 5 5 1 

to his friend's criticism. He retained,, also, his old kindness 
for his first tutor, Thomas Young, who came back from Ham- 
burg to take a vicarage in Stowmarket. In 1629, on the 26th of 
March, Milton graduated as B.A. On the following Christmas- 
day, his age being twenty-one, he wrote his hymn, " On the 
Morning of Christ's Nativity." It may have then come into 
young Milton's mind to form a series of odes on the great 
festivals of the Christian Church, for on the 1st of January the 
ode on the Nativity was followed by one on "The Circum- 
cision;" and when Easter came he began a poem on "The 
Passion," of which he wrote only eight stanzas and then broke 
off. "This subject," says the appended note, "the author 
finding to be above the years he had when he wrote it, and 
nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished." 

In 1 63 1 the unexpected death of the young Marchioness of 
Winchester was lamented by poets, and among them by Ben 
Jonson in his latter years, by Milton at the opening of his 
career. On his birthday, the 9th of December, in the same 
year 1631, Milton wrote that sonnet "on his being arrived at 
the age of twenty-three," which is the preface to his whole life 
as a man. He refers in it to his boyish aspect, feels his mind 
unripe, his advance slow, his achievement little, and adds these 
lines of self-dedication, to which he was true in his whole 
after life : 

" Yet be it less or more, or soon or flow, 
It shall be still in strictest measure even 
To that same lot, however mean or high, 
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven : 
All is, if I have grace to use it so, 
As ever in my great Task-master's eye." 

Already Milton showed himself an exact student of his art. 
This sonnet, and every other sonnet written by him, was true to 
the minutest detail in its technical construction (ch. vi. § 46) — 
true not only in arrangement of the rhymes, but in that manner 
of developing the thought for which the structure of this kind 
of poem was invented. The sonnet of self-dedication Milton 
wrote when his college life was near its close. In July, 1632, he 
graduated as M.A. At Cambridge, Milton had added seven 
years of study in the University to seven years of school training. 
He was not paled by study, but long retained the bloom of youth 
upon a very fair complexion. He was a little under middle 
height, slender, but erect, vigorous, and agile, with light brown 
hair clustering about his fair and oval face, with dark grey eyes. 



552 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d-. 163J 

His voice is said to have been "delicate and tunable." His 
father, by this time retired from business, and living in the com- 
pletely rural village of Horton, which is not far from Windsor 
Castle, had designed his eldest son for a career in the Church ; 
but Milton felt, he said afterwards, that "he who would take 
orders must subscribe himself slave and take an oath withal," 
and by that feeling the Church was closed to him. His choice 
was to be God's minister, but as a poet. Such a choice pro- 
duced from his father natural remonstrance. There is reference 
to this in a Latin poem to his father — " Ad Patrem " — written by 
Milton at the close of his University training, full of love and 
gratitude for the education so far finished, with this glance at 
the kindly controversy that was then between them. The trans- 
lation is Cowper's : 

" Nor thou persist, I pray thee, still to slight 
The sacred Nine, and to imagine vain 
And useless, powers, by whom inspired ? Thyself 
Art skilful to associate verse with airs 
Harmonious, and to give the human voice 
A thousand modulations, heir by right 
Indisputable of Arion's fame. 
Now say, what wonder is it if a son 
Of thine delight in verse, if so conjoin'd 
In close affinity, we sympathise 
In social arts, and kindred studies sweet? 
Such distribution of himself to us 
Was Phcebus' choice ; thou hast thy gift, and I 
Mine also, and between us we receive, 
Father and son, the whole-inspiring God." 

Milton went home to Horton, and proceeded to add to the 
seven years of school training and the seven years of university 
training another seven years of special training for his place 
among the poets. Nearly six years were spent at Horton, from 
the end of July, 1632, to April, 1638 ; then followed fifteen 
months of foreign travel. 

Milton's life as a writer is in three parts : — 1. The period of 
his Earlier Poems, in the time of Charles I., including "L'Allegro" 
and "II Penseroso," "Arcades," " Comus," "Lycidas;" all 
written during the training time at Horton. 2. The period of 
his Prose Works, from 1641 to the end of the Commonwealth. 
3. The period of his Later Poems, in the time of Charles II., 
namely, " Paradise Lost," " Paradise Regained," and " Samson 
Agonistes." To the reign of Charles I. belong, then, all Milton's 
Earlier Poems and some of his Prose Works. 

52. L'Allegro and U. Penseroso are companion poems, repre- 



TOA.D. 1638.] MILTON. V ALLEGRO AND IL PENSEROSO. 553 

senting two moods of one mind, and that mind Milton's. No 
man can be the one, in Milton's sense, who cannot also be the 
other. It was part of Milton's training for his work as a poet 
to study thoroughly the words through which he was to express 
his thought. Milton's precision in the use of words is very 
noticeable, and it fills his verse with subtle delicacies of thought 
and expression. Mirth and Melancholy would not content 
Milton as titles for these poems, because one word has for 
its original meaning "softness," and is akin to marrow, the 
soft fat in bones ; the other word, based on an old false 
theory of humours in a man, traces the grave mood to black 
bile. The poems themselves use the English words with 
definition of the sense in which alone each is accepted : 

" These delights if thou canst give, 
Mirth, with thee I mean to live." 

" These pleasures, Melancholy, give, 
And I with thee will choose to live." 

The Italian titles to the poems represented in each case the real 
source of these delights and pleasures. Milton's Mirth was the 
joy in all cheerful sights and sounds of nature, and in social 
converse natural to the man whose bosom's lord sits lightly on 
his throne ; and " L' Allegro " is defined in Gherardini's Sufifili- 
mento a) Vocabolai'j Italiani (six vols., Milan, 1852) as "one 
who has in his heart cause for contentment {che ha in cuore 
cagione di contentezza), which shows itself in serenity of coun- 
tenance." " II Penseroso," whose name is derived from a word 
meaning " to weigh," is the man grave, not through ill-humour, 
but while his reason is employed in weighing and considering 
that which invites his contemplation. With his companion 
sketches of this true lightness of heart and this true gravity, 
Milton blends a banning of the false mirth of the thoughtless 
—"vain deluding joys, the brood of Folly" — and the black 
dog, the loathed (from lath, meaning "evil") Melancholy "of 
Cerberus and blackest midnight born." To commendation of 
the true he thus joins condemnation of the false ; and by trans- 
ferring his condemnation of a baseless joy to the opening of 
that poem which paints gravity of thoughtfulness, and his con- 
demnation of a Stygian gloom to that poem which paints 
innocent enjoyment, he heightens the effect of each poem by 
contrast, and links the two together more completely. The 
poems are exactly parallel in structure : 



554 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [ad. 1632 



V Allegro. 

1. Banning of " loathed " 

Melancholy 

2. Invitation to ' ' heart-easing " 

Mirth 

3. Allegorical parentage and 

companions 

4. The Morning Song 

5. Abroad under the Sun 

6. Night, and the tales told by 

the social fireside 

7. L' Allegro social 

8. His Life set to Music 



25—40 
41—56 
57-98 

99—116 



// Penseroso. Lines. 

1. Banning of "vain" Joys ... x— 10 

2. Invitation to "divinest" 

Melancholy 11 — 21 

3. Allegorical parentage and 

companions 22 — 54 

4. The Even Song 55 — 64 

5. Abroad under the Moon ... 65 — 76 

6. Night, and lonely study of 

Nature's mysteries, and of 

the great stories of the Poets 77 — 120 

7. II Penseroso solitary 121 — 154 

8. His Life set to Music 155 — 174 



9. Acceptance of each mood — if this be it. 

53. The cousin to whom Spenser dedicated "The Tears of 
the Muses," retaining the higher title that belonged to her as 
widow of her first husband (ch. vii. § 76), still was called the 
Countess Dowager of Derby after she had become wife of Sir 
Thomas Egerton, afterwards Lord Chancellor Ellesmere. Lord 
Ellesmere, too, had been married before, and his son John 
married one of the two daughters of the widow who became his 
second wife. When Milton was at Horton, in Buckinghamshire, 
the Dowager Countess of Derby, having outlived both her 
husbands, and bearing the title given by the first of them, lived 
chiefly at her favourite country house of Harefield, in Middlesex. 
That was on the borders of Buckinghamshire. At Ashridge Park, 
also on the borders of Buckinghamshire, and but a few miles 
from Horton, lived John Egerton, only male heir of Lord Chan- 
cellor Ellesmere, who, in compliment to his family, had been 
made Earl of Bridgewater. He was doubly son-in-law to the 
Countess of Derby, for she had been his father's wife, and was 
his own wife's mother. The Earl and Countess of Bridgewater 
had four sons and eleven daughters, of whom, in 1634, when 
Milton produced " Comus " for them, ten survived, namely, eight 
daughters, of whom the eldest was Lady Frances, aged thirty, 
and the youngest Lady Alice, aged fourteen or fifteen. After 
the eight girls came two boys — John, the elder and heir, Viscount 
Brackley, aged twelve or thirteen, and Thomas, aged eleven or 
twelve. Milton's introduction to this household was probably 
through Henry Lawes, who, as fashionable composer and musician, 
taught singing in noble families. Henry and William Lawes were 
sons of a musician, had been singing-boys in Salisbury Cathedral, 
and were now prospering in London. Doubtless the elder Milton's 
interest in music had caused Henry Lawes, eight years older 



TOA.D. i6 3 8.] MILTON'S ARCADES AND COMUS. 555 

than Milton, to be one of the poet's friends. The Arcades may 
have preceded " Comus." On some occasion of congratulation, 
the old Countess of Derby's numerous family of children and 
grandchildren planned a small entertainment in her honour, 
to contain only a few songs and a few spoken words of blessing 
on her house. Henry Lawes would be taken into counsel as 
musician, and would probably suggest that he had a friend 
at Horton, a few miles off, who could write the words. For 
such a purpose, certainly, and probably in some such way, 
Milton received the commission which caused him to write 
Arcades ("The Arcadians"). On the appointed day the old lady 
was led to a seat of state — say, in her garden. Then " some 
noble persons of her family " came " in pastoral habit," as 
Arcadians, down the garden walk towards her, singing her 
praise as they approached. They arranged themselves before 
her, and to pay homage to her one stood forward as the genius 
of the wood about her house, who blessed the place with health, 
and lived in accord with the celestial harmonies. Two other 
songs then followed, of love and praise to the old lady ; the 
young members of the family paid homage to her ; she would 
then kiss them, say " Thank you, my dears," and all was over. 
The poem was but a slight piece, contrived according to the 
fashion of the time, its simple motive being family affection. 

There is no direct evidence that "Arcades" was written 
before "Comus;" but it is likely that success in the small occa- 
sional masque caused Milton to be joined again with Henry 
Lawes when a masque on a much larger scale was required 
by the same family for a state occasion. This was Comus. 

In June, 1631, John Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater, was 
nominated to the office that Sir Henry Sidney had held, of 
Lord President of the Council of the Principality of Wales and 
the Marches of the same, with a jurisdiction and military 
command that comprised the English counties of Gloucester, 
Worcester, Hereford, and Shropshire. Ludlow Castle, in Shrop- 
shire, was the seat of government ; it was to the Lord-President 
of Wales what Dublin Castle now is to the Lord-Lieutenant of 
Ireland, and a large hospitality was, of course, one duty of the 
Lord-President's office. The Earl of Bridgewater did not go 
to his post till 1633. In the following year he was joined by 
members of his family who had been left at Ashridge or Hare- 
field, and then it became the Lord-President's business to give a 
grand entertainment to the country people, and of this a masque 



556 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1634 

was to be one feature. The masque of " Comus," by John Milton, 
with music by Henry Lawes, was accordingly produced in the 
great hall of Ludlow Castle, on the 29th of September, 1634. 
Milton was true in " Comus " to the highest sense of his vocation 
as a poet, while he satisfied all accidental demands on his skill. 
The masque must include music — with a special song for Lady 
Alice — dances, and entertaining masquerade. The rout of 
Comus disguised in heads of divers animals, provided mas- 
querade in plenty. The masque must appeal to local feeling, 
and did that by bringing in Sabrina, the nymph of the Severn ; 
must refer, also, with direct compliment, to the new Lord- 
President, and must provide fit parts for the three youngest 
children of the family, the Lady Alice, and her brothers John 
and Thomas, aged from fifteen to twelve. William Prynne had 
been pilloried, and was then in prison, for his " Histriomastix " 
(§ 36), produced only two years before. Richard Baxter, two 
years before, had been a youth of seventeen, living in Ludlow 
Castle as private attendant upon Mr. Wicksted, the chaplain, 
when the presidency was in commission, and Baxter told after- 
wards of the corrupting influences of the place. He knew, he 
said, one pious youth whom it had made a confirmed drunkard 
and a scoffer. Something of this Milton may have known when 
he made his masque a poet's lesson against riot and excess. 
The reverence due to youth Milton maintained by causing his 
children-actors to appear in no stage disguise, but simply as 
themselves. There was on the stage a mimic wood, through 
which the children passed on the way to their father and 
mother, who sat in front, and to whom, at the close of the 
masque, they were presented. As they traversed this wood of 
the world, typical adventures rose about them, and gave rise to 
dialogue, in which the part given to Lady Alice made the girl — 
still speaking in no person but her own — a type of holy inno- 
cence and purity. 

Since in the same year, 1634, the "Comus" of Ericius 
Puteanus (first published at Louvain in 1608) was reprinted at 
Oxford, it may be that this pamphlet had some influence on 
Milton's choice of subject for his masque. When in London, 
Milton went to the play, as a letter to his friend Diodati tells 
us, and the revival of Fletcher's " Faithful Shepherdess " (§ 6) 
occurred at the beginning of 1634, when it was "acted divers 
times with great applause " at the Blackfriars Theatre, after its 
production at court on Twelfth Night. Some influence from 



a.d. 1634.] MILTON'S COMUS. 557 

Fletcher's play might blend with some influence from a recent 
reading of the Dutchman's pamphlet, newly re-issued from an 
Oxford press, when Milton was determining the subject of his 
masque. " Comus " is quite original, but it includes distinct 
evidence of Milton's acquaintance with those works. He may 
have read, also, Peele's "Old Wives' Tale" (ch. vii. § 72). 
Ericius Puteanus was the Latinised name of Hendrick Van der 
Putte, known in France as Henri du Puy, a modest and sound 
scholar, who was born at Vanloo, in 1574, and after writing about 
a hundred little books, officiating also as Professor of Eloquence 
at Milan and Louvain (where he succeeded Lipsius, in 1606), 
and as Historiographer to the King of Spain, died at Louvain, 
governor of the citadel there and Councillor of State, twelve 
years after Milton's " Comus" was produced. The " Comus" of 
this writer had for its second title, " Phagesiposia Cimmeria " — 
that is, eating and drinking after the manner of Cimmerians, or 
those who live in darkness — and under the fiction of a dream, 
with dialogue of a friend, Aderba, and a wise Tabutius, in a great 
hall of feasters which has the colossal image of the idol Comus 
upreared at one end, Van der Putte's book in Latin prose exposed 
and censured the vices of sensualists. 

Comus was a Greek personification of disordered pleasure, 
" tipsy dance and jollity." The name is derived from the Greek 
word for a village (ko^tj). When the procession at old sacred 
festivals passed from village to village, with measured step and 
music, it picked up a disorderly following of merry villagers, 
who sang and danced wildly and out of measure. This following 
was called the Comus, and soon yielded a general name for un- 
measured festival. The next step was to personification. This 
we have in the Agamemnon of yEschylus, when Cassandra says 
of the house of the son of Atreus : " That horrid band who sing 
of evil things will never forsake this house. Behold Comus, the 
drinker of human blood, fired with new rage, still remains within 
the house, sent forward by the Furies, his kindred." The last 
step was to engrave his image, and this was done by representing 
him as a divinity balanced unsteadily on his crossed legs, with a 
Large stomach, a drooping head, and an inverted torch in his 
hand — the torch of reason. 

54. In 1635 Milton was incorporated as M.A. at Oxford. On 
the 3rd of April, 1637, his mother died. On the 10th of August, 
1637, the son of Sir John King, Secretary for Ireland, Edward 
King, a young man who was a fellow of Milton's own college at 



55 8 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, ja.d. 1637 

Cambridge, who was three or four years younger than Milton, 
and had been destined for the Church, was drowned when on 
his way home for the long vacation. The ship in which he 
sailed from Chester for Dublin struck on a rock, in a calm sea, 
near the Welsh coast, and went down with all on board. When 
the next college session began, a little book of memorial verse, 
in Latin, Greek, and English, was planned, and this appeared at 
the beginning of 1638, as "Obsequies to the Memorie of Mr. 
Edward King." It contained twenty-three pieces in Latin and 
Greek, and thirteen in English, of which thirteen the last was 
Milton's Lycidas, written in November, 1637. 

At that time Milton was preparing to add to his course of 
education two years or more of travel in Italy and Greece. As 
a poet he did not count himself to have attained, but still 
pressed forward. In a letter to his friend, Charles Diodati, he 
had written on the 23rd of September: "As to other points, 
what God may have determined for me I know not ; but this I 
know, that if He ever instilled an intense love of moral beauty 
into the breast of any man, He has instilled it into mine : Ceres, 
in the fable, pursued not her daughter with a greater keenness 
of inquiry than I, day and night, the idea of perfection. Hence, 
whenever I find a man despising the false estimates of the 
vulgar, and daring to aspire, in sentiment, language, and 
conduct, to what the highest wisdom, through every age, has 
taught us as most excellent, to him I unite myself by a sort of 
necessary attachment ; and if I am so influenced by nature or 
destiny, that by no exertion or labours of my own I may exalt 
myself to this summit of worth and honour, yet no powers of 
heaven or earth will hinder me from looking with reverence and 
affection upon those who have thoroughly attained this glory, or 
appear engaged in the successful pursuit of it. You inquire 
with a kind of solicitude even into my thoughts. Hear, then, 
Diodati, but let me whisper in your ear, that I may not blush at 
my reply — I think (so help me Heaven !) of immortality. You 
inquire also what I am about ? I nurse my wings, and meditate 
-a flight ; but my Pegasus rises as yet on very tender pinions. 
Let us be humbly wise." 

The opening lines of Milton's Lycidas repeat this modest 
estimate of his achievement. In " Comus " Milton had produced 
one of the masterpieces of our literature, but he felt only that 
the laurels he was born to gather were not yet ripe for his 
Tiand, and that when the death of Edward King called from 



a.d. 1637.J MILTON S LYCIDAS, 559 

him verse again, and love forced him to write, his hand could 
grasp but roughly at the bough not ready for his plucking. 

" Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more 
Ye myrtles brown with ivy never sere, 
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude ; 
And, with forced fingers rude, 
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year: 
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear, 
Compels me to disturb your season due : 
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, 
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer. 
Who would not sing for Lycidas ? " 

The pastoral name of Lycidas was chosen to signify purity of 
character. In Theocritus a goat was so called (\evKirus) for its 
whiteness. Like Spenser, Milton looked on the pastoral form as 
that most fit for a muse in its training time. Under the veil of 
pastoral allegory, therefore, he told the story of the shipwreck ; 
but in two places his verse rose as into bold hills above the level 
of the plain, when thoughts of higher strain were to be uttered. 
The first rise (lines 64 to 84) was to meet the doubt that would 
come when a young man with a pure soul and high aspiration 
laboured with self-denial throughout youth and early manhood 
to prepare himself for a true life in the world, and then at the 
close of the long preparation died. If this the end, why should 
the youth aspire ? 

** Were it not better done, as others use, 
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, 
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair." 

(As in Virgil, Eel. viii., 11. jj, 78; and Horace, Od. III. xiv., 
11. 21 — 24.) 

But, Milton replied, our aspiration is not bounded by this 
life; 

" Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, 
Nor in the glistering foil 

Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies ; 
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes 
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove: 
As he pronounces lastly on each deed, 
Of so much fame, in heaven expect thy meed. 

From that height of thought Milton skilfully descended 
again : 

" O fountain Arethuse, and thou honour'd flood, 
Smooth-sliding Mincius, crown'd with vocal reeds ! 
That strain I heard was of a higher mood : 
But now my oat proceeds," &c. ; 



56c A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1637 

and we are again upon the flowery plain of the true pastoral, 
till presently there is another sudden rise of thought (11. 108 — 131). 
The dead youth was destined for the Church, of which he would 
have been a pure devoted servant. He is gone, and the voice of 
St. Peter, typical head of the Church, speaks sternly of the 
many who remain — false pastors who care only to shear their 
flocks, to scramble for Church livings, and shove those away 
whom God has called to be His ministers. Ignorant of the duties 
of their sacred office, what care they ? They have secured their 
incomes ; and preach, when they please, their unsubstantial, 
showy sermons, in which they are as shepherds piping not from 
sound reeds but from little shrunken straws (" scrannel," from 
soincan, to shrink, past scranc, with diminutive suffix. In 
Lancashire a "scrannel" is a lean skinny person). The con- 
gregations, hungry for the word of God, look up to the pulpits 
of these men with blind mouths, and are not fed. Swollen with 
windy doctrine, and the rank mist of words without instruction, 
they rot in their souis and spread contagion, besides what the 
devil, great enemy of the Christian sheepfold, daily devours 
apace, " and nothing said." Against that wolf no use is made 
of the sacred word that can subdue him, " of the sword of the 
Spirit, which is the word of God" (Ephes. vi. 17). "But that 
two-handed engine" — two-handed, because we lay hold of it by 
the Old Testament and the New: 

" But that two-handed engine at the door 

Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more." 

Milton wrote engine (contrivance of wisdom) and not weapon, 
because "the word of God, quick and powerful, and sharper 
than any two-edged sword" (Heb. iv. 12), when it has once 
smitten evil, smites no more, but heals and comforts. 

Here again, by a skilful transition, Milton descends to the 
level of his pastoral or Sicilian (ch. v. § 28) verse. The river of 
Arcady has shrunk within its banks at the dread voice of St. 
Peter, but now it flows again : 

" Return, Alpheus ; the dread voice is past, 
That shrunk thy streams ; return, Sicilian Muse, 
And call the vales," &c. 

The first lines of " Lycidas " connected Milton's strain of love 
with his immediate past. Its last line glances on to his immediate 
future. Milton was preparing for his travel to Italy and Greece. 
" To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new." 



toa.d. 1639.] LYCIDAS. MILTON'S TRAVEL. 561 

55. In April, 1638, Milton, attended by one man-servant, left 
Horton for his travel on the Continent. His younger brother, 
Christopher, married about that time, and seems then to have 
lived at Horton with his father. Milton went to Paris with 
letters to the English Ambassador there, Lord Scudamore, by 
whom he was introduced to Hugo Grotius, then ambassador at 
the French court for the Queen of Sweden. Hugo Groot, born 
at Delft in 1583, had acquired fame as a youth at the beginning 
of the century by his Latin tragedies and poems. His career 
had been that of a patriotic historian, philosopher, and statesman, 
and he was prosperous at home until he suffered for maintaining 
the cause of the Arminians (§ 18). For this he was doomed 
at the Synod of Dort, in 1618, to perpetual imprisonment. In 
prison he was still a busy writer. After two years' imprisonment 
his escape was contrived by his wife, but it was not till October, 
1 63 1, that he was able to return to his own country. The 
strength of party feeling caused him to leave Holland again in 
March, 1632, and he found a friend in the great Chancellor 
Oxenstiern, who then came to the head of affairs in Sweden. In 
1636, Grotius was sent to Paris as ambassador from Sweden, and 
he retained that office till 1644, the year before his death. From 
Paris, Milton went to Nice, from Nice by sea to Genoa; he 
visited Leghorn and Pisa, stayed two months at Florence, then, 
by way of Siena, went to Rome. At Rome he remained two 
months, and while there enjoyed and praised in three Latin 
epigrams the singing of the then famous vocalist, Leonora Baroni. 
From Rome, Milton, aged thirty, went to Naples, where he was 
kindly received by Manso, Marquis of Villa, then an old man of 
seventy-eight, the friend and biographer of Tasso. At his 
departure he paid his respect to Manso in a Latin poem 
addressed to him. Milton was about to pass on through Sicily 
to Greece when, as he wrote afterwards in his " Second Defence 
of the People of England," " the melancholy intelligence which 
I received of the civil commotions in England made me alter my 
purpose ; for I thought it base to be travelling for amusement 
abroad while my fellow-citizens were fighting for liberty at home." 
He retraced his steps, dwelt on his way back another two months 
at Rome, where, when attacked for his faith he boldly defended 
it. " It was," he says, " a rule I laid down to myself in those 
places, never to be the first to begin any conversation on religion ; 
but if any questions were put to me concerning my faith, to 
declare it without any reserve or fear." At Florence also he 

K K 



562 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1637 

again stayed for two months; he visited Lucca, Bologna, 
Ferrara ; gave a month to Venice ; from Venice he shipped to 
England the books he had bought in Italy ; then he went through 
Verona and Milan to Geneva, where he was in daily converse 
with Giovanni Diodati (§ 30), uncle of his old school friend. 
From Geneva, Milton passed through France, and was at home 
again in July or August, 1639, after an absence of about fifteen 
months. When he returned he found his friend Charles Diodati 
dead, and poured out his sorrow in a Latin pastoral, " Damon's 
Epitaph " — Epitaphium Damonis — with the refrain : 

" Go seek your home, my Iambs ; my thoughts are due 
To other cares than those of feeding you." 

The flocks, the dappled deer, the fishes, and the birds can find 
the fit companion in every place : 

" We only, an obdurate kind, rejoice, 
Scorning all others, in a single choice ; 
We scarce in thousands meet one kindred mind, 
And if the long-sought good at last we find, 
When least we feel it, Death our treasure steals. 
And gives our heart a wound that nothing heals. 
Go, go, my lambs, unpastur'd as ye are, 
My thoughts are all now due to other care. 
Ah, what delusion lur'd me from my flocks, 
To traverse Alpine snows, and rugged rocks ? 
What need so great had I to visit Rome, 
Now sunk in ruins, and herself a tomb? 
Or, had she flourish'd still as when, of old, 
For her sake Tityrus forsook his fold, 
What need so great had I t' incur a pause 
Of thy sweet intercourse for such a cause; 
For such a cause to place the roaring sea, 
Rocks, mountains, woods, between my friend and me J 
Else had I grasp'd thy feeble hand, compos' d 
Thy decent limbs, thy drooping eyelids clos'd, 
And, at the last, had said — ' Farewell — ascend — 
Nor even in the skies forget thy friend/ " 

Into Charles Diodati's ear Milton had whispered his dream 
of immortality, said that his muse rose yet only on tender wings, 
unequal to the meditated flight. In his poem to Manso, Milton 
indicated that it was in his mind to write a poem of high strain 
upon King Arthur. A passage in this " Epitaph of Damon " 
shows that when he came back to England the design to write 
an epic upon Arthur took a more definite shape. Had he taken 
Arthur for his hero, Milton would, like Spenser (ch. vii. § 78), have 
turned him to high spiritual use. He had looked for examples, 
he said afterwards (in his " Reason of Church Government 



tga.d. 1639.] WILLIAM PRYNNE. PETER HEYLIN. 563 

against Prelacy"), to Homer, Virgil, Tasso, to the plays of 
Sophocles and Euripides, to the odes of Pindar, to the poetical 
books of the Old and New Testament, as "the mind at home 
in the spacious circuit of her musing " sought to plan its future 
work. Me had reasoned to himself whether in the writing of an 
epic poem '- the rules of Aristotle herein are to be strictly kept 
or nature to be followed, which in them that know art and use 
judgment is no transgression but an enriching of art." But 
still, and for years yet to come, Milton felt that the work to 
which his soul yearned forward was to be achieved only " by 
devout prayer to that eternal Spirit who can enrich with all 
utterance and knowledge, and sends out His seraphim, with the 
hallowed fire of His altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom 
He pleases : to this must be added industrious and select reading, 
steady observation, insight into all seemly and generous arts and 
affairs." He knew that only hard work could enable him to 
make the best use of his genius, hard work and a right life. In 
the " Apology for Smectymnuus '• Milton has written, " I was 
confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate 
of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought 
himself to be a true poem." 

56. The news that caused Milton to turn back from his 
longer travel into Greece was news of trouble with the Scots 
which clearly boded civil war. Milton had left Wentworth and 
Laud governing England. In June, 1637, judgment was given 
against John Hampden in the question of ship-money; and law, 
physic, and divinity were pilloried in the persons of William 
Prynne, the lawyer (§ 36), now to be branded on both cheeks 
with " S. L." (Schismatic Libeller), and imprisoned for life in 
Carnarvon Castle; Robert Eastwick, a physician; and Henry 
Burton, a clergyman. Prynne's controversial activity against 
Laud and his policy was met by that of Peter Heylin, a divine 
of Laud's own school, who had published, in 162 1, Microcosmus, 
a Description of the World, and, in 1629, became chaplain to 
Charles I. Dr. Heylin, who was born in 1600 and died in 1662, 
was a prolific writer, bitter against Puritans, and very faithful in 
maintaining the Divine authority of Church and king. Milton 
left England in April, 1638, and while he was away Church 
controversy had been embittered. Prelacy had been restored 
in Scotland in 1606. In 1609, King James had further set up in 
Scotland the Court of High Commission. In 161 8, King James 
had forced the Assembly at Perth to accept for the Scottish 

K K 2 



564 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1636 

Church Five Articles of his own devising. This was the year in 
which the Synod of Dort declared Calvinism the religion of the 
Dutch, and condemned the Five Points in the Remonstrance of 
the Arminians (§ 18). James had not carried out his design of 
imposing upon the Church of Scotland a liturgy like that of 
the Church of England, in place of Knox's " Book of Common 
Order," which some used and some had dropped. But, in 1636, 
Charles I. issued under the Great Seal, by his personal authority, 
" Canons and Constitutions Ecclesiastical for the Government 
of the Church of Scotland," followed by a " Book of Common 
Prayer," prepared by two Scottish bishops, and so revised by 
Laud that it came nearer than the Anglican Service Book to 
the form of a Roman Missal. The new Prayer-Book was to be 
proclaimed at every market cross, and to come into use at 
Easter, 1637. The people were stirred to excitement. The 
Scottish bishops delayed. The court forbade farther delay ; the 
new service was used for the first time on the 23rd of July, 1637, 
and there were riots at Edinburgh in the churches of St. Giles 
and the Greyfriars. The Scottish Council suspended for a time 
the use of both the old and the new Service Books. Laud and 
the king would not yield, and there were then riots in Edinburgh. 
But the resolve of a nation was not represented only by excesses 
of a mob. The nobles, the middle classes, and the clergy 
claimed a right to meet and petition; and the Privy Council at 
Edinburgh then assented to the proposal that they should be 
represented by four permanent committees, consisting, 1, of 
nobles; 2, of a gentleman from every county; 3, of a minister 
from every presbytery ; 4, of a burgher from every town ; each 
sending representatives to a central committee. The four 
committees sat at four tables in the Parliament House, were 
known as the Tables, and formed a central revolutionary com- 
mittee that soon became the supreme power. 

Opposition to the new Prayer-Book was now blended with 
opposition to the whole Episcopacy and the Court of High Com- 
mission. It was determined to revive the method of covenanting 
used by the Lords of the Congregation, when the Scottish Refor- 
mation was established. A confession which King James VI. 
had been made to subscribe in 15 81, during a panic against 
Romanism, was now revived ; there was added to that, a sum- 
mary of the Acts of Parliament condemning Romanism and 
securing the liberties of the Scottish Church ; and then came, 
as third part of the same document, the Covenant itself, in which 



to a.d. x.639.] SECOND SCOTTISH REFORMATION. 565 

the subscribers swore to maintain their religion. On the 28th of 
February, the signing of the Covenant began at Edinburgh, in 
the Greyfriars church and churchyard. Copies were sent for 
signature throughout the country. The cause of prelacy was 
lost in Scotland. As the Archbishop of St. Andrews said, the 
Covenanters had " thrown down in a day what we have been 
building up for thirty years." 

So matters stood when Milton, in the spring of 1638, the 
year of the Second Scottish Reformation, set out for his travel 
in Italy. King Charles partly opposed, partly temporised, and 
partly yielded ; but the strong will of the Scottish laity bore 
down all his resistance. On the 21st of November, 1638, a 
General Assembly of the Scottish Church met in Glasgow 
Cathedral, the Marquis of Hamilton sitting as Lord High Com- 
missioner to represent the king. This Glasgow Assembly swept 
away King James's Five Articles, swept away King Charles's 
Canons and the Service Book, and swept away the Bishops, 
finishing its labours on the 20th of December. Meanwhile, 
both sides had been preparing arms in case of need, and news 
of what seemed to be the inevitable conflict, with a sense of 
what the letting out of waters might be if the strife began, 
caused Milton to abridge his term of travel. 

In the spring of 1639, King Charles was at the head of an 
army at York, and the Covenanters were being drilled into an 
organised force by Alexander Leslie, who had been serving his 
apprenticeship to battle with the Dutch against Spain, and had 
been a field-marshal under Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty 
Years' War for the defence of German Protestantism, which had 
yet nine of its thirty years to run. At the end of May the 
English and Scottish armies faced each other at Berwick, on 
opposite sides of the Tweed, every Scottish company having 
colours inscribed in golden letters, " For Christ, Crown and Cove- 
nant/' But no blow was struck, a pacification was agreed upon 
at Berwick ; and though the king would not recognise any acts 
of the Glasgow Assembly, he yielded the essential points by 
promising a free General Assembly, at Edinburgh, on the 6th of 
August, followed by a Parliament on the 20th, to make its reso- 
lutions law. For a time, then, civil war was averted ; and so 
matters stood when, at the end of June, or early in July, 1639, 
Milton returned from his travel in Italy. 

In August the General Assembly met in Edinburgh, passed 
an Act cancelling all that had been done since 1606 for the 



566 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.e. 1639 

establishment of Episcopacy in the Church of Scotland, and 
restored the old Presbyterian system. Having secured their 
own liberties, the Scottish Presbyterians proceeded to attack the 
liberties of others ; they renewed the Covenant, required all to 
swear to it, and asked for civil pains and penalties on Roman 
Catholics and others who refused. Parliament met on the day 
after the closing of the Assembly, but King Charles prorogued it. 

John Spottiswoode, Archbishop of St. Andrew's, who had 
lived in London since his deposition, died at the close of this 
year, 1639, aged seventy-four. He left behind him a History 
of the CJturch of Scotland, begi?i?iing the Year of Our Lord 20^ 
and continued to the end of the Reign of King James VI., which 
was first published in folio in 1655. It is an honest book, written 
by a strong upholder of Episcopacy. Ten years younger than 
Spottiswoode was another actor in these scenes, David Calder- 
wood, a Presbyterian divine, who told the story as a strong 
opponent of Episcopacy, and dealt with that part about which 
he could give valuable information in his True History of the 
Church of Scotla?idfro7n the beginning of the Reformation unto 
the end of the Reign of fames VI. Calderwood died in 165 1. 

Charles I. endeavoured to prevent the confirmation of the 
Acts of the Edinburgh Assembly, by a Scottish Parliament. He 
therefore prorogued the Parliament to October, then again to 
November, then to June, 1640. A technical blunder enabled 
the Scots to turn deaf ears to the next prorogation ; their 
Parliament met, and soon afterwards their General Assembly 
met also, at Aberdeen. In August an army, under Leslie, 
marched southward from Edinburgh, routed the king's troops 
at Newburn, and on the 30th had possession of Newcastle. In 
England, Charles, needing money, after governing for eleven 
years without a Parliament, had summoned one in April to dis- 
solve it in May. It sat for three weeks, and was the Short 
Parliament. The Covenanters were in Newcastle, and were to 
be paid £850 a day by the king while the terms of peace were 
being arranged ; and a new Parliament, to become memorable as 
the Long Parliament — it sat for thirteen years — was opened on 
the 3rd of November, 1640. On the nth of November, it im- 
peached the Earl of Strafford, who was committed to the Tower 
on the 25th. On the 18th of December, Archbishop Laud was 
impeached, and on the 1st of March, 1641, he was sent to the 
Tower. On the 22nd of March, Strafford's trial began, and on 
the nth of May, Strafford was executed. Among other early 



toa.d. 1641.3 EPISCOPACY. SIR H. WOTTON. JOHN HALES. 567 

proceedings of this Parliament were the release of political 
prisoners — that brought William Prynne (§ 36), among others, 
back in triumph to London — abolition of the Star Chamber 
and of the Court of High Commission ; peace with Scotland ; 
and discussion of Episcopacy. 

In December, 1640, fifteen thousand Londoners petitioned 
Parliament for the rooting out of the Episcopal system, with all 
its dependencies. Other petitions followed, and were referred to 
a Committee of Religion, which was to consider the whole ques- 
tion, and report to the House. Joseph H all, Bishop of Norwich 
(ch. vii. § 92, ch. viii. § 15), who had published a treatise, in 1640, 
on Episcopacy by Divine Right, issued at the end of January, 
1 64 1, his Humble Remonstrance to the High Court of Parlia- 
ment. By a Dulifull Somie of the Church. The question thus 
raised occupied many earnest minds in 1641, and was in that 
year the chief subject of controversy. John Milton took part in 
the argument. 

57. Sir Henry Wotton, who had been Provost of Eton 
since 1624, and who had written a most cordial letter to his 
young neighbour, John Milton, before he left for Italy, died, at 
the age of seventy-two, six months after Milton's return. He 
had been, as a young man, secretary to the Earl of Essex, had 
then lived in Florence, and served the Grand Duke of Tuscany 
as a diplomatist. Being sent as ambassador to James VI. of 
Scotland, Wotton pleased that monarch so well that he was em- 
ployed by him, when King of England, as his ambassador to 
Venice, and to princes of Germany. He was made Provost of 
Eton at the close of James's reign ; and in the same year, 1624? 
he published his Elements of Architecture. Wotton wrote 
also on the State of Christendom, a Survey of Education, 
Poems, and other pieces, collected and published in 165 1, by 
Izaak Walton, as Reliquice Wottoniance j or, a Collection oj 
Lives, Letters, Poems, with Characters of Sundry Personages, 
a?id other Incomparable Pieces of Language and Art. By Sir 
H. Wotton, Knt. 

During the last months of Wotton's life at Eton, the old 
provost was much comforted by the society of John Hales 
(born in 1584), who had been made Greek professor at Oxford 
in 16 1 2, and who had then an Eton fellowship. He died in 
1656, and his writings were published in 1659, as Go lde?i Remains 
of the Ever Memorable Mr. J ohm Hales, of Eton College. The 
most interesting part is the series of letters written by Hales 



568 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1628 

from the Synod of Dort. Having gone to the Hague, in 1616, 
as chaplain to the English Ambassador, Sir Dudley Carleton, 
Hales went to the Synod of Dort, where his sympathies were 
with the Arminians ; and in letters and documents sent to Sir 
Dudley Carleton, he has left an interesting narrative of the pro- 
ceedings of the Synod. Hales was sixteen years younger than 
his friend Sir Henry Wotton, and eighteen years older than his 
friend William Chillingworth, who was born at Oxford, in 
1602, and had Laud for his godfather. Chillingworth became a 
Fellow of Trinity, was converted to the Roman faith by John 
Fisher, the Jesuit, re-converted by Laud, returned to Oxford, in- 
quired freely into religion, and published, in 1637, dedicated to 
Charles I., his Religion of Protestants, a Safe Way to Salvation. 
Chillingworth's inquiry led him to dissent from the Athanasian 
Creed and some points of the Thirty-nine Articles. That 
stayed his promotion ; but in 1638 he was induced to subscribe 
as a sign of his desire for peace and union, but not of intellectual 
assent. He then obtained preferment in the Church, and was 
in the Civil War so thoroughly Royalist that he acted as engineer 
at the siege of Gloucester. He was taken prisoner at the siege 
of Arundel, and died in 1644. One of the worst examples of 
the bitterness of theologic strife was published immediately after 
his death, by Francis Cheynell, in a pamphlet called Chilling- 
ivorthi Novissima j or, the Sickness, Heresy, Death, a?id Burial 
of William Chillingworth. He was the friend of Laud, and 
therefore counted as an enemy by Francis Cheynell ; but he was 
a man of the best temper, as well as a clear close reasoner. 

58. The religious mind of England had in the days of 
Charles I., as always, manifold expression. There were many 
readers of the Resolves, Divine, Political, and Moral, published 
in 1628, by Owen Feltham, a man of middle-class ability, 
with a religious mind, who was maintained in the household of 
the Earl of Thomond. His Resolves are one hundred and 
forty-six essays on moral and religious themes, the writing of a 
quiet churchman, who paid little attention to the rising contro- 
• versies of his day. 

Oriental scholarship was represented by John Lightfoot, 
born at Stoke-on-Trent, in 1602, who had been of Milton's 
college, at Cambridge, then was tutor at Repton School, then 
held a curacy in Shropshire, and became chaplain to Sir Row- 
land Cotton, a great student of Hebrew. This gave Lightfoot 
his impulse to a study of the Oriental languages, and in 1629 



toa.d. 1644.] CHILLINGWORTH. LIGHTFOOT. HENRY MORE. 569 

he published his Eriibhim j or, Miscellanies, Christian and 
Judaical, dedicated to Sir Rowland, who gave him, two years 
afterwards, the rectory of Ashley, Staffordshire. 

Henry More represented Piatonism. He was born in 1614, 
at Grantham, in Lincolnshire, educated at Eton and Christ's 
College, Cambridge, where he obtained a fellowship. He aban- 
doned Calvinism, was influenced by Tauler's " Theologia Ger- 
manica," and fed his spiritual aspirations with writings of Plato 
and the Neoplatonists, Plotinus and Iamblichus, and Platonists 
of Italy at the time of the revival of scholarship. Henry More 
was for a time tutor in noble families, obtained a prebend at 
Gloucester, but soon resigned it in favour of a friend. Content 
with a small competence, he declined preferment, and sought to 
live up to his own ideal as a Christian Platonist. He lived on 
through the reign of Charles II., and died in 1687, aged seventy- 
three. The Piatonism which had been a living influence upon 
Europe at the close of the fifteenth century had its last re- 
presentative in Henry More. In 1642 he published " Vvx&tiia. 
Platonicaj or, a Platonical Song of the Soul," in four books ; 
with prefaces and interpretations, published in 1647, as "Philoso- 
phicall Poems." The first book, "Psychozoia" (the Life of the 
Soul) contained " a Christiano-Platonicall display of life." The 
Immortality of the Soul was the theme of the second part, 
" Psychathanasia," annexed to which was a metrical " Essay 
upon the Infinity of Worlds out of Platonick Principles." The 
third book contained " A Confutation of the Sleep of the Soul,, 
after Death," and was called " Antipsychopannychia," with an 
Appendix on " The Prae-existency of the Soul." Then came 
Cm Antimonopsychia," or the fourth part of the " Song of the 
Soul," containing a confutation of the Unity of Souls ; where- 
unto is annexed a paraphrase upon Apollo's answer concerning 
Plotinus his soul departed this life. This poem was throughout 
written in the Spenserian stanza, with imitation also of Spenser's 
English. The books were divided into cantos, and each canto 
headed in Spenser's manner. Thus, the first canto of Book I. is 
headed : 

" Struck with the sense of God's good will 
The immortality 

Of souls I sing ; praise with my quill 
Plato's philosophy." 

But there is no better reason why it should not have been all 
written in prose, than the evidence it gives that Piatonism came 



57° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1628 

as poetry to Henry More, although he was not himself a great 
poet. Dr. Henry More also published, with a dedication to 
Cudworth, the Hebrew Professor at Cambridge, his Threefold 
Cabbala, a triple interpretation of the three first chapters of 
Genesis, with a Defence of it. The Jewish Cabbala (from kibbal, 
" to receive ") was conceived to be a traditional doctrine or expo- 
sition of the Pentateuch, which Moses received from the mouth 
of God while he was on the mount with Him. Henry More's 
"Threefold Cabbala" was, he said " the dictate of the free reason 
of my minde, needfully considering the written text of Moses, 
and carefully canvasing the expositions of such interpreters as 
are ordinarily to be had upon him." The threefold division of 
his " Cabbala " was into literal, philosophic, and moral. More 
wrote also against Atheism, and on theological topics. 

Intense religious feeling, Puritan in tone, was expressed in 
the sermons and books of Richard Sibbes (born in 1577), 
who was Master of Catherine Hall when Milton was at Cam- 
bridge, and a frequent preacher in the University. Of the two 
great English Universities, Cambridge was the stronghold of the 
Puritans. The persecuted Puritans who had left home for the 
New World called the town Cambridge in which they founded, 
in 1638, their first university, named after a private benefac- 
tor, John Harvard, a clergyman of Charlestown. Sermons by 
Sibbes were published as his Saints' Cordials, in 1629. To his 
B?'tiised Reede and Smoki7ig Flax, in which other sermons were 
collected, Baxter said that he owed his conversion. Richard 
Sibbes had died in 1635. 

59. Two clever clergymen, one aged thirty-three, the other 
twenty-seven, Thomas Fuller and John Wilkins, were, in 1641, 
taking opposite sides in the great controversy of the day. 
Thomas Fuller, born at Aid winkle, Northamptonshire, in 
1608, was educated at Queen's College, Cambridge. He became 
a popular preacher at St. Benet's, Cambridge, then obtained a 
prebend at Salisbury, and became Rector of Broad Winsor, in 
Dorsetshire, when he married. His first publication, at the age 
of twenty-three, was a poem, in three parts, David's Hainous 
Sinne, Hear tie Repenta7ice, Heavie Punishment In 1639 ap- 
peared, in folio, Fuller's first work of any magnitude, The. History 
of the Holy Warre. His wife died, and in 1641 he came to 
London as lecturer at the Savoy Church,- in the Strand, where 
his vivacity of speech not only brought together crowded audi- 
ences within the walls, but also procured him listeners outside 



to a.d. 1638.] EPISCOPACY. SIR H. WOTTON. JOHN HALES. 57 1 

the windows. In 1642, Fuller published one of the most charac- 
teristic of his works, The Holy and Profane State, a collection of 
ingenious pieces of character writing, moral essays, and short 
biographical sketches. Troubled as the times were, the book 
went through four editions before 1660. The quips and conceits 
of Fullers style represent the later Euphuism in its best form, 
for Fuller had religious feeling and high culture, good humour, 
liberality, quick sense of character, and lively wit, which the 
taste of the day enabled him to pour out in an artificial form, 
with a complete freedom from affectation. Culture and natural 
wit made his quaintness individual and true. The ingenuity of 
John Wilkins took a scientific turn. He was born in 16 14, 
.the son of a goldsmith, at Oxford, was educated in Oxford, 
graduated, took orders, and was chaplain, first to Lord Say, then 
to the Count Palatine of the Rhine. When the Civil War broke 
out, Fuller went to the king, at Oxford ; and John Wilkins took 
the Solemn League and Covenant. In 1638, Wilkins, aged 
twenty-four, published anonymously, The Discovery of a New 
World j or, a Discourse tending to prove that 'tis prod 'able there 
may be another Habitable World in the Moon. In 1640 this 
was followed by a Discourse concerning a New Planet : tending 
to prove that His probable our Earth is one of the Planets. 
Wilkins's book on the world in the moon closed with an 
argument for the proposition " that 'tis possible for some of 
our posterity to find out a conveyance to this other world ; and 
if there be inhabitants there, to have commerce with them." 
His other tract, in support of the doctrine set forth by Coper- 
nicus, in 1543, and developed in the time of Charles I. by 
Galileo, included a temperate endeavour to meet those prevalent 
theological objections to which Galileo had been forced to bend. 
It was in 1632 that Galileo published, at Florence, the " Dia- 
logues," in which he proved the double movement of the earth, 
round the sun and round its own axis. In June, 1637, Galileo, 
seventy years old, was sentenced to imprisonment by the 
Inquisition at Rome, and forced to abjure the " heresy " of 
"holding and believing that the sun is the centre of the world, 
and immovable ; and that the earth is not the centre, and that 
it moves." It may be added of Galileo, who, by ground glasses 
fitted to an organ-pipe, discovered the uneven surface of the 
moon, and taught his pupils to measure its mountains by their 
shadows, who discovered Jupiter's satellites, Saturn's ring, the 
sun's spots, and the starry nature of the Milky Way, that he 



57 2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1640 

became blind in 1636, and was living, blind, at his country house 
near Florence, when, during his Italian journey, Milton spoke 
with him. 

60. Soon after his return to England, John Milton settled 
in London, by taking lodgings for a short time at the house of 
a tailor in St. Bride's Churchyard, and there he undertook the 
teaching of his sister Anne's two boys, Edward and John 
Phillips, aged nine and eight. Edward Phillips, to whom Anne 
Milton was married in 1624, died in 1631, leaving his widow 
with these boys, then babies, their only surviving children. Mrs. 
Phillips had had a considerable dowry from her father, and the 
bulk of her husband's property was left to her. When her 
brother John undertook the education of her boys, she had 
taken for second husband Thomas Agar, a widower, who 
succeeded also to Edward Phillips's post of Secondary in the 
Crown Office. While teaching his nephews, Milton, in 1640, 
was sketching plans of sacred dramas, dwelling especially upon 
" Paradise Lost " as the subject of a drama : suggesting also 
as themes, "Abram from Morea ; or, I sack redeem'd," " The 
Deluge," " Sodom," " Baptistes," noting subjects also from 
British history. Milton " made no long stay," his nephew tells 
us, in his lodgings in St. Bride's Churchyard : "necessity of having 
a place to dispose his books in, and other goods fit for the furnish- 
ing of a good handsome house, hastening him to take one ; and, 
accordingly, a pretty garden-house he took, in Aldersgate Street, 
at the end of an entry, and therefore the fitter for his turn, besides 
that there are few streets in London more free from noise than 
that." There he worked hard, and had his two nephews to board 
with him. There also he began, in 1641, the second part of his 
literary life, put aside, at the age of thirty-two, his high ambition 
as a poet, and, devoting himself to the duty that lay nearest to his 
hand, gave the best years of his manhood, the twenty years from 
thirty-two to fifty-two, to those questions of his day that touched, 
as he thought, the essentials of English liberty. 

In 1641 the great argument was for and against Episcopacy. 
Bishop Hall's nimble Re?nonstrance to the High Court oj 
Parliame?it appeared at the end of January, in defence of the 
Liturgy and of Episcopal Government. Towards the close of 
March appeared An A?iswer to a Book entituled an Humble 
Remonstrance . . Written by Smectymnuus. This name 
was compounded of the initials of the five divines who took 
part in its production, Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, 



toa.d. i6 4 i. MILTON. JOSEPH HALL. JAMES USHER. 573 

Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen, and William Spurstow. 
Thomas Young, Milton's old tutor, was chief author of the 
pamphlet. James Usher (§ 17), now Archbishop of Armagh, 
was urged by Bishop Hall to add the weight of his knowledge 
of Church antiquities to the argument for Episcopacy, and he 
published, towards the end of May, The Judg?nent of Doctor 
Rainoldes touching the Originall of Episcopacy, more largely 
confirmed out of Antiquity. A week or two later, when the 
Bishops' Exclusion Bill was awaiting the decision of the Lords, 
and when the Commons, on the 27th of May, had expressed their 
mind more strongly by passing the second reading of a "Root 
and Branch " Bill, " For the utter abolishing and taking away 
of all Archbishops, Bishops," &c, Milton published his first 
pamphlet, entitled, Of Reformation touching Church Discipline 
in England, and the Causes that hitherto have hindered it :- Two 
Books, written to a Eriend. In the first book he argued that, 
in and after the reign of Henry VI II., Reformation of the 
Church was most hindered by retaining ceremonies of the Church 
of Rome, and by giving irresponsible power to bishops, who, 
though they had removed the pope, yet "hugged the popedom 
and shared the authority among themselves." In his second 
book, Milton argued from history that the political influence 
of prelacy had always been opposed to liberty. This pamphlet 
of ninety pages was followed quickly by a shorter pamphlet 
in twenty-four pages, chiefly in reply to Usher, and entitled 
Of Prelatical Episcopacy j and whether it may be dedudd 
from the Apostolical Times by vertue of those Testimonies which 
are alleged to that purpose in some late Treatises, one whereof 
goes under the Name of James, Archbishop of Ar7)iagh. While 
the controversy was at its height, Milton's pen had no rest. 
Bishop Hall had replied promptly to Thomas Young and his 
fellow-writers, with A Defence of the Humble Remonstrance 
against the Frivolous and False Exceptions of Smecty?nnuus. 
This was a thick pamphlet. The Smectymnuans replied again 
for themselves in a thicker pamphlet ; and Milton aided them 
with- his own third pamphlet, Aimnadversions on the Remon- 
strants Defence against Smectymnuus, which is a rough pulling 
to pieces of Hall's pamphlet, with sharp comment upon succes- 
sive passages and phrases. 

On the 1 st of December the Grand Remonstrance was pre- 
sented by the Commons to the king, at Hampton Court. On 
the 31st of December, the Commons voted that the House be 



574 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1641 

resolved into a committee to take into consideration the militia 
of the kingdom. On the 3rd of January, 1642, the Attorney- 
General, at the bar of the House of Lords, accused, in the king's 
name, of high treason, Lord Kimbolton and five members of 
the House of Commons — Pym, Hampden, Hollis, Haslerig, and 
Strode. On the same day the king sent, without warrant of 
Privy Council or of magistrate, a serjeant-at-arms to the House 
of Commons to require of the Speaker that the five members 
be given in custody. On the following day the king came to the 
House with armed force to take them, but leave had been given 
to them to absent themselves. On the ioth of January, Charles 
left Whitehall for Hampton Court. Next day the five members 
were brought in a popular triumph to the House of Commons. 
On the 14th of February, the king, who returned no more to 
London till the end, gave his assent to the Bill which excluded 
bishops from the House of Lords. On the 16th the queen, 
taking the crown jewels with her, went to Holland. She was 
in search of aid for the impending struggle. The king, who 
refused assent to the Bill for regulating the militia, v/ent to 
York. On the 23rd of April he appeared, with a body of horse, 
before Hull, and demanded admission to the town and fortress. 
The governor replied respectfully that he had sworn to keep 
the place at the disposal of the Parliament, and could not admit 
the king. Thirty-two peers and sixty-five members of the 
House of Commons then joined the king at York ; those who 
remained formed a Parliament no longer asking the king's 
sanction for its acts. On the 5th of May^ Parliament issued 
its ordinance for the militia. Civil war was inevitable ; there 
was contest between each party for possession of fortified places 
and gunpowder. On the 22nd of August, the king set up on 
Nottingham Castle the royal standard, with a red battle-flag 
over it — a formal act signifying that the kingdom was in a state 
of war — and called upon his subjects to attend him. Next day 
the king heard that the army of the rebels — for such he had now 
declared them — was, horse, foot, and cannon, at Northampton. 
While this was the course of events, John Milton continued 
his discussion of Episcopacy. In the first months of 1642 he 
published, near the time when the king gave his assent to the 
Bill excluding bishops from the House of Lords, the fourth of 
his pamphlets on this subject, now first setting his name upon 
the title-page. This was The Reason of Church Government 
urg'd against Prelaty, by Mr. John Milton : In Two Books. 



ro a.d. 1642.] MILTON'S REASON OF CHURCH GOVERNMENT. 575 

It was a careful expression of his argument that Church govern- 
ment is necessary, but that Prelacy is not the proper form of it. 
He suggested rather a government by presbyters and deacons, 
with free debate and vote in parochial consistories, representing 
single congregations ; and a General Assembly, elected as a par- 
liament for the whole Church. In the opening of the second 
book he expressed his spirit, as a writer, in the midst of strife 
on questions of this kind. The duty was burdensome. " For, 
surely, to every good and peaceable man, it must in nature needs 
be a hateful thing to be the displeaser and molester of thou- 
sands ; much better would it like him doubtless to be the mes- 
senger of gladness and contentment, which is his chief intended 
business to all mankind, but that they resist and oppose their 
own true happiness. But when God commands to take the 
trumpet and blow a dolorous or jarring blast, it lies not in man's 
will what he shall conceal." When the Word was in the heart 
of Jeremiah, as a burning fire shut up in his bones, he was weary 
with forbearing, and could not stay ; " which might teach these 
times not suddenly to condemn all things that are sharply spoken 
or vehemently written, as proceeding out of stomach, virulence, 
or ill-nature." When there was so strong a resisting power to 
contend with, " no man can be justly offended with him that 
shall endeavour to impart or bestow, without any gain to him- 
self, those sharp and saving words which would be a terror and 
a torment in him to keep back. For me, I have determined to 
lay up, as the best treasure and solace of a good old age, if God 
vouchsafe it me, the honest liberty of free speech from my youth, 
when I shall think it available in so dear a concernment as the 
Church's good." If the end of the struggle be oppression of the 
Church, how shall he bear in his old age the reproach of the 
voice within himself, saying, " When time was, thou couldst not 
find a syllable of all thou hast read or studied to utter in her 
behalf? Yet ease and leisure was given thee for thy retired 
thoughts out of the sweat of other men. Thou, hast the dili- 
gence, the parts, the language of a man, if a vain subject were 
to be adorned or beautified ; but when the cause of God and 
His Church was to be pleaded, for which purpose that tongue 
was given thee which thou hast, God listened if He could hear 
thy voice among His zealous servants, but thou wert dumb as a 
beast ; from henceforward be that which thine own brutish silence 
hath made thee." In this spirit Milton maintained throughout 
his prose writing that which he believed to be the cause of 



57^ A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1642. 

liberty. Were he wise only to his own ends, he said, he would 
write with leisurely care upon such a subject as of itself might 
catch applause, and should not choose " this manner of writing 
wherein knowing myself inferior to myself, led by the genial 
power of nature to another task, I have the use, as I may account, 
but of my left hand." Many a man of genial temper and pre- 
dominating gentleness of life has gone as a soldier into battle, 
and struck death about him without stopping to discriminate 
the true merits of those whose skulls he cleft. He knew only 
that one of two sides was to prevail, and while the battle raged 
he was to do his duty as a soldier. In bloodless war of contro- 
versy for a vital cause, where the appeal is on a few broad ques- 
tions to national opinion, there may be like need to beat roughly 
down opposing arguments, to roll in the dust and march over 
the credit of opposing reasoners, without staying a blow to an 
opponent's credit as a reasoner from just consideration of his 
feelings and impartial weighing of his merits. The day may 
come when we shall all argue with philosophical precision, and 
call equal attention to the merits and the faults of those over 
whom we struggle to prevail. It certainly is nearer than it was 
in Milton's time. Controversy then was simply a strong wrestle 
with the single desire in each wrestler to secure the fall of his 
antagonist. So Milton wrestled, and gave many a rough hug 
with his intellectual arm, but he sought only the triumph of his 
cause by strife of mind with mind : his antagonists opposed to 
him argument rough as his own, with coarse abuse ; and their 
supporters, when they could, had argued with the prison and 
the pillory. But Milton never called for pains and penalties on 
an opponent. That is not true of the Long Parliament. At 
Christmas, 1641, it sent William, Archbishop of York, and 
twelve bishops, of whom one was Joseph Hall, Bishop of Nor- 
wich (ch. vii. § 92), to the Tower for a protest against acts done 
in Parliament while they were kept away by force of tumult 
in the streets. Bishop Hall remained in the Tower till the 
beginning of May, and during his imprisonment appeared 
a reply to Milton's " Animadversions." The writer of much 
of this reply was probably the Rev. Robert Hall, the bishop's 
son. It was called A Modest Confutation of a Slanderous 
and Scurrilous Libell, intituled Animadversions upon the 
Remonstranfs Defence agai?ist Smectymnuus. This modest 
confuter says of John Milton that " Of late, since he was out of 
wit and clothes, he is now clothed in serge and confined to a 



_a.d. 1642.] JOHN MILTON. JEREMY TAYLOR. S77 

parlour ; where he blasphemes God and the king as ordinarily 
erewhile he drank sack and swore. Hear him speak ! . . . 
Christian ! dost thou like these passages ? or doth thy heart rise 
against such unseemly beastliness ? . . . Nay, but take this 
head . . . Horrid blasphemy ! You that love Christ, and 
know this miscreant wretch, stone him to death, lest yourselves 
smart for his impunity." Milton replied with An Apology 
against a Pamphlet call'd A Modest Confutation of the Animad- 
versions of the Re?nonstrant against Smectymnuus. It includes 
a dignified reply to the personal slanders, in which Milton ex- 
pressed the true spirit of his life, and censured the butcherly 
speech " against one who in all his writing spake not that any 
man's skin should be rased." 

61. Five pamphlets within a year had now represented 
Milton's part in the argument upon Episcopacy, and he had deli- 
vered his mind on the subject. Among the other writers on the 
question there was one man of genius, nearly five years younger 
than Milton, opposed to him in opinion but as pure in aspira- 
tion, who was made by the king's will Doctor of Divinity, for 
a pamphlet called Episcopacy Asserted. This was Jeremy 
Taylor. He was born at Cambridge, in August, 1613, the son 
of a barber, who sent him, when three years old, to a free school 
then just founded by Dr. Stephen Perse. At thirteen, Jeremy 
Taylor left this school to enter Caius College as a sizar, or poor 
scholar. He had proceeded to the degree or M.A., and been 
ordained by the time he was twenty-one. A college friend then 
asked young Taylor to preach for him at St. Paul's. He had, 
like Milton, outward as well as inward beauty, and a poet's 
mind. Archbishop Laud heard of his sermons, called him to 
preach at Lambeth, and became his friend. Laud having more 
patronage and influence at Oxford than at Cambridge, Taylor 
was incorporated there, and the archbishop procured for him a 
Fellowship of All Souls, by using his sole authority as Visitor of 
the College to overrule the statutes which required that candidates 
should be of three years' standing in the University. Laud also 
made the young divine his chaplain ; and in March, 1637, when 
Jeremy Taylor was not yet twenty-four, obtained for him the rec- 
tory of Uppingham, in Rutlandshire. Two years later, in May, 
1639, Taylor was married, in his own church, to Phcebe Langs* 
dale. Three years afterwards his youngest son died, in May 
1642, and his wife died shortly afterwards. He was left with two 
infant sons, at the time when the breach between the king and 

L L 



57§ A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1642 

Commons had become irreparable. Then he was made one 
of the king's chaplains, and joined the king ; perhaps when, in 
August, he was on his way to hoist the royal standard at Notting- 
ham. The infant boys must have been left to the care of his 
wife's relations, and for some years remained with them. In Octo- 
ber, 1642, the Parliament resolved on sequestration of the livings 
of the loyal clergy. Jeremy Taylor, like Herrick and others, was 
deprived. The indecisive battle of Edge Hill was fought in the 
same month. In November, the king marched upon London; 
there was a fight at Brentford. The Londoners mustered their 
trained bands. It was the occasion of Milton's sonnet, " When 
the Assault was Intended to the City." But the Royalists re- 
tired, and at the end of November the king was at winter 
quarters in Oxford. There Jeremy Taylor published his Episco- 
pacy Asserted, and was rewarded, at the age of twenty- 
nine, with the degree of Doctor of Divinity. On the 26th of 
January, 1643, Parliament passed a Bill for the utter abolition of 
Episcopacy. 

62. John Milton took no part in the strife of swords, nor did 
he write a syllable to animate it. His duty to God was to make 
full use of his reason. For him the great inspiring truth was, 
not that Englishmen drew swords on one another — glory of 
animal battle we share with the dogs and cats — but that they 
were drawn to this by a conflict of opinion. On one side was a 
belief that discord would be endless if Englishmen were not in 
Church and State bound by allegiance to a single authority, 
ordained by God ; on the other side, a belief that such authority 
in Church and State had claimed for itself too great a power to 
restrain men where God made them free. Authority should 
not decree for them the form of their opinions. Yet very many 
fought on this side against authority over themselves who were 
too ready to impose their own opinions upon others. Milton was 
true to his own principle. He was against the Parliament when it 
put thought in fetters. The passions and stupidities of men had 
made the Civil War a dread necessity, but the work of bloodshed 
was no work for him who " in all his writing spake not that any 
man's skin should be rased." To each man his place ; and 
Milton's place was to keep watch over the course of opinion 
while the contest raged. His life would have belied his writing 
if Milton had ever shot a man for his opinions. His own 
brother, Christopher, was a Royalist, and difference of opinion 
caused no break in the household harmony. Christopher had 



TOA.D. 1647.J JEREMY TAYLOR. JOHN MILTON. $79 

been called to the bar in January, 1640, and in 1641 had settled 
at Reading, with his wife and one or two young children. The 
father, too, left Horton then, and lived with Christopher at 
Reading. In April, 1643, strife was resumed with the siege of 
Reading, which on the 24th surrendered to the forces of Par- 
liament. Milton took also about this time — at the end of May 
or in June — a wife from a Royalist family with which he had an 
old acquaintance. This was Mary Powell, eldest daughter in the 
large family of Richard Powell, of Forest Hill, three or four miles 
from Oxford, then the head-quarters of the Royalists. The old 
home of the Milton family was in the same part of Oxfordshire, 
and between Milton and the Powells there had been old neigh- 
bourly relations. John Milton, the poet, when at college, had 
money of his own. Perhaps the grandfather, who had quarrelled 
with his father, did what is not uncommon in family quarrels, 
and left property over the son's head to the son's son. At any 
rate, John Milton, when at Cambridge, and twenty years old, had 
lent ^"500 to Richard Powell. The Powells, therefore, were old 
friends, and to them Milton, aged not quite thirty-five, went for 
the wife, then in her eighteenth year, whom he brought home 
to Aldersgate Street about the end of June, 1643. Her ex- 
perience was of a Cavalier country gentleman's way of free 
housekeeping and social enjoyment. The philosophic calm of 
the house in Aldersgate Street was new to her, and at first 
irksome. In the first weeks of marriage those whose lives have 
differed must learn how to make their lives agree, and it must 
needs take more than a month to do that where home-grown 
ways, in many respects opposite, have to be changed or modified, 
and brought into accord. Milton's young wife was allowed or 
encouraged by her family to fly from the first difficulty. " By 
the time," says Milton's nephew, "she had for a month or there- 
about led a philosophical life, her friends, possibly incited by her 
own desire, made earnest suit by letter to have her company the 
remaining part of the summer." She was to return at Michael- 
mas, but did not. At this time Milton began to receive other 
pupils than his two nephews, and through the disestablishment 
of Christopher after the surrender of Reading, soon after 
Milton's wife had gone back to Forest Hill, his father came to 
live with him. 

When Milton's newly-married wife went to her home, near 
Shotover, the queen had just joined King Charles at Oxford, 
bringing more troops with her ; the Royalists had been victorious. 

LL 2 



580 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1643 

in Somersetshire and Wiltshire ; strife was embittered, Royalist 
hope was rising. On the 27th of July, Bristol was taken by 
Prince Rupert. A note from Colonel Cromwell, on the 6th of 
August, recognised " how sadly our affairs stand." The change 
of prospect might have led the Powells to prompt or encourage 
a separation of their daughter from John Milton. In Septem- 
ber there was published by the Parliament the text of the 
" Solemn League and Covenant," which was to bring in 
Scottish aid. Commissioners to Scotland had asked for a 
Civil League, the Scotch offered a Religious Covenant; the 
compromise took form that might be made to content both 
sides, as the Solemn League and Covenant, which, after slight 
modification by the Westminster Assembly, the Parliament 
swore to maintain. In the middle of January, 1644, the Scots, 
again under Leslie, who was now Earl of Leven, entered 
England. 

Milton sought in vain to win back his wife; and being left 
with nothing of matrimony but its chain, his mind was turned 
into a course of thought upon the bond of marriage. The 
result was, in 1644, his treatise in two books on The Doctrine 
and Discipline of Divorce, addressed to the Parliament and 
the Westminster Assembly then sitting, written wholly without 
passion or personal reference, and arguing from a pure and 
spiritual sense of marriage as a bond for the mutual aid and 
comfort of souls rather than of bodies. He asked that 
among reforms then under discussion there might be included 
a revisal of the canon law, which allowed divorce only on 
grounds less valid than " that indisposition, unfitness, or con- 
trariety of mind, arising from a cause in nature unchangeable, 
hindering, and ever likely to hinder, the main benefits of con- 
jugal society, which are solace and peace." When marriage 
was found to be rather an unconquerable hindrance than a help 
to the true ends of life, Milton desired that it might be ended 
by deliberate consent of both husband and wife, religiously, in 
presence of the Church. For he said, " It is less breach of 
wedlock to part, with wise and quiet consent betimes, than still 
to foil and profane that mystery of joy and union with a polluting 
sadness and perpetual distemper : for it is not the outward con- 
tinuing of marriage that keeps whole that covenant, but what- 
soever does most according to peace and love, whether in mar- 
riage or in divorce, he it is that breaks marriage least ; it being 
so often written that " Love only is the fulfilling of every com- 



toa.d. 1644.] OF DIVORCE. AREOPAGITICA. 581 

mandment." Right or wrong in opinion, Milton wrote this 
treatise in no spirit of bitterness. His last words in it are, 
" That God the Son hath put all other things under His own feet, 
but His commandments he hath left all under the feet of 
Charity." In a second pamphlet, published in the same year, 
1644, Milton supported his case by translating and abridging- 
the like opinions of Martin Bucer from a book of his on " The 
Kingdom of Christ," addressed to Edward VI. This pamphlet 
was addressed also to the Parliament, as The Jtidg?nent of 
Martin Bucer co?icerning Divorce. 

63. But this was not the only nor even the chief subject 
occupying Milton's thoughts in the year 1644. In that year he 
addressed to the Parliament another writing } which is the 
noblest of his English prose works, Areopagitica; a Speech of 
Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Vnlicendd Printing, to the 
Par lament of England. 

John Selden had said in Parliament, in 1628, " There is no 
law to prevent the printing of any books in England; only 
a decree of the Star Chamber." Licensing of new books was 
placed in the power of the Archbishop of Canterbury and his 
substitutes and dependents, who used, we are told, " that strict- 
ness that nothing could pass the press without his or their 
approbation, but the authors must run a hazard." The Star 
Chamber, under Charles I., had sought to make more effective 
the decrees and ordinances of Queen Elizabeth (ch. vii. § 92) 
for the control of the press, and the suppression of books that 
contained opinions distasteful to the Government. In July, 1637, 
a stringent decree was issued for the control of printers, book- 
sellers, and the works issued and sold by them, and to restrain 
unlicensed importations. All books of Divinity, Physic, Philo- 
sophy, and Poetry were to be licensed either by the Archbishop 
of Canterbury or Bishop of London, or by substitutes of their 
appointment. Check was thus put on the reprint of books of 
divinity formerly licensed. A new licence was denied, for 
instance, to Fox's " Book of Martyrs." Historical works seem to 
have been submitted to the Secretary of State for his sanction. 
To May's " Edward III." is prefixed, " I have perused this book, 
and conceive it very worthy to be published. — Io. Coke, Knight, 
Principall Secretary of State, Whitehall, 17th of November, 
1634." Besides His Majesty's printers and the printers allowed 
for the Universities, the number of master printers was, by the 
decree of 1637, limited to twenty, who were named; and no new 



582 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1644 

printer could be licensed until the place of one of the twenty was 
left vacant for him by death, censure, or otherwise. It was 
decreed also that there should be only four licensed type-founders, 
also named, and, like the printers, under strictest oversight, and 
there were arrangements for the hunting out of all unlicensed 
presses. Now the Long Parliament, which had abolished the 
Star Chamber, set up a Committee of Examinations for control 
of printers, search for books and pamphlets disapproved by 
them, and seizure of the persons by whom such works were 
published or sold; and on the 14th of June, 1643, the Lords and 
Commons ordered the publication of their ordinance " for the 
regulating of printing, and for suppressing the great late abuses 
and frequent disorders in printing many false, scandalous, 
seditious, libellous, and unlicensed pamphlets, to the great 
defamation of religion and Government." Mikon met this by 
publishing, in November, 1644, a noble protest, as his plea for 
liberty of thought and utterance. " Why," he asked, " should 
we affect a rigour contrary to the manner of God and of Nature, 
by abridging or scanting those means, which books freely per- 
mitted are, to the trial of virtue and the exercise of truth." 
" And now," he says again, " the time in speciall is, by priviledge 
to write and speak what may help to the furder discussing of 
matters in agitation. The Temple of James with his two con- 
troversal faces might now not unsignificantly be set open. And 
though all the windes of doctrin were let loose to play upon the 
earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing 
and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falshood 
grapple ; who ever knew Truth put to the wors, in a free and 
open encounter. Her confuting is the best and surest suppres- 
sing. He who hears what praying there is for light and clearer 
knowledge to be sent down among us, would think of other 
matters to be constituted beyond the discipline of Ge?ieva, fram'd 
and fabric't already to our hands. Yet when the new light which 
we beg for shines in upon us, there be who envy, and oppose, if 
it come not first in at their casements. What a collusion is 
this, whenas we are exhorted by the wise man to use diligence, 
to seek for wisdom as for hidden treasures early and late, that 
another order shall enjoyn us to know nothing but by statute. 
When a man hath been labouring the hardest labour in the 
deep mines of knowledge, hath furnisht out his findings in all 
their equipage, drawn forth his reasons as it were a battel 
raung^d, scattered and defeated all objections in his way, calls 



a.d. 1644.] MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA. 583 

out his adversary into the plain, offers him the advantage of 
wind and sun, if he please, only that he may try the matter by 
dint of argument, for his opponents then to sculk, to lay am- 
bushments, to keep a narrow bridge of licencing where the 
challenger should passe, though it be valour enough in souldier- 
ship, is but weaknes and cowardise in the wars of Truth. For 
who knows not that Truth is strong next to the Almighty; she 
needs no policies, no strategems, no licencings to make her 
victorious ; those are the shifts and the defences that error uses 
against her power." 

Milton called this tract " Areopagitica," with reference to an 
oration of Isocrates, "the old man eloquent " of his sonnet to 
Lady Margaret Ley, whom 

" That dishonest victory 
At Chseronea, fatal to liberty, 
Kill'd with report" 

Isocrates, who had Demosthenes among his pupils, is said to 
have been an old man of ninety-eight when he ceased to take 
food after receiving the news of the battle of Cheronea (B.C. 338). 
Twenty-one of his sixty speeches are extant, and one of these, 
inscribed " Areopagitic," was a polished argument in the form 
of deliberative, not popular, oratory designed to persuade the 
High Court of Areopagus to reform itself. Milton was seeking 
to persuade the High Court of Parliament, our Areopagus, to 
reform itself, by revoking a tyrannical decree against liberty of 
the press. He took, therefore, for his model this noble Greek 
oration, written with discretion and high feeling, but without 
harshness of reproof. He uttered nobly his own soul and the 
soul of England on behalf of that free interchange of thought 
which Englishmen, permitted or not, have always practised, 
and by which they have laboured safely forward as a nation. 

Milton published also, in 1644, his short letter on " Educa- 
tion," addressed to Samuel Hartlib. Samuel Hartlib was of 
a good Polish family ; ancestors of his had been Privy Coun- 
cillors to Emperors of Germany. He came to England in 1640, 
and his active beneficent mind brought him into friendship 
with many of the earnest thinkers of the time. In 1641, Hartlib 
published A Brief Relation of that which hath been lately 
attempted to procure Ecclesiasticall Peace among Protestants, 
and a Description of Macaria, his ideal of a well-ordered state. 
In the midst of the strife of civil war, Hartlib was wholly 
occupied with scientific study, having especial regard to the 



584 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1644 

extension and improvement of education, and the development 
of agriculture and manufactures. In 1642 he translated from 
the Latin of a Moravian pastor, John Amos Komensky, two 
treatises on A Refoj'matiun oj Schooles. His zeal for the better 
education of the people, as a remedy for their distresses, caused 
him not only to give thought to the education of the poor, but 
also to attempt the establishment of a school for the improved 
education of the rich; and he asked Milton to print his ideas on 
the subject ; hence the tract of eight pages published by Milton, 
in 1644, without title-page, but inscribed on the top in one line, 
Of Education. To Mr. Sajnuel Hart lib. In 1645, Hartlib 
edited a treatise on " Flemish Agriculture," which gave counsel 
that added greatly to the wealth of England. Among Hartlib's 
schemes was a plan for a sort of guild of science, which should 
unite students of nature into a brotherhood while they sought 
knowledge in the way set forth by Francis Bacon. 

64. Bacon's philosophy had arisen out of that part of the 
energy of thought, quickened along its whole line, which prompted 
free inquiry into nature. It gave new impulse and a definite 
direction to the movement that produced it. Scientific studies 
had new charms for many minds, and there was an enthusiasm 
for experiment in the Baconian way (§ 22). Many a quiet 
thinker, to whom civil war was terrible, turned aside from the 
tumult of the times, and found rest for his mind in the calm 
study of nature. Such men were drawn together by community 
of taste, driven together also by the discords round about them ; 
and the influence of Bacon's books upon the growing energy of 
scientific thought was aided by the Civil War. 

Robert Boyle, the chemist, was a young man in these days. 
The outside dignity of the Boyle family was established by 
Richard, son of Roger Boyle, of Canterbury. Richard Boyle 
went to Ireland, married an heiress, who soon died, became 
secretary for the Government in Munster, used his opportunities 
of getting estates cheap, became enormously rich, married 
another heiress, and died Earl of Cork in 1643, leaving seven 
sons and eight daughters, with estates enough to provide 
handsomely for all of them. His fifth son was Roger Boyle, 
born in 1621, who at twenty married a daughter of the Earl of 
Suffolk, went with his bride to Ireland, defended his father's 
castle of Lismore in the Rebellion, and often brought armed force 
to the aid of his neighbours. We shall meet with him again. 
The seventh son of the Earl of Cork was born in 1626, the year 



to a.d. 1646.] HARTLIB. BOYLE. SIR THOMAS EROWNE. 585 

of Bacon's death, and he was Robert Boyle, educated between 
eight and twelve years old at Eton, then at Geneva. When his 
father died, in 1643, Robert Boyle, aged seventeen, returned to 
England. By advice of his eldest sister, Lady Ranelagh, he 
shunned the strife of parties, and devoted himself to study. 
Lady Ranelagh having become a widow, added her income to 
Robert's, and kept house for him. In 1644, Robert Boyle 
became a friend of Hartlib's, and entered heartily into his 
beneficent schemes. He became also a friend of Milton's, for 
Lady Ranelagh sent her son and her nephew, the Earl of Barri- 
more, to Milton's school. Another of Milton's pupils was Sir 
Thomas Gardiner, of Essex. In Robert Boyle the fresh study 
of nature quickened love of God; his scientific thought was 
blended with simple and deep religious feeling. 

Dr. Thomas Browne, of Norwich, who did not become Sir 
Thomas Browne until the reign of Charles II., was educated 
at Winchester and Oxford. He practised physic for a time in 
Oxfordshire, married, went to Ireland, France, and Italy ; on his 
way home through Holland was made M.D. at Leyden, returned 
to England, and in 1636 settled at Norwich. In 1642 he pub- 
lished his Religio Medici (the Religion of a Physician), rich in 
the original quaintness that was then especially enjoyed, full of 
learning, Latinism, acute perception, and courageous ingenuity, 
and with religious depths where now and then the formalist sus- 
pected shallows, with delight in knowledge, acceptance of the 
scientific errors of the time, and bold feeling in right and wrong' 
directions for new matter of thought. In 1646, Dr. Browne of 
Norwich published his Pseudodoxia Epide7nica (Epidemic False 
Doctrines) ; or, Inquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors, 
which showed the scientific mind itself accepting uncorrected 
errors of the learned upon which, in our thoughtless moods, we 
may now look back with surprise. The men of science had 
only made a fresh start with more settled determination, and a 
better guide upon the road to truth. But Bacon knew no better 
than his neighbours what they would find on the way. Coper- 
nicus had reasoned in vain for him as for others. When Bacon 
rejected the theory of the crystalline spheres, he added, " Nothing 
is more false than all these fancies, except perhaps the motions 
of the earth, which are more false still." John Wilkins (§ 59) 
was even now one of the few men in England for whom Galileo 
had not spoken in vain. " Smectymnuus," opposing one of 
Bishop Hall's assertions, took the notion " that the earth moves " 



586 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1641 

as a commonplace for an absurdity : " We shall show anon that 
there is no more truth in this assertion than if he had said with 
Anaxagoras, ' Snow is black/ or with Copernicus, ' The earth 
moves and the heavens stand still.' " Error so great among 
the learned showed clearly enough that it was not for science to 
stand still. 

A young man of science who did not separate himself from 
the contest of the time was the mathematician, John Wallis, 
born in 1616, son of a rich incumbent of Ashford, Kent. His 
father died when he was six years old, his mother educated him 
for a learned profession, he went at sixteen to Emmanuel College, 
Cambridge, and is said to have been the first student who main- 
tained Harvey's new doctrine of the circulation of the blood 
(§ 41). There was no study of mathematics then in Cambridge ; 
the best mathematicians were in London, and their science was 
little esteemed. Wallis graduated, obtained a fellowship at 
Queen's College, took orders in 1640, and acted as chaplain in 
private families until the Civil War. He then took the side of the 
Parliament, and used his mathematical skill in reading the secret 
ciphers of the Royalists. The ingenious John WiU^ins had 
called attention to various methods of cipher- writing, as well as 
of telegraphing, in 1641, by his Mercury; or,the Secret and Swift 
Messenger : Shewing how a Man may with Privacy and Speed 
Conwiunicate his Thoughts to a Friend at any Distance. In 
1643, John Wallis, aged twenty-seven, obtained the living of 
St. Gabriel, Fenchurch Street. In the same year the death of his 
mother gave him independent fortune. In 1644 he married, 
and was one of the secretaries of the Assembly of Divines at 
Westminster. In 1645 he was among the men of science, and 
took part in the meetings which led to the formation of the 
Royal Society. In 1648 he was rector of a church in Iron- 
monger Lane. He remonstrated against the execution of 
Charles I., and in 1649 he was appointed Savilian Professor 
of Geometry at Oxford. 

Sir Henry Spelman, who died in 1641 at the age of eighty, 
was only twelve years younger than the founder of that pro- 
fessorship (ch. vii. § 89). He had been employed and knighted by 
James I. He was an orthodox antiquary, who had written in 
behalf of tithes when John Selden got into trouble for his 
account of them, and left behind him a valuable archaeological 
glossary, and a collection in two folios, the first published in 1639, 
the second after his death, of British Ecclesiastical Laws, Con- 



toa.d. 1649.] SCIENCE AND SCHOLARSHIP. MILTON 587 

cilia, Decreta, Leges, Constitutiones i?i Re Ecclesiastica Orbis 
Britannici. He had a son, Sir John Spelman, who inherited 
his tastes, wrote a life of King Alfred, and survived his father 
but two years. In 1640, Sir Henry Spelman, then eighty years 
old, founded a lectureship at Cambridge for the study of Anglo- 
Saxon or First English. Archbishop Usher, at his suggestion, 
nominated Abraham Wheloc, a learned Orientalist, who was 
already teaching Arabic there. Sir Henry Spelman set apart a 
portion of his private income and the vicarage of Middleton, as a 
stipend either for the reading of Anglo-Saxon lectures, or the 
publishing of Anglo- SaxOn manuscripts. Wheloc preferred pri- 
vate study. He edited Bede's History (ch. ii. § 10 ), and gave 
much of his time to the printing of the gospels in Persian, to be 
used for missionary enterprise. 

65. John Milton had no great liking for the Westminster 
Assembly, in which Wallis, the mathematician, acted as a 
secretary. The prevailing policy in the Assembly and the Parlia- 
ment was Presbyterian. Milton's " Reason of Church Govern- 
ment against Prelacy " showed that he had no dislike to the 
Presbyterian system in itself, but it seemed to him that the 
Scottish Covenanters and their English allies sought to impose 
it on all men without regard to their consciences, and to set up 
a spiritual dominion that differed only in name from that which 
they had thrown down. Milton's battle was -against a despotism 
from without, forcing the consciences of men. The Westminster 
Assembly first met in July, 1643, summoned by an ordinance of 
Parliament, to reconstitute the Church in nearer harmony with 
the Church of Scotland and other Reformed Churches abroad. 
There were 121 divines and 30 laymen, among whom was John 
Selden, who took an active part in the debates. The rising body 
of the Independents, weakly represented in the Assembly, had 
a central doctrine that brought Milton into much sympathy with 
them. They held with the Brownists, who were Independents 
of Elizabeth's time (ch. vii. § 84), that, given the Bible for a rule 
of faith, each Christian should draw from it the highest truth that 
was the truth to him ; that men who agreed sufficiently should 
form themselves into a congregation, elect and pay their own 
minister, be independent of all outside interference, and seek in 
their own way their own spiritual welfare. They would form a 
united church of all these bodies of Christians, each left free to 
seek Divine truth in the way that seemed right to its members, 
and all held together by the Christian charity which bound them 



5 05 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1645 

to avoid coercion of their neighbours. That view of a church 
agreed with Milton's sense of right. In 1643 a pamphlet written 
in this spirit, An Apologeticall Narration of some Ministers 
formerly Exiles in the Netherlands, now Members of the 
Assembly of Divines, was answered by A. S. In the Assembly 
and in his writings Samuel Rutherford bitterly attacked the 
Independents, and Thomas Edwards expressed a hate of 
all who differed from him that, in 1646, was summed up in his 
Gangrtzna; or, A Catalogue of many of the Errours, Heresies, 
Blasphemies, and Pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this- 
Time j Rutherford publishing in the same year his Divine 
Right of Church Government. Seeing such things, and attacked 
himself, Milton, in his sonnet on the New Forcas of Conscience 
under the Long Parliamoit, spoke his mind about the West- 
minster Assembly that would 

" Adjure the civil swdrd 
To force our consciences that Christ set free, 
And ride us with a classic hierarchy 
Taught ye by mere A.S. and Rotherford. 
Men whose life, learning, faith, and pure intent 
Would have been held in high esteem by Paul, 
Must now be named and printed heretics 
By shallow Edwards and Scotch What-d'ye-call." 

He trusted Parliament would use its civil power to clip, not, as 
under past tyranny, the ears, but the phylacteries of these new 
masters : 

" When they shall read this clearly in your charge : 
New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large." 

66. Absolute authority of the king was maintained in the 
philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who was born in April, 1588, 
son of a clergyman, at Malmsbury, in Wiltshire. As a school- 
boy at Malmsbury he translated the "Medea" of Euripides 
from Greek into Latin verse. In 1603 he was entered to Magda- 
lene Hall, Oxford ; and in 1608 became tutor to William, Lord 
Cavendish, son of Lord Hardwicke, soon afterwards created 
Earl of Devonshire. In 1610, Hobbes travelled with his pupil in 
France and Italy. When he came home, Bacon, Lord Herbert 
of Cherbury, and Ben Jonson, were among his friends. In 1626 
his patron died, and in 1628 the son whose tutor he had been died 
also. In that year Hobbes published his first work, a Transla- 
tion of Thucydides, made for the purpose of showing the evils of 
popular government. Ben Jonson helped in the revision of it. 
Hobbes next went to France as tutor to the son of Sir Gervase 



toad. 1648.J THOMAS HOBBES. SIR ROBERT FILMER. 589 

Clifton, but was called back by the Countess Dowager of Devon- 
shire to take charge of the young earl, then thirteen years old. 
In 1634 he went with his pupil to France and Italy, returned to 
England in 1636, and, still living at Chats worth with the family 
he had now served for about thirty years, he, in this year, 
honoured Derbyshire with a Latin poem on the wonders of the 
Peak, De Mirabilibits Pecci. In 1641 Hobbes withdrew to Paris, 
and in 1642 published in Latin the first work setting forth his 
philosophy of society. It treated of the citizen — Elementa 
Philosophica de Cive. Hobbes upheld absolute monarchy as 
the true form of government, basing his argument upon the prin- 
ciple that the state of nature is a state of war. In 1647 Hobbes 
became mathematical tutor to Charles Prince of Wales. 

67. Nicholas Hun ton, a Nonconformist minister, pub- 
lished in 1643-4 a treatise on Monarchy, in two parts, with a 
Vindication. Part One inquired into the nature of Monarchy; 
Part Two argued that the sovereignty of England is in the Three 
Estates — King, Lords, and Commons. This doctrine was after- 
wards, in 1683, condemned by the Convocation of the University 
of Oxford, and the book publicly burnt. Two or three years later 
it was answered by Sir Robert Filmer, an upholder of abso- 
lute monarchy, who based it upon patriarchal authority, and 
combated every form of the assertion that men were born equal. 
Filmer's reply to Hunton, published in 1646, was entitled A narchy 
jf a Limited and Mixed Monarchy. Sir Robert was the son of 
Sir Edward Filmer, of East Sutton, in Kent. He entered 
Trinity College as a student in 1604, and died under the Com- 
monwealth, in 1653. The book for which he is remembered, his 
■" Patriarcha," written about 1642, was not published until 1680 ; 
but in 1648 he expressed much of his argument in a pamphlet 
•on The Power of Kings; and in Particular of the King of 
England, which sets out with this practical definition of the 
king's absolute power not subject to any law. " If the sovereign 
prince be exempted from the laws of his predecessors, much less 
shall he be bound by the laws he maketh himself ; for a man 
may well receive a law from another man, but impossible it is in 
nature for to give a law unto himself." Filmer published also in 
1648, The Freeholders Grand Inquest touching our Soveraign 
Lord the King and his Parliament, endeavouring to prove 
from history that the king alone makes laws and is supreme 
judge in Parliament ; that " the Commons by their writ are 
only to perform and consent to the ordinances of Parliament," 



59° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1625 

and that the Lords " are only to treat and give counsel to 
Parliament." 

68. John Selden (§ 19), in December, 1621, had joined in 
a protest of the House of Commons, claiming liberty of speech, 
and counselling James I. upon his duties as the king of a free 
people, and for that offence to the king he suffered slight im- 
prisonment. In the Parliament of Charles I. he was opposed to 
arbitrary government, he supported liberty of the press, and was 
sent to the Tower for a time by Charles as well as by James. 
But Selden had the moderation of a scholar, and the regard for 
old institutions that is strengthened by a study of the past ; 
while, true to his love of liberty, he sought conciliation, and was 
somewhat suspected by more angry combatants. Usher had 
been nominated as a member of the Westminster Assembly, but 
refused to attend, and preached against it at Oxford. On this 
account it was resolved to confiscate his library, but Selden 
saved it for him. Selden himself went to the Assembly, and 
foiled bitter divines at their own weapons. " Sometimes," says 
his friend Whitelock, " when they had cited a text of Scripture 
to prove their assertion, he would tell them, ' Perhaps in your 
little pocket Bibles with gilt leaves,' which they would often pull 
out and read, ' the translation may be thus, but the Greek or 
Hebrew signifies thus and thus,' and so would silence them." 
When, in September, 1645, tne House of Commons was debating 
the proposal to bring in excommunication and suspension from 
the Sacrament as part of the discipline in the new establishment 
of religion, Selden marshalled his learning into array against it. 
The most interesting books of his that appeared in the reign of 
Charles I. were his account of the marbles brought from the East 
to the house of the Earl of Arundel, a great patron of art and 
literature — the Marmora Amndellia?ia, published in 1629 ; and 
the Mare Clausum^ Closed Sea"), published in 1636— it had been 
written in the reign of James I. Grotius, in his Mare Libei'tim 
("Free Sea"), having contended that the sea was free to the 
Dutch in the East Indies, where Portugal laid claim to rights in 
it, Selden argued that the sea round England belonged to the 
English. The book was not printed in James's reign ; but in 
1634 disputes arose out of the claim of Dutch fishermen to the 
right of free sea for the herring fishery by English coasts. 
Selden's Mare Clausum was then published, with its purport set 
forth in its title-page, " The Closed Sea ; or, On the Dominion 
of the Sea. Two Books. In the first it is demonstrated that the 



toa.d. 1645. J JOHN SELDEN. JOHN MILTON. 59 1 

sea, from the law of nature or of nations, is not common to 
all men, but is the subject of property equally with the land 
In the second, the King of Great Britain is asserted to be 
lord of the circumfluent sea, as an inseparable and perpetual 
appendage of the British Empire." In 1640, Selden published 
an elaborate work on the natural and national law of the Jews--— 
De Jure Naturali et Gentium juxta Disciplinam Ebrczorum; 
and he added to this, in 1646, Uxor Ebraica, which was a work 
upon the Jewish laws of marriage and divorce. 

69. We return now to John Milton, and his argument 
on a like question. In 1645 ne met tne religious arguments 
against his doctrine with a pamphlet called Tetrachordon (that 
is, " arranged with four chords ") : Expositions tipon the Four 
Chief Places in Scripture which treat of Marriage or Nullities 
in Marriage. To this was added presently Colasterion (i.e., 
"place of punishment"), a reply to an anonymous assailant, 
with a special word to the Parliament's new licenser, who sur- 
passed the old licenser under the Crown, " for a licenser is not 
contented now to give his single imprimatur, but brings his 
chair into the title-leaf, there sits and judges up or judges down 
what book he pleases." The licenser who cried a book up on 
its title-page might help the printer to put off wares otherwise 
unsaleable, which might in time, Milton suggested, bring him in 
round fees. But upon the subject of divorce, also, Milton had 
now said what he had to say. 

Civil war had advanced. English and Scottish armies were 
besieging York; in June, 1644, Prince Rupert marched to 
relieve the city. He did so, but marched out again ; and on the 
2nd of July, at Marston Moor, the charges of Fairfax and 
Cromwell turned defeat of the Parliamentary army into signal 
victory. The queen fled to France. On the 10th of January. 
1645, tne Presbyterians sent Laud to the scaffold — Prynne, his 
violent opponent, and once his victim, acting as counsel against 
the helpless old man at his trial. Then followed the failure of 
an attempt at treaty ; and then, on the 14th of June, the battle 
of Naseby, in which the king's cause was completely lost, and 
the success again was mainly due to Cromwell and his Ironsides, 
This ruin of the king's cause brought the Powells into difficulties. 
John Milton's wife suddenly appeared to him in 1645, when he 
was paying a visit to a relative named Blackborough, who lived 
by St. Martin's-le-Grand. She knelt for forgiveness, had it at. 
once, went back to his home, and we have no reason for 



592 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1645 

doubting that she learnt to understand his gentle nature. He 
resumed, also, his active good-will to her family, and, with help 
of his brother Christopher as a lawyer, stood between them 
and ruin. In the toe year, 1645, Milton removed to a larger 
house in Barbican, and a publisher obtained from him a collected 
edition of his earlier verse, Poems both Lati?i and English, by 
John Milton. In the following year, 1646, Milton's first 
daughter, Anne, was born. She was lame. In the next year, 
1647, his second daughter, Mary, was born, and his father died. 
He moved in that year to a house in Holborn, looking back on 
Lincoln's Inn Fields. He published no more pamphlets or 
books during the Civil Wars. 

In 1648, Cromwell had defeated, at Darwen Bridge, the Scotch 
Royalist army brought in by the Duke of Hamilton, and was 
welcomed in Edinburgh as a deliverer ; and after this Milton 
addressed to him a sonnet as "our chief of men," who had 
prevailed, "guided by faith and matchless fortitude ;" but while 
paying honour to his success in battle,, the poet urged that 
which lay next to his heart 

" Yet much remains 
To conquer still ; Peace hath her victories 
No less renown'd than War ; new foes arise 
Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains." 

On the 2nd of May, 1648, the Presbyterians had secured a 
Parliamentary ordinance enacting that all persons who, "by 
preaching, teaching, printing, or writing," denied seven specified 
articles of faith, should, on conviction, if the error were not 
abjured, " suffer the pains of death, as in the case of felony, 
without benefit of clergy." 

To Fairfax, also, Milton wrote his praise for victory ; but in 
each sonnet the praise for prowess in battle is the prelude in the 
two quatrains to the essential thought in the terzettes. This is 
the essence of Milton's sonnet to Fairfax : 

" Oh, yet a noble task awaits thy hand, 
(For what can war but endless war still breed ?) 
'Till truth and right from violence be freed, 

And publick faith cleared from the shameful brand 
Of publick fraud. In vain doth Valour bleed, 

While Avarice and Rapine share the land." 

70. We look back now with equal reverence to men of all 
opinion who have been true to the highest life within their souls. 
Jeremy Taylor (§ 61) was, early in 1644, a chaplain with 



toa.d. 1649.] JOHN MILTON. JEREMY TAYLOR. 593 

the Royal army in Wales. He was imprisoned for a time, after 
the defeat at Cardigan, then married a Welsh lady, Joanna 
Bridges, who had some property at Llangedock, in Carmarthen- 
shire, and with two companions — William Nicholson, afterwards 
Bishop of Gloucester, and William Wyatt, afterwards a Pre- 
bendary of Lincoln — Jeremy Taylor kept a school, Newton Hall, 
in Carmarthenshire, at Llanvihangel Aberbythyrch. It lies near 
Grongar Hill, and the great house of the neighbourhood is 
Golden Grove, where Lord and Lady Carbery were his warm 
friends. In this Welsh village Taylor wrote his best works, and 
first, in 1647, his Libe?'ty of Prophesying (ch. vii. § 33), a plea for 
freedom to all in the interpretation of the Bible, with one simple 
standard of external authority, the Apostles' Creed. In this 
book Jeremy Taylor showed, of course, the natural bent of his 
mind towards authority in Church and State. He would have a 
church of every country contained within its political boundaries, 
and allowed the ruler more power to secure uniformity than would 
be practically consistent with his theory ; but this represents 
only the form of thought which was as natural to him as his 
different form of thought to Milton. It was warmed in Jeremy 
Taylor with true fervour of devotion, and brought home to the 
sympathies of men by a pure spirit of Christian charity. The 
mischiefs of prevailing discord came, he said, "not from this, 
that all men are not of one mind, for that is neither necessary 
nor possible, but that every opinion is made an article of faith, 
every article is a ground of quarrel, every quarrel makes a 
faction, every faction is zealous, and all zeal pretends for God, 
and whatsoever is for God cannot be too much. We by this 
time are come to that pass, we think we love not God except 
we hate our brother." And these were the last words in the 
book : " I end with a story which I find in the Jews' books : — 
When Abraham sat at his tent door, according to his custom, 
waiting to entertain strangers, he espied an old man stooping 
and leaning on his staff, weary with age and travel, coming 
towards him, who was an hundred years of age ; he received 
him kindly, washed his feet, provided supper, and caused him 
to sit down ; but observing that the old man ate and prayed not, 
nor begged for a blessing on his meat, asked him why he did 
not worship the God of heaven. The old man told him that he 
worshipped the fire only, and acknowledged no other god ; at 
which Abraham grew so zealously angry that he thrust the old 
man out of his tent, and exposed him to all the evils of the night 

M M 



594 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1649. 

and an unguarded condition. When the old man was gone, 
God called to Abraham and asked him where the stranger was ? 
Pie replied, 'I thrust him away because he did not worship 
thee. 5 God answered him, ' I have suffered him these hundred 
years, although he dishonoured me ; and couldst thou not endure 
him one night, when he gave thee no trouble?' Upon this, 
saith the story, Abraham fetched him back again, and gave him 
hospitable entertainment and wise instruction. ' Go thou and 
do likewise,' and thy charity will be rewarded by the God of 
Abraham." 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE COMMONWEALTH. 

I. On the 30th of January, 1649, m weather so cold that the 
Thames was frozen over, King Charles I., after trial by a 
High Court of Justice constituted by authority of the House of 
Commons, was publicly executed at Whitehall. On the 7th of 
February, the House of Commons abolished the office of King 
in this nation, and soon afterwards a Council of State v/as ap- 
pointed, consisting of forty-one persons, of whom twenty-two, 
including Sir Henry Vane, refused to sign a document expressing 
their approval of the proceedings by which monarchy had been 
overthrown. It was agreed to let the past be, and take only a 
pledge of fidelity for the future. To this Council John Milton 
was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues. 

With much weakness of character, through which he fell, the 
king had many merits, and he died asserting that his people 
mistook the nature of government, for that men were free under 
a government not by being sharers in it, but by due adminis- 
tration of its laws. He did not understand that form of govern- 
ment towards which England was now tending, as, with advance 
of civilisation, the old controversy on the limit of authority 
(ch. iii. § 11) advanced its ground. Some who condemned the 
king did so in cruelty of zeal ; with others, trial, sentence, and 
execution of a king by his people, for the first time in the history 
of man, was a blow struck at the doctrine of an irresponsible 
monarchy. But thousands had taken the Parliament's side in 
the Civil Wars who would not have assented to this act. Dr. 
.John Gauden published about a fortnight before the execution 



a.d. 1649.] EIKON BASILIKE. 595 

his Religions and Loyal Protestation against the present Declared 
Purposes and Proceedings of the Army and others, about theTrying 
and Destroying onr Sovereign Lord the King. Sent to a Collotiell 
to bee presented to the Lord Fai?fax, and his Generall Councell of 
Officers, the fifth of January, 1648 (New Style, 1649). This was 
" Printed for Richard Royston ; " and Richard Royston was then 
printing another work of Gauden's, which was not issued until a 
few days after the execution, but its appearance at such a time 
made it a power. It was called " EIkwv BaaiAmb" (Eikon Basilike, 
the Royal Image), The Portraicture of His Sacred Majesty in 
his Solitudes and Sufferings. It was written in the first person, 
professing to be the work of Charles himself, displaying his piety 
while it set forth an explanation of his policy. It was in 28 
sections, as : 1. Upon His Majesties calling the last Parliament. 
2. Upon the Earl of Strafford's Death ; and so forth, usually 
giving, as from the king's own lips, a popular interpretation of 
his actions, and each section ending with a strain of prayer. 
One section, the 25th, consisted wholly of " Penitential Medi- 
tations and Vows in the King's Solitude at Holmby ;" the 27th 
was fatherly counsel "To the Prince of Wales ;" and the 28th 
closed the series with ci Meditations upon Death, after the Votes 
of Non-Addresses, and His Majestie's closer Imprisonment in 
Carisbrook Castle." The writer of this book (except two of its 
sections) had, as John Gauden, B.D., preached before the 
Parliament, in November, 1640, to its great satisfaction, on 
The Love of Truth and Peace. He was chaplain to the 
Earl of Warwick, a Presbyterian leader, and afterwards held 
under the Parliament the living of Booking, in Essex. When 
he was at work upon his book for the king, he showed his 
design to Anthony Walker, Rector of Fifield, who agreed with 
his strong desire to aid the king, but doubted the morality 
of personating him, to which Gauden replied, " Look on the 
title, 'tis The Poi'traicture, &c, and no man draws his own 
picture." Dr. Walker was with Gauden when he called on the 
Bishop of Salisbury (Dr. Duppa), left Gauden and the bishop to 
a private talk, and was told afterwards that the bishop had 
liked the work, but thought there should be sections added on 
' The Ordinance against the Common Prayer Book," and " Their 
Denying his Majesty the attendance of his Chaplains." As 
bishop and as chaplain to the king, Duppa felt strongly on these 
points, and he had agreed to write the sections upon them (16th 
and 24th in the printed book). The book being finished, a copy 

M M 2 



59° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. |a.d. 1649. 

of it was sent to King Charles by the hands of the Marquis of 
Hertford, when he went to the Isle of Wight. This was the copy- 
found with corrections upon it in the king's handwriting. Time 
pressed, and it was thought the better course to publish at 
once, without waiting for His Majesty's permission. The press 
was corrected by Mr. Simmonds, a persecuted minister, and the 
last part of the manuscript was taken by Anthony Walker on 
its way to the printer's on the 23rd of December, 1648. The 
Marquis of Hertford afterwards told Mrs. Gauden that the 
king had wished the book to be issued not as his own, but as 
another's ; but it was argued that Cromwell and others of the 
army having got a great reputation with the people for parts and 
piety, it would be best to be in the king's name, and His Majesty 
took time to consider of it. When the book appeared its author- 
ship was known to the Marquis of Hertford, Lord Capel, Bishop 
Duppa, and Bishop Morley. After the Restoration, Dr. Gauden 
privately proved his claim to Charles II. and the Duke of York, 
and was made Bishop of Exeter before the end of 1660; had 
in a few months ,£20,000 in fines for the renewal of leases ; 
thought himself poorly rewarded ; pressed for Winchester, got 
Worcester, and died six months afterwards. Lord Clarendon, 
vexed by Gauden's importunities, wrote to him (March 13, 1661) 
when he was Bishop of Exeter : " The particular which you 
often renewed, I do confesse was imparted to me under secrecy, 
and of which I did not take myself to be at liberty to take 
notice ; and truly when it ceases to be a secret, I know nobody 
will be gladd of it but Mr. Milton. I have very often wished I 
had never been trusted with it." In a sale of books of the 
Marquis of Anglesey, a private note was found in his copy of 
the " Eikon Basilike/' saying that when in 1675 he was showing 
to the king and Duke of York the MS. of the work, with some 
corrections in their father's own handwriting, they assured 
the marquis " that this was none of the said king's compiling, 
but made by Dr. Gauden, Bishop of Exeter." 

This fact was known to not more than a dozen people when, 
a few days after the execution, " Eikon Basilike " appeared. 
Charles II. said to Gauden that if it had come out a week sooner 
it would have saved his father's life. It would not have done 
that ; but it touched the religious feeling of the people, and 
excited a strong sympathy. At home and abroad fifty thousand 
copies were circulated in a twelvemonth. There were also ap- 
pended to some of these copies His Majesty's Speeches, Prayers, 



A.D. 1649.] MILTON'S EIKONOKLASTES. 59/ 

Messages for Peace, and Letters. A " Prayer in Time of Capti- 
vity," said to have been delivered to Dr. Juxon, Bishop of Lon- 
don, immediately before the king's death, was an adaptation to 
his own case of Pamela's prayer, in Sidney's " Arcadia " (ch. 
vii. § 44). Charles, no doubt, read novels, rightly thought this 
prayer good and applicable to himself, adapted it, and used it. 
Dr. Juxon, who did not read novels, supposed it to be original. 
Nobody can have intended any fraud, for, as detection was in- 
evitable, it would have been a mere asking for ridicule. 

2. The strong feeling excited by the form given to the 
arguments of the " Eikon Basilike " had to be met, and on the 
15th of March, John Milton was called upon by the Council of 
State to answer it. He had then already published his " Tenure 
of Kings and Magistrates," which appeared in February, when 
the answer to "Eikon Basilike" appeared, later in the same 
year, 1649, "Published by Authority," as " ; Ei/coj/o/cAcurryjs " (The 
Iconoclast). "The Author, I. M." In his preface Milton 
said, " I take it on me as a work assign'd rather than by me 
chosen or affected, which was the cause both of beginning it so 
late, and finishing it so leisurely in the midst of other employ- 
ments and diversions." He treated the book as the king's, and 
said, " As to the author of these soliloquies, whether it were the 
late king, as is vulgarly believ'd, or any secret coadjutor, and 
some stick not to name him, it can add nothing, nor shall take 
anything from the weight, if any be, of reason which he brings." 
It was a time for forbearance, but if the king left this new 
appeal behind him to truth and the world, the adversaries of 
his cause were compelled " to meet the force of his reason in 
any field whatsoever, the force and equipage of whose arms they 
have so often met victoriously." Milton accordingly replied, 
section by section, to each of the twenty-eight parts of the 
*' Eikon Basilike." 

3. But the chief expression of Milton's thought upon the 
great event of the time is to be found in his Tenure of Kings 
a?id Magisti'ates, which he began to write during the struggle 
between the Presbyterians and Independents. The Presby- 
terians brought Charles to the block, and the Independents 
executed him. The Presbyterians sought mastery over the 
Independents by separating themselves from the act. As a 
Royalist said, their grief was " that the head was not struck off 
to the best advantage and commodity of them that held it by 
the hair." Since the deed was done, Milton's desire was that it 



59§ A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1649. 

should not have been done in vain, but that it should be held 
to signify what was for him the central truth of the great 
struggle, that the chief magistrate of a nation, whatever he be 
called, has no power to dispense with laws which are the 
birthright of the people ; that he is bound to govern in accord- 
ance with them, is himself under them, and answerable for the 
breach of them. Milton sought to give to so momentous an act 
its true interpretation, as a violent expression of the principle 
towards which the question of the limit of authority was tending,, 
the principle that, forty years later, was to be finally established 
at the Revolution. This principle, the essence of the struggle, 
was what Milton kept in mind, and for this, throughout his 
prose writing under the Commonwealth, he sought chiefly to 
win assent from wise and simple. He " wrote nothing," he said 
in a later book (his " Second Defence"), "respecting the regal 
jurisdiction, till the king, proclaimed an enemy by the Senate, 
and overcome in arms, was brought captive to his trial and 
condemned to suffer death. When, indeed, some of the Presby- 
terian leaders, lately the most inveterately hostile to Charles, 
but now irritated by the prevalence of the Independents in the 
nation and the Senate, and stung with resentment, not of the 
fact, but of their own want of power to commit it, exclaimed 
against the sentence of the Parliament upon the king, and 
raised what commotions they could by daring to assert that 
the doctrine of Protestant divines, and of all the Reformed 
churches, was strong in reprobation of this severity to kings, 
then at length I conceived it to be my duty publicly to oppose 
so much obvious and palpable falsehood. Neither did I then 
direct my argument or persuasion personally against Charles ; 
but, by the testimony of many of the most eminent divines, I 
proved what course of conduct might lawfully be observed 

towards tyrants in general This work was not 

published till after the death of the king ; and was written rather 
to tranquillize the minds of men than to discuss any part of 
the question respecting Charles, a question the decision of which 
belonged to the magistrates and not to me, and which had now 
received its final determination." 

Early in 1649, Milton also published Observations on the 
Articles of Peace between the Eaid of Or?nond and the Irish, 
in which comments of his upon a manifesto of the Presbytery of 
Belfast show very clearly the spirit of the relation between the 
Presbyterians and Milton as an Independent. The Indepen- 



a.d. 1649.] TENURE OF KINGS AND MAGISTRATES. 599 

dents, then predominant, were charged, he said, with having 
broken the Covenant. " Let us hear wherein. * In labouring/ 
say they, 'to establish by law a universal toleration of all 
religions.' This touches not the State; for certainly, were they 
so minded, they need not labour at but do it, having power in 
their hands; and we know of no Act as yet passed to that 
purpose. But suppose it done, wherein is the Covenant broke ? 
The Covenant enjoins us to endeavour the extirpation first of 
popery and prelacy, then of heresy, schism, and profaneness, 
and whatsoever shall be found contrary to sound doctrine and 
the power of godliness. And this we cease not to do by all 
effectual and proper means : but these divines might know that 
to extirpate all these things can be no work of the civil sword, 
but of the spiritual, which is the word of God " (ch. viii. § 54). 
"No man well in his wits, endeavouring to root up weeds out 
of his ground, instead of using the spade will take a mallet or 
beetle. Nor doth the Covenant any way engage us to extirpate 
or to prosecute the men, but the heresies and errors in them, 
which we tell these divines and the rest that understand not, 
belongs chiefly to their own function, in the diligent preaching 
and insisting upon sound doctrine, in the confuting, not the 
railing down, of errors ... by the power of truth, not of 
persecution." 

It was also in the first months of 1649 ^ at Milton planned 
and began a History of England, which would have expressed 
his view of the life of the nation if his pen had not been called 
to the immediate service of his country, and so left it a fragment 
in six books, extending from the old fabulous times to the 
Conquest. This was not published until 1670, but four of the 
six books were written at the beginning of the Commonwealth. 

4. When Milton was appointed Foreign Secretary to the 
Council, he removed, to be near his work, to lodgings, first at 
Charing Cross, by the opening into Spring Gardens, and after- 
wards in Scotland Yard. It was here that he wrote his first 
" Defence of the People of England." One of the foremost 
scholars of the time upon the Continent had accepted, with a 
hundred gold jacobuses, the commission to arraign England 
before the intelligence of Europe for the murder of her king. 
His book, with the Royal Arms of England on its title-page, 
appeared towards the end of 1649, in Latin, because addressed 
to readers throughout Europe, as Salmasius's " Royal Defence 
of Charles I., addressed to his legitimate heir, Charles II." 



60O A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1649 

(CI. Salmasii Defensio Regia pro Carolo I. Ad Serenissimum 
Magna Britannia Regem Carohim II, Filium natu majorem, 
Haredem et successorem legitimum.) Claude de Saumaise 
was about twelve years older than John Milton, whose age 
when he wrote his reply was forty-one. Saumaise was the 
son of a learned member of Parliament for Burgundy, who, 
in 1597, translated Dionysius of Alexandria into French verse. 
He was educated at home by his father, and, when ten years 
old, read Pindar and wrote Greek and Latin fluently. At 
sixteen he was sent to study at Paris, where the influence of 
Casaubon made him a Reformer. He went next to Heidelberg, 
there formally renounced Catholicism, worked hard, gave every 
third night to study, fell ill, went home and wrote books full of 
minute erudition. In 1622, at the age of twenty-six, he edited 
Tertullian on the Pallium, for the sake of producing a minute 
treatise upon the dress worn by the ancients. Milton began 
by studying man's inmost soul, Saumaise by studying the 
clothes outside the surface of his body. Saumaise worked at 
the "Polyhistor" of Solinus, because that gave him an oppor- 
tunity for the display of various learning, and he enriched his 
exercitations with an appendix on Manna and Sugar. He 
studied Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic ; was invited to Venice, 
Oxford, even Rome, although he had cast off the pope; but 
settled at Leyden, in 1632, with a public salary. In 1642 his 
father died, and he returned to France. Richelieu and, after 
Richelieu's death, in December, 1642, Mazarin pressed the 
famous scholar to remain in his own country, but he went back 
to Leyden, where he was applied to on behalf of Prince Charles, 
and wrote against the English people his Defence of Charles I. 
In 1650, while Milton was at work upon his answer, Saumaise 
went to the Court of Christina, of Sweden, then about twenty- 
five years old, who had said she could not be happy without 
him; and there he was in such high favour that the queen 
is said to have lighted his fire with her own hands when she 
came for confidential morning talks with him. Saumaise, 
under the assumed name of Wallo Messalinus, had attacked 
Episcopacy violently, in 1641, in a Latin book on " Presbyters 
and Bishops." Claude Sarrau, a devoted admirer of his genius, 
warned him after his " Royal Defence " appeared that he was 
contradicting doctrines which he had been honoured for main- 
taining with fidelity, and said, in reply to his excuses, " I am of 
opinion that even a king's advocate ought not, in his master's 



toa.d. 1650.] CLAUDE SAUMAISE. JOHN MILTON. 6oi 

cause, to speak in public differently from what he speaks and 
thinks in private. . . . But you wrote, you say, ' by com- 
mand.' And was it possible for any commands to prevail on 
you to change your opinion ? Your favourite Epictetus tells us 
that our opinion is one of those things in our power, and so far 
in our power that nothing can take it away from us without our 
consent." There is, of course, no parallel between the beneficent 
duty of an advocate before a court of justice, who gives to the 
worst criminal the right of a clear statement of whatever can be 
urged in his defence, and the act of an independent scholar, who 
for fame or money will affirm what he does not believe. 

Milton was called upon by the Council of State to reply to 
Salmasius. His health was already weak, the sight of his left 
eye already gone, and he was told he would lose h$s eyesight 
altogether if he undertook this labour. But to maintain before 
Europe in Latin, as he had maintained before his countrymen 
in English, what was for him and, as he believed, for England 
the living truth involved in the great struggle, with all its 
passions and misdeeds, was the next duty in his intellectual war. 
Milton wrote his " Defence of the People of England against 
Claude Saumaise's 'Royal Defence 5 " {Defensio pro Populo 
Anglicano contra Claudii Salmasii Defensionem Regiani)^ and 
the sight of the remaining eye then gradually vanished. Yet he 
said, in a sonnet to his old pupil, Cyriac Skinner — for Milton 
loved alike those who had taught him and those whom he had 
taught : 

"Yet I argue not 
Against Heaven's hand or will, or bate a jot ' 
Of heart or hope ; but still bear up and steer 
Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask ? 
The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied 
In liberty's defence, my noble task, 
Of which all Europe rings from side to side ; 
This thought might lead me through the world's vain mask, 
Content, though blind, had I no better guide." 

Milton's reply to Saumaise first gave him European reputation. 
Queen Christina read his book, delighted in it, and told Saumaise 
that he was beaten ; upon which Saumaise, whose health had 
been failing, found that the climate of Sweden disagreed with him. 
The common question was, "Who is this Milton?" Nicholas 
Heinsius, in Holland, had asked it of Isaac Voss, who was 
among the scholars then at the court of this daughter of Gustavus 
Adolphus ; and Voss at last replied, " I know now about Milton 



602 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1650. 

from my Uncle Junius, who is intimate with him {qui cum eo 
familiaritatem colit). He has told me that he serves the 
Parliament in foreign affairs ; is skilled in many languages ; that 
he is not indeed of noble, but, as they say, of gentle birth ; 
a pupil of Patrick" — (mistake for Thomas) — "Young; kindly, 
affable and endowed with many other virtues" (comem, ajfa- 
bilem, imiltisque aliis ftj'czditutn virti/fidus"). 

5. The Francis Junius who gave this information was the 
son of a Francis Junius who took part in the great religious 
contest of the Netherlands (ch. vii. § 26). Milton's friend had 
come to England in 1620, and become librarian to that Earl of 
Arundel for whom Selden, with aid from Patrick Young, royal ■ 
librarian, described the Arundel Marbles (ch. viii. § 68). Junius 
held that office for thirty years, and was known among scholars 
as an enthusiastic student of the early languages of Europe. 
* For this reason, when Usher, among his searches for books, 
found a MS. of First English, which proved to be (and is to 
this day) the only known copy of the work of the "Anglo-Saxon 
Milton," "Caedmon's Paraphrase" (ch. ii. § 5), he gave it to 
Francis Junius, as the man most able to make proper use of it. 
Junius could show it to his friend Milton, who cared much for 
such things, tell him about it, describe to him notable passages 
in it, before he left England in 1650. After his departure, Junius 
printed " Caedmon's Paraphrase" at Amsterdam, in 1655. Cer- 
tainly, therefore, Milton knew of " Caedmon's Paraphrase" before 
he began to write " Paradise Lost." 

6. The "Defence of the People of England" is, above all 
things, Milton's argument for the responsibility of kings against 
the theory of their divine right to an absolute command over 
their subjects. Salmasius said, "As to the pretended pact 
between a king and his subjects, certainly there is none in 
kingdoms born of force of arms, as almost all existing kingdoms 
are," and he thought it simply ridiculous to say, as the English 
did, that a king was the minister and servant of his people, and 
waged not his own wars, but theirs. Milton wrote to convince 
the many and the few. To the thinkers the great body of 
argument was addressed ; for them he appealed out of his own 
highest nature to their highest sense of right ; but he satisfied 
he many, too, by blending with his answer vigorous combat of 
the kind that alone would win attention from the thoughtless. 
On another occasion he had said, "There cannot be a more 
proper object of indignation and scorn together than a false 



to a.d. 1653.] DEFENCE OF THE PEOPLE OF ENGLAND. 603 

prophet taken in the greatest, dearest, and most dangerous cheat 
— the cheat of souls — in the disclosing whereof, if it be harmful 
to be angry, and withal to cast a lowering smile, when the 
properest object calls for both, it will be long enough ere any be 
able to say why those two most rational faculties of human 
intellect, anger and laughter, were first seated in the breast of 
man." And now Milton had not only to cast back the con- 
tumelies of Salmasius against the English people, but scorned 
an advocacy that, upon a question of the welfare of humanity, 
was on a vital point not what the writer thought, but what he 
had agreed to say. He trusted still to the fair battle of thought. 
At the end of the preface to his reply he said, "And now I 
would entreat the illustrious States of Holland to take off their 
prohibition, and suffer the book to be publicly sold ; for when 
I have detected the vanity, ignorance, and falsehood that it is 
full of, the farther it spreads the more effectually it will be sup- 
pressed." In the noble close to his Defence, Milton urged on 
the people of England that they must themselves refute their 
adversary, by a constant endeavour to outdo all men's bad words 
with their own good deeds. God had heard their prayers, but 
now, he said, you must show " as great justice, temperance, and 
moderation in the maintaining your liberty as you have shown 
courage in freeing yourselves from slavery." 

7. In 1650, the year in which this Defence appeared, there 
was a son born to Milton, and lost in its infancy. In 165 1 he 
left his lodgings for a pretty garden-house next to Lord Scuda- 
more's, and opening into the Park, now No. 19, York Street, 
Westminster. In 1652 his third daughter, Deborah, was born 
there, and at the same time his wife died, on the 2nd of May. 
In the following year Milton reinstated his wife's family at 
Forest Hill, by recovering for them, with Christopher's help, 
part of the exorbitant fines levied on their land. 

In the year of his wife's death appeared " The Cry of Royal 
Blood to Heaven against the English Parricides" {Regit San- 
guinis Clamor), another Latin appeal to Europe. Saumaise had 
meant to reply to Milton, but his health was failing still. He 
died in 1653. The new attack upon the English was written by 
a Frenchman, Pierre Dumoulin, who wrote afterwards a treatise 
on Peace of Soul and Content of Mind, and was made a Pre- 
bendary of Canterbury ; but its actual promoter and nominal 
author was Alexander More, a Protestant divine, born at Lan- 
guedoc, where his father, a Scotchman, was principal of the 



604 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1654. 

college. More had been professor of Greek at Geneva, but in 
1649 disagreement with colleagues obliged him to leave, and 
he went to Middleburg, afterwards to Amsterdam and Paris. 
His personal character was notoriously worthless. Milton's 
"Second Defence of the People of England/' published in 1654, 
was followed by a defence of himself. On the 16th of December, 
1653, Cromwell had been made Lord Protector of the Common- 
wealth, and Milton's Second Defence, published in 1654, contains 
expression of the nation's faith in him as " father of his country," 
and earnestly admonishes him that his country has entrusted to 
his hands her freedom. In the duties before him there are, said 
Milton, difficulties to which those of war are child's play. He 
must not suffer that liberty for which he encountered so many 
perils to sustain any violence at his own hands, or any from 
those of others ; and he must look for counsel to men who had 
shared his dangers, "men of the utmost moderation, integrity, 
and valour ; not rendered savage or austere by the sight of so 
much bloodshed and of so many forms of death ; but inclined 
to justice, to the reverence of the Deity, to a sympathy with 
human suffering, and animated for the preservation of liberty 
with a zeal strengthened by the hazards which for its sake they 
have encountered." Of his countrymen during the struggle they 
had gone through Milton says here, " No illusions of glory, no 
extravagant emulation of the ancients influenced them with a 
thirst for ideal liberty ; but the rectitude of their lives and the 
sobriety of their habits taught them the only true and safe road 
to real liberty ; and they took up arms only to defend the 
sanctity of the laws and the rights of conscience." Of himself 
he says, " No one ever knew me either soliciting anything myself 
or through my friends. I usually kept myself secluded at home, 
• where my own property, part of which had been withheld during 
the civil commotions, and part of which had been absorbed 
in the oppressive contributions which I had to sustain, afforded 
me a scanty subsistence." 

8. In 1654, gradual loss of sight in the remaining eye ended 
in Milton's complete blindness. Its cause was not in the eyes 
themselves, which remained unimpaired, but in the nerve of 
sight ; it was a form of blindness then known, from a wrong 
theory of its cause, as gutta serena (" drop serene "), but now 
called amaurosis. Its predisposing cause in Milton was the 
gouty constitution which he must have inherited, and of 
which, at last, he died. Its exciting cause was exhaustion 



A.D. i6s4-j MILTON'S SECOND DEFENCE. MARVELL. 605 

of nervous power by excessive use of his eyes in study from 
childhood. 

In 1654, then, Milton was blind, his wife had been dead 
two years, and when she died left him in charge of three little 
girls, of whom the eldest was but six years old, the youngest 
a new-born infant. But it was not until two years after his 
blindness became complete, or about four years after the death 
of his first wife, that Milton — the ages of his three motherless 
girls being then ten, nine, and four — married again. His 
second wife was Catherine, daughter of Captain Woodcock, of 
Hackney. She died in a year, at birth of her first child, and 
the child followed her. How tenderly Milton had sought to 
bring into his home with this second wife a companion to 
himself, with womanly care for his little girls, his sonnet " on 
his deceased wife" shows. He had dreamt of her one night 
after her death as coming to him before he awoke to blindness, 
with veiled face — for he had never seen her : 

" Methought I saw my late espoused saint 
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave. 

***** 
And such as yet once more I trust to have 
Full sight of her in heaven without restraint- 
Came, vested all in white, pure as her mind : 
Her face was veil'd, yet to my fancied sight, 
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined 
So clear, as in no face with more delight; 
But oh, as to embrace me she inclined, 
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night ! " 

* 

9. At this time Milton took reduced pay as La+in or Foreign 
Secretary, and was assisted in his work by Andrew Marvell. 
Andrew Marvell, born in November, 1620, was son of a clergy- 
man, and master of the Grammar School at Kingston-upon-Hull. 
He was sent at fifteen to Trinity College, Cambridge. When 
he was still a youth his father was drowned by crossing the 
Humber in stormy weather with a young lady, who was resolved 
to return home after a christening at his house. She. was the 
only daughter of a widow, who, considering how Mr. Marvell's 
life had been lost, took charge of his son, completed his educa- 
tion, and at her death left him her property. Andrew Marvell 
graduated as B.A. in 1638, and about 1642 went abroad, spend- 
ing four years in foreign travel. After his return he was at 
Bilbrough, in Yorkshire, teaching languages to the only daughter 
of Lord Fairfax, and his first poems were upon the Hill and 



606 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1650 

Grove at Bilbrough and upon the House at Nun-Appleton, 
another seat of Fairfax's, in Yorkshire. In 1652, Milton recom- 
mended the appointment of Marvell as his assistant secretary, 
but at that time without success. He described him, both from 
report and " personal converse," as of " singular desert ; " told 
that he had been four years abroad, in Holland, France, Italy, 
and Spain, knew these four languages, and was well read in 
Latin and Greek. With characteristic kindliness, Milton added 
to his recommendation of young Marvell, " This, my lord, I 
write sincerely, without any other end than to perform my duty 
to the public in helping them to an humble servant ; laying 
aside those jealousies and that emulation which mine own con- 
dition might suggest to me by bringing in such a coadjutor." 

Milton sent, in 1654, his " Second Defence of- the People of 
England" to Cromwell by Andrew Marvell's hand; and in 1657 
Cromwell made Marvell tutor to young Mr. Denton, the son of an 
old friend who had died leaving the Protector his boy's guardian. 
Andrew Marvell's quality had now made itself known, and in 
the same year, 1657, he obtained the office of assistant-secretary 
to Milton for the foreign correspondence. What was written 
officially for foreigners was Latin ; but unofficial correspondence 
and conversation in the chief languages of Europe would be 
required also, and for this Milton and Marvell were both 
qualified. 

10. At the beginning of the Commonwealth there were 
among the young men born in the reign of Charles I., and. from 
seventeen to twenty-one years old at the time of his execution, 
John Bunyan, George Villiers Duke of Buckingham, Robert 
Boyle, and Sir William Temple, all born in the year 1628; the 
divines of after years, Isaac Barrow and John Tillotson, both 
born in 1630; John Dry den, born in 1631 ; and John Locke, 
born in 1632. Isaac Newton, ten years younger, was a child of 
seven at the beginning of the Commonwealth. 

Among men of the elder generations who died during the 
Commonwealth were the dramatists, John Webster and Thomas 
Heywood (date unknown); John Selden (1652); James Usher 
(1656), his last years being occupied in the production of his 
Annals, first in Latin (1650 and 1653), and then in an English 
translation of his own, published in 1658, as Annals of the 
Woi'ld deduced from the Origin of Time, and continued to the 
Destruction of the Temple, containing the History of the Old 
and New Testament. John Taylor, the Water Poet, died in 1654 ; 



toa.d. 1655.] WRITERS UNDER THE COMMONWEALTH. 607 

John Hales in 1656; William Harvey in 1657; Richard Love- 
lace in 1658; John Cleveland in 1659. Among those born 
under the Commonwealth were no writers of higher mark than 
Jeremy Collier, John Oldham, and Thomas Otway. 

A few plays by Elizabethan Stuart dramatists were printed 
under the Commonwealth, as, in 1656, Ford and Dekker's " Sun's 
Darling/' and " The Old Law," by Massinger, Middleton, and 
Rowley ; but that race of writers survived only in James Shirley 
(ch. viii. § 33), who had served the Earl (afterwards Duke) of New- 
castle during the wars, and helped him to write plays. Under 
the Commonwealth, Shirley printed some of his old plays, but 
theatres being closed, he kept a prosperous school in Whitefriars, 
and wrote grammars. Shirley had among his friends in trouble 
Thomas Stanley (born 1624), son of Sir Thomas Stanley, of 
Hertfordshire, who lived in the Middle Temple, and produced 
under the Commonwealth, in 1655, A History of Philosophy, 
popular in its time, and translated into Latin and Dutch. 

Dr. Jasper Mayne (ch. viii. § 36), during the Common- 
wealth, was chaplain to the Earl of Devonshire, where he was 
brought into the society of Thomas Hobbes, whom he did 
not like. 

1 1. Thomas Hobbes (ch. viii. § 66) was active under the Com- 
monwealth. In 1650 he published a treatise on Human Nature j 
or, the Fimdametital Elements of Policy, and another, De Corpore 
Politico; or, the Ele?nents of Law, Moral and Politic. In the 
following year, 165 1, appeared his Leviathan; or, the Matter, 
Eorm, and Power of a Coinmonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil. 
This book he caused to be written on vellum for presentation 
to Prince Charles ; but the divines were in arms against Hobbes 
for opinions which they considered hostile to religion. Upholder 
as he was of the supremacy of kings, Charles naturally avoided 
him. No man can hurt religion by being as true as it is in his 
power to be ; and that Hobbes was. Our judgment of a man 
ought never to depend upon whether or not we agree with him 
in opinion. Hobbes was an independent thinker, and retained 
his independence when he might have lapsed into the mere 
hanger-on of a noble house, or, by dwelling only on some part of 
his opinion, have looked for profit as a flatterer of royalty. At 
Chatsworth he gave his morning to exercise and paying respects 
to the family and its visitors ; at noon he went to his study, ate 
his dinner alone without ceremony, shut himself in with ten or 
twelve pipes of tobacco, and gave his mind free play. Hobbes's 



608 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1651 

Leviathan, "occasioned," he says, "by the disorders of the 
present time," is in four parts, 1, Of Man; 2, Of Commonwealth ; 
3, Of a Christian Commonwealth; 4, Of the Kingdom of Dark- 
ness. Whatever can be compounded of parts Hobbes called a 
body ; man, imitating nature, or the art by which God governs 
the world, creates " that great Leviathan called the Common- 
wealth or State, which is but an artificial man, though of greater 
stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and 
defence it was intended." In this huge body the sovereignty is 
an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to all its parts. (1.) 
The matter and artificer of it is Man. Men are by nature equal, 
and their natural state is one of war, each being governed by his 
own reason, and with a right to everything that he can get. But 
he may agree to lay down this right, and be content with so 
much liberty against other men as he would like them to have 
against himself. Retaining certain natural rights of self- 
preservation, man makes a covenant which is the origin of 
government, and injustice then consists simply in breach of that 
covenant. (2.) For the particular security not to be had by the 
law of nature a covenant is made, which forms man into the 
Commonwealth, and is the basis of the rights and just power or 
authority of a sovereign, who becomes thenceforth as soul to the 
body. The subjects to a monarch thus constituted cannot with- 
out his leave throw off or transfer monarchy, because they are 
bound by their covenant. " And whereas," says Hobbes, " some 
men have pretended, for their disobedience to their own sovereign,, 
a new covenant, made not with men but with God ; this also is 
unjust : for there is no covenant with God but by mediation of 
somebody that representeth God's person; which none doth 
but God's lieutenant, who hath the sovereignty under God." 
(3.) Reason directs public worship of God, but since a Common- 
wealth is but as one person, it ought also to exhibit to God but 
one worship. There is no universal Church, because there is no- 
power on earth to which all other Commonwealths are subject ; 
but there are Christians in many states, each subject to the 
Commonwealth of which he is a member. It is the function of 
the constituted supreme power to determine what doctrines are 
fit for peace and to be taught the subjects. All pastors in a 
church exercise their office by Civil Right ; the civil sovereign 
alone is pastor by Divine Right. The command of the civil 
sovereign, having Divine warrant, may be obeyed without for- 
feiture of life eternal ; therefore, not to obey is unjust. All that 



toa.d. 1654.] HOBBES'S LEVIATHAN. 609 

is necessary to salvation is contained in Faith in Christ and 
Obedience to Laws. (4.) The " Rulers of the Darkness of this 
World " are the confederacy of deceivers that, to obtain dominion 
over men in this present world, endeavour by dark and erroneous 
doctrines to extinguish in them the light both of Nature and of 
the Gospel ; and so to disprepare them for the kingdom of God 
to come. 

Much of the detail in " Leviathan * and other writings led 
to a belief that the doctrines of Hobbes were destructive to 
Christianity and all religion. This was expressed by Dr. 
Bramhall, Bishop of Deny, in a book called The Catching of 
Leviathan, to which Hobbes wrote an answer. Hobbes pub- 
lished, in 1654, a treatise written in 1652, Of Liberty and 
Necessity, wherein all Controversy concerning Predestination, 
Election, Free-will, Grace, Merits, Reprobation, &C., is fully 
Decided and Cleared. Dr. Bramhall undertook to show him 
that on these points also he was to be by no means clear of 
controversy. 

Sir Robert Filmer (ch. viii. § 67) published, in 1652, Obser- 
vatio7is upon Mr. Hobbes's Leviathan, Mr. Milton against Sal- 
masius, and H. Grotius De Jure Belli et Pads, concerning the 
Originall of Government. Filmer repudiated Hobbes's notion 
of authority established by a covenant among men naturaHy 
equal, his own faith being that authority was given by Divine 
appointment from the first. 

12. The writings of James Harrington show from another 
point the energy with which the mind of our British Leviathan 
was now in debate within itself (ch. i. § 1). James Harrington, 
born in 161 1, eldest son of Sir Sapcotes Harrington, was of a 
good Rutlandshire family. In 1629 he entered as a gentleman 
commoner of Trinity College, Oxford. His father died before 
he was of age. He went to Holland, Denmark, Germany, and 
France, and to Italy, where he became an admirer of the 
Venetian Republic. After his return he lived a studious life, 
and was generous in care for his younger brothers and sisters. 
At the beginning of 1647 he was appointed to wait on Charles I., 
after his surrender to the English Commissioners, went with 
him from Newcastle, and was one of his grooms of the chamber 
at Holmby House. The king preferred his company, talked 
with him of books and foreign parts, and was only a little im- 
patient when Harrington, a philosophical republican, entertained 
His Majesty with a theory of an ideal Commonwealth. Harrington 

N N 



6iO A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d *5 5 6. 

was with Charles in the Isle of Wight, but was afterwards 
separated from him because he would not take an oath against 
connivance at the king's escape. After the king's execution 
Harrington worked out his view of government in the book 
which he called The Commonweatih of Oceana. Oceana was 
England, and he styled Scotland Marpesia, Ireland Panopasa, 
Henry VII. Panurgus, Henry VIII. Coraunus, Queen Elizabeth 
Parthenia, and so forth. Oceana being island, seems, said 
Harrington, like Venice, to have been designed by God for a 
Commonwealth; but Venice, because of its limited extent and 
want of arms, " can be no more than a Commonwealth for pre- 
servation : whereas this, reduced to the like government, is a 
Commonwealth for increase." At the foundation of Harrington's 
theory was the doctrine that empire follows the balance of 
property. He began with a sketch of the principles of govern- 
ment among the ancients and among the moderns, arguing 
throughout that dominion is property, and that, except in cities 
whose revenue is in trade, the form of empire is determined by 
the balance of dominion or property in land. If one man be, 
like the Grand Turk, sole landlord, or overbalance the people 
three parts in four, his empire is Absolute Monarchy. If the 
nobility be the landlords, or overbalance the people to the like 
proportion, that is the Gothic balance, and the empire is Mixed 
Monarchy, as that of Spain or Poland, and of Oceana, till " the 
Statute of Alienations broke the pillars by giving way to the 
nobility to sell their estates." If the whole people be landlords, 
or hold the lands so divided that no one man or small body of 
men overbalance them, the empire (unless force intervene) is a 
Commonwealth. Any possible attempt to maintain govern- 
ment in opposition to this principle leads, said Harrington, to 
disorder. Where a nobility holds half the property, and the 
people the other half, the one must eat out the other, as the 
people did the nobility in Athens, and the nobility the people in 
Rome. After illustrating this position, Harrington cited, under 
feigned names, nine of the most famous forms of legislation 
known in history; and out of what he took to be the good points 
of each, with additions and modifications of his own invention, 
he produced a Council of Legislators and a Model Common- 
wealth for his Oceana. Olphaus Megaletor (Oliver Cromwell), 
the most victorious captain and incomparable patriot, general 
of the army, was made by its suffrage Lord Archon of Oceana ; 
fifty select persons sat as a Council to assist him. The materials 



A.D. 1656.] HARRINGTON'S OCEANA. 6ll 

of a Commonwealth are the people ; these the Lord Archon and 
his Council divided into freemen or citizens, and servants. The 
servants were not to share in the government until able to live 
of themselves. The citizens were divided into youths (from 
eighteen to thirty) and elders ; also, according to their means, 
. into herse and foot ; and, according to their habitations, into 
parishes, hundreds, and tribes. A thousand surveyors, each 
with a district assigned to him, " being every one furnished with 
a convenient proportion of urns, balls, and balloting-boxes (in 
the use whereof they had been formerly exercised), and now 
arriving each at his respective parishes, began with the people 
by teaching them their first lesson, which was the ballot ; and 
though they found them in the beginning somewhat froward, as 
at toys, with which (while they were in expectation of greater 
matters from a Council of Legislators) they conceived them- 
selves to be abused, they came within awhile to think them 
pretty sport, and at length such as might very soberly be used 
in good earnest." Then followed an account of the machinery 
of balloting in each parish for deputies, only the elders being 
the electors ; of balloting also for the new pastor by the elders 
of the congregation in every parish church, with provision 
saving the rights of all Dissenters; and for the election of 
justices and high constables, captains and ensigns, coroners 
and jurymen, by ballot, among deputies of the parishes, and so 
throughout; "the ballot of Venice, as it is fitted by several 
alterations, to be the constant and only way of giving suffrage 
in this Commonwealth." The method of voting by ballot in the 
national Senate was illustrated by a picture. The full scheme 
of a Commonwealth was worked out in the " Oceana" with much 
detail. Harrington's manuscript was seized and carried to 
Whitehall, but pleasantly recovered by appeal to Cromwell 
through his daughter Lady Claypole, and published in 1656, 
inscribed " to His Highness, the Lord Protector of the Common- 
wealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland." Like all books 
that represented the activity of independent thought on the 
great questions of the day, Harrington's "Oceana" produced 
pamphlets in attack and in defence. Its chief opponents were 
Dr. Henry Feme, afterwards Bishop of Chester, and Matthew 
Wren, one of the votaries of experimental science, out of whose 
meetings the Royal Society was presently to spring, and of 
whom Harrington said they had " an excellent faculty of mag- 
nifying a Flea and diminishing a Commonwealth." Partly to 

N N 2 



6l2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1649 

the opinions of Hobbes and partly to those of Harrington, 
Richard Baxter opposed his " Holy Commonwealth." Har- 
rington published an abridgment of his political scheme in 
1659, as The Art of Lawgiving; and established, in the latter 
days of the Commonwealth, a club called the Rota, which met 
at the " Turk's Head," kept by one Miles, in the New Palace 
Yard, Westminster, and sat round an oval table, with a passage 
cut in the middle of it by which Miles delivered his coffee. 
The Rota discussed principles of government, and voted by ballot. 
Its ballot-box was the first seen in England. Milton's old pupil, 
Cyriac Skinner, was one of the members of this Club, which was 
named from a doctrine of its supporters, that in the chief 
legislative body a third part of the members should rote out by 
ballot every year and be incapable for three years of re-election ; 
by which principle of rotation Parliament would be completely 
renewed every ninth year. Magistrates also were to be chosen 
for only three years, and, of course, by ballot. 

13. Richard Baxter, in his Holy Commonwealth j or, 
Political Aphorisms, opening the trtie Principles of Government, 
opposed his title to the heathenish Commonwealth of other 
theorists, and pleaded the cause of Monarchy. Baxter was born 
in 161 5, at High Ercall, by the Wrekin, in Shropshire. After 
living ten years there with his grandfather, he went to Eaton 
Constantine, to his father, who had become very devout after 
loss of much of his estate by gambling. Richard Baxter's chief 
place of education was the free school at Wroxeter. From 
Wroxeter he went to be the one pupil of Mr. Wicksteed, chaplain 
of Ludlow Castle (ch. viii. § 53) ; then he taught in Wroxeter 
school for a few months, had cough with spitting of blood, and 
began the systematic study of theology. "My faults," said 
Baxter, " are no disgrace to any University, for I was of none ; 
I have little but what I had out of books and inconsiderable 
helps of country tutors. Weakness and pain helped me to study 
how to die ; that set me on studying how to live." In 1638 
Baxter became head master of a free school just founded at 
Dudley, took orders, went to Bridgenorth, and was forced by 
Laud's Church policy into Nonconformity. In 1640 he settled 
in Kidderminster, whence he was driven after two years by 
Royalist opposition. His life and his thoughts were unsettled 
by the Civil War. He signed the Covenant, and afterwards re- 
pented. He was with the army of the Parliament as military 
chaplain, and found there that " the most frequent and vehement 



to a. d. 1653.] RICHARD BAXTER. JOHN HOWE. 613 

disputes were for liberty of conscience, as they called it — that is, 
that the civil magistrate had nothing to do to determine matters 
of religion by constraint and restraint." He battled against their 
opinions, and was unpopular, but towards the close of the Civil 
Wars Baxter had a severe illness, and it was during this illness 
that he wrote his Saints' Everlasting Rest, first published in 
1653. Under the Commonwealth, Baxter was opposed to Crom- 
well, argued privately with him on his position in the State, and, 
as we have seen, supported Monarchy in the political discussions 
of the day. 

John Howe, Cromwell's chaplain, was fifteen years younger 
than Baxter. He was born in 1630, at Loughborough, where his 
father was minister of the parish. When John Howe was about 
three years old, his father was suspended and condemned to fine, 
imprisonment, and recantation by the High Commission Court, 
for opposing " The Book of Sports," which offended Puritans by 
encouraging Sunday afternoon amusements, and for praying in 
his church " that God would preserve the prince in the true 
religion, which there was cause to fear." King James I.'s De- 
claration to his subjects concerning lawful sports to be used on 
Sundays was published in 161 8, and professed to have originated 
in the desire to take away a hindrance to the conversion of 
Roman Catholics by checking the Puritans in their endeavour 
to repress " lawfull recreation and exercise upon the Sundayes 
afternoone, after the ending of all diuine seruice." Charles I. 
re-issued this declaration in 1633, with an added command for 
the observance of wakes. The reprint of James's proclamation 
with the ratification of Charles added was that "Book of 
Sports" which Howe's father was punished for opposing. He 
escaped to Ireland, and was there till 1641, when he returned 
with his boy, and settled in Lancashire. In 1647, John Howe, 
aged seventeen, entered Christ's College, Cambridge, as a sizar. 
He took his degree of B.A. at Cambridge, and was at Oxford 
in the first years of the Commonwealth. He formed there his 
own system of theology, became M.A. in 1652, was ordained, and 
became, at two-and-twenty, pastor at Great Torrington, in Devon- 
shire. The energy with which in these days the religious life of 
England was animating the great social changes may be illus- 
trated by Howe's work for his flock on any one of the frequent 
fast-days. He began with them at nine a.m., prayed during a 
quarter of an hour for blessing upon the day's work, then read and 
explained a chapter for three-quarters of an hour, then prayed for 



6 14 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1654 

an hour, then preached for an hour and prayed again for half an 
hour, then retired for a quarter of an hour's refreshment — the 
people singing all the while — returned to his pulpit, prayed for 
another hour, preached for another hour, and finished at four p.m., 
with one half-hour more of prayer, doing it all singly, and with his 
whole soul in it all. In 1654 Howe married the daughter of an 
elder minister. In 1656 he happened to be in London on a Sun- 
day, and went, out of curiosity, to Whitehall Chapel, to see the 
Lord Protector and his family. But the Lord Protector saw also 
the young divine in his clerical dress ; sent for him after service, 
and asked him to preach on the following Sunday. He preached, 
was asked to preach again, and was at last urged by Cromwell 
to stay by him as his domestic chaplain. He took that office, 
and was made also lecturer at St. Margaret's, Westminster, the 
parish church of the House of Commons. In three months he 
was writing from Whitehall to Baxter,for counsel as to those duties 
of which it would be most useful for him to remind the rulers, 
and he was supporting at head-quarters a plan of Baxter's for 
producing a more open fellowship among Christians of hitherto 
contending sects. Zealous and fearless enough to preach before 
Cromwell against a point of the Protector's own faith, Howe was 
thoroughly tolerant. When Thomas Fuller had to satisfy the 
Triers — a board for examining ministers before they were in- 
ducted to a charge — he was hard pressed upon a particular 
point, and said to Howe, good-humouredly, "You may observe, 
sir, that I am a pretty corpulent man, and I have to go through 
a passage that is very strait ; be so kind as to. give me a shove 
and help me through." Howe got him through. John Howe 
was Cromwell's chaplain to the last, and remained in the same 
office during the nine months' rule of the Protector's son, 
Richard. The best of his many books, The Living Temple, 
appeared in two parts, in 1676 and 1702. Howe lived till 1705. 

14. Thomas Fulle (ch. viii. § 59), who married.; in 1654, a 
sister of Lord Baltinglasse, wrote during the Commonwealth his 
Pisgah-Sight of Palestine (1650), an account of Palestine and its 
people, illustrative of Scripture; his Abel Redivivus (1651), 
being "Lives and Deaths ol the Modern Divines, written by 
several able and learned men ;" and (in 1656), in folio, The 
Church History of Britain, from the Birth of Christ to 1648, 
which was not the less a piece of sound, well-studied work for 
being quaint in style, good-humoured, and witty 

Jeremy Taylor (ch. viii. § 70) published, in 1649. The 



toa.d. i6 5 8.] BAXTER. FULLER. JEREMY TAYLOR. 615 

Great Exemplar of Sanctity and Holy Life, according to the 
Christian Institution, described in the History of the Life and 
Death of Christ; in 1650, his Holy Living, with "Prayers for 
our Rulers," altered afterwards to "Prayers- for the King;" in. 
165 1, his Holy Dying; and the first volume for the "Summer 
Half-year" (the second, for the "Winter Half-year," followed in 
1653) of A Course oj Sermons for all the Sundaies in the Year. 
His friend, Lady Carbery, died in October, 1650, and Taylor 
preached her funeral sermon with the tender piety of friendship, 
Jeremy Taylor, when he wrote verse, failed as a poet. He was 
no master in that form of expression ; but natural grace of mind, 
with a fine culture, liveliness of fancy, the unaffected purity of 
his own standard of life upon earth, and, in the midst of all 
the tumult of the time, " the strange evenness and untroubled 
passage" with which he was himself, as he said of Lady Carbery 
" sliding towards his ocean of God and of infinity with a certain 
and silent motion," has filled his prose with the true poetry 
of life. In 1655 he applied the name of Lord Carbery's house 
to a book of devotion, The Golden Grove; or, a Manual of 
Daily Prayers and Letanies fitted to the Dayes of the Week ; 
also, Festival Hymns, according to the Manner of the Ancient 
Church. Jeremy Taylor was imprisoned twice during the Com- 
monwealth, and brought down on himself a controversy upon 
original sin, by his Unutn Necessarium ; or, The Doctrine and 
Practice of Repentance. In 1656 he lost two children by small- 
pox and fever, and had only one son left of the family by his 
second marriage. In 1657 he published a Discourse on the 
Measures and Offices of Friendship, addressed to Mrs. Catherine 
Philips, with whom we shall meet again as the first English- 
woman who earned good fame as a poetess. At this time 
Jeremy Taylor was preaching in London, and had John Evelyn 
among his friends. Lord Conway, who had a residence at 
Portmore, offered him the post of alternate lecturer at Lisburn, 
nine miles from his house. Taylor accepted it, and went to 
Ireland in the summer of 1658. Even then he was not left 
wholly in peace ; " for," he wrote, " a Presbyterian and a mad- 
man have informed against me as a dangerous man to their 
religion, and for using the sign of the cross in baptism." He 
was taken to Dublin, but obtained easy acquittal. 

15. John Bunyan was born in 1628, the son of a poor 
tinker, at Elstow, in Bedfordshire. He was sent to a free school 
for the poor, and then worked with his father. As a youth of 



6l6 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1649 

seventeen he was combatant in the Civil War. He was married, 
at nineteen, to a wife who helped him to recover the art of 
reading, over the only books she had— "The Practice of Piety" 
and " The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven." He went regularly 
to church, but joined in the sports after the Sunday after- 
noon's service, which had been a point of special defiance to the 
Puritans, by the proclamation of James I., in 1618, re-issued by 
Charles I. in 1633. Once Bunyan was arrested in his Sunday 
sport by the imagination of a voice from heaven. Presently he 
gave up swearing, bell-ringing, and games and dances on the 
green. Then came the time of what he looked upon as his con- 
version, brought about by hearing the conversation of some 
women as he stood near with his tinker's barrow. They referred 
him to their minister. He says that he was tempted to sell 
Christ, and heard, when in bed one morning, a voice that re- 
iterated, " Sell Him, sell Him, sell Him." This condition was 
followed by illness which was mistaken for consumption ; but 
Bunyan recovered, and became robust. In 1657 he was deacon> 
of his church at Bedford, and his private exhortations caused him 
to be invited to take turns in village preaching. Country people 
came to him by hundreds. Only ordained ministers might 
preach. In 1658 complaint was lodged against Bunyan ; but 
under the Commonwealth he was left unmolested. 

16. George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends, was 
about four years older than Bunyan. He was born at Fenny 
Drayton, Leicestershire, in July, 1624, the son of a respectable 
weaver. He was taught reading and writing, and then placed 
with a shoemaker, who also kept sheep. Fox minded the sheep. 
His mind from childhood was fixed upon Bible study, he was 
true of word, and as he took the Scripture " Verily " for his 
most solemn form of assertion, it was understood that, "If 
George says ' Verily/ there is no moving him." At twenty, in 
obedience to words that seemed to answer prayer, he left his 
home, and, having means enough for simple life without a trade,. 
spent about nine months in towns where he was unknown, and 
free to wander and reflect. He made himself a suit of leather 
clothes, that would last long without renewal, and gave himself 
up to intense religious meditation. He came home still un- 
settled, and again moved restlessly about, profoundly dwelling 
upon the relation of his soul to God. The result was uttermost 
rejection of all forms and ceremonies as a part of true religion. 
" God," he said to himself, " dwells not in temples made with 



Toa.d. 1658.] JOHN BUNYAN. GEORGE FOX. 617 

hands, but in the hearts of His obedient people." The Church 
of Christ was, he felt, a living church ; and he became zealous 
against reverence paid to churches of brick and stone, which he 
denied to be churches, and thenceforth called steeple-houses. 
tie not only set himself against those parts of ceremonial which 
had been a source of contest from the days of Cranmer to the 
days of Laud, but utterly against all ceremonial, in Church and 
State. He realised to his own mind a Christian commonwealth 
in which the civil power is obeyed as far as conscience permits, 
and, if disobeyed, never resisted ; in which the great religious 
bond of love makes all men equal before God, by teaching man 
to be the Friend of man. In such a community there should be 
no untrue forms of ceremonial, no reverence by using the plural 
pronoun, and addressing one as if he were two, by scraping the 
foot, or uncovering the head. In all things the simple word of 
truth was to be all-sufficient, so that Christians would swear not 
at all, but their word would be simply Yea or Nay. He would 
have a church of souls with no paid minister, no formal minister 
of any kind, no formal prayers, and no formal preaching. At 
the meetings of such a church there should none speak unless 
it were borne in upon any one that there was something to say 
fresh from the heart, but in that case each man or woman was 
free to address the assembled friends. It was in 1647 that Fox 
began to spread his opinions, and gather friends. Some of their 
first meetings were heid at Dukinfield and Manchester. The 
protest against formalism was so complete and so unflinching, 
that it brought the followers of Fox into constant collision with 
the usages and laws, or supposed laws, of society. If an oath 
had to be taken it was refused, because it was an oath, and the 
penalty was borne of the refusal. The hat not removed in 
church, or in a court of justice, or by a son in presence of his 
father ; the courteous " you " transformed to " thou " in days 
when " thou," as now in Germany, was used only to an inferior 
or to an equal friend — offences such as these against the esta- 
blished forms led, Fox says, to " great rage, blows, punchings, 
beatings, and imprisonments." Fox was imprisoned first at 
Nottingham, in 1649, because the spire of the great church had 
caused him to " go and cry against yonder great idol and the 
worshippers therein." He stopped the preacher with contra- 
diction in the middle of his sermon, and was imprisoned for 
interruption of the service; but his religious fervour won the 
heart of one of the sheriffs, and he was quickly released. But 



6l8 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1649 

in 1650 he was arrested at Derby for telling " plain and homely 
truths" at a gathering summoned by Presbyterian preachers, 
was taken before the magistrates, and suffered much from 
Justice Gervas Bennet. It was this justice who first gave to 
Fox and his friends in derision the name of Quakers, because 
Fox bade him tremble and quake before the power of the Lord. 
At Derby, Fox was imprisoned for twelve months in the common 
gaol on a charge of blasphemy, while his religious life answered 
the charge, and he, as a guiltless man, refused either to go 
through the form of being bound to good behaviour, or to allow 
any one to be surety for him. At last he was released uncon- 
ditionally. He then preached and drew followers to his cause 
in Yorkshire and Westmoreland ; was charged with blasphemy 
at Lancaster; imprisoned, in 1653, at Carlisle, and released 
when the case was brought before Cromwell's first Parliament. 
In his home at Drayton, in 1654, he disputed with the clergy, was 
arrested on suspicion of holding or encouraging seditious meet- 
ings, and was sent to Cromwell, who heard him at length while 
he was dressing, took his hand as he left, and said, with tears in 
his eyes, " Come again to my house, for if thou and I were but 
an hour a day together, we should be nearer one to the other." 
Fox was free again, but he and his followers were still persecuted. 
The character of other interviews shows clearly that Cromwell 
recognised a true man in George Fox. His intense religious 
fervour led to acts of seeming insanity, when a sudden impulse, 
biblical in its form, was taken with simple faith for a Divine 
prompting, and acted upon straightway. The body also, both 
in John Bunyan and in George Fox, was sometimes fevered by 
the intensity of spiritual life. George Fox's followers were un- 
flinching in their protest. In 1659 two thousand of them had 
suffered more or less in the foul gaols; and 164 of the Friends 
offered themselves in place of that number of their fellow- 
worshippers whom they found to be in danger of death from 
continuance of their imprisonment Fox wrote letters, of which 
many were collected, and about 1 50 doctrinal pieces. He lived 
until 1690, and his Journal oj his Life, Travels, Sufferings, &C, 
was published in 1694. 

17. Everywhere there was in those days the quickened spirit 
of inquiry. It entered into politics ; and patriotic thinkers, 
representing many forms of mind, active in fresh examination 
of the framework of society, sought to find their way to the 
first principles on which established forms of government are 



TO A.D. 1059.] THE FIRST QUAKERS. ADVANCE OF SCIENCE. 6l>.y 

founded, and part false from true. It entered into religion^ 
and devout men, also representing many forms of mind, went 
straight to the Bible as the source of revealed truth, seeking to 
find their way to the first principles on which established forms 
of faith are founded, and part false from true. It entered into 
science ; and followers of Bacon, hoping to draw wisdom from 
the work of the All-wise, went straight to Nature as the source 
of all our material knowledge, and sought, by putting aside 
previous impressions where they interfered with a new search 
for truth, to find their way to the first principles upon which 
a true science is built. 

1 8. These men of science, who were drawn together in the 
time of Civil War, were active still under the Commonwealth. 
There was Robert Boyle (ch. viii. § 64), with a special turn for 
chemical investigation, and an ever-present sense of God in 
nature. During the Commonwealth it was chiefly at Boyle's 
house, in Oxford, with his sister, Lady Ranelagh,- for hostess, 
that the knot of associated men of science had their meetings. 
There was Samuel Hartlib (ch. viii. § 63), one of the first to 
suggest fellowship in the pursuit of knowledge, a foreigner who 
spent his whole fortune for the well-being of England, and was 
still at work under the Commonwealth, issuing practical books 
that taught the English farmer to improve his crops. Hartlib's 
services were recognised by Cromwell with a pension of ,£300 
a year. This ceased at the Restoration, and Hartlib died poor 
and neglected. There was John Wallis, Savilian Professor 
of Geometry at Oxford (ch. viii. § 64), who prepared the way for 
Newton. Newton's binomial theorem was a corollary of the 
results of Wallis on the quadrature of curves. Wallis published, 
in 1655, his chief mathematical work, Arithmetica Lnfinitorum, 
with a prefixed treatise on Conic Sections Thomas Hobbes, 
who swam out of his depth in mathematics, supposed himself to 
have squared the circle. Wallis -commented on this in his 
Elenchns Geometries Hobbiancs. Hobbes, who never took con- 
tradiction well, retorted with Six Lessons to the Professor oj 
Mathematics at Oxford. Wallis replied, in 1656, with Due 
Correction for Mr. Hobbes j or, School Discipline for not sayi?ig 
his Lesson right. Hobbes rejoined with Stigmas; or> The 
Marks of the Absurd Geometry, &*c, of Dr. Wallis: and the 
controversy went on for some time, Wallis being in the right, 
and also cleverer than Hobbes in conduct of the controversy. 
The best of his retorts was Hobbius , Heaulontimoroumenas 



620 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1649 

(named from one of the comedies of Terence, Hobbes, the 
Self- Tormentor), published in 1663. Wallis lived till 1703. 
Another of these comrades in science was John Evelyn, born 
in 1620, the son of Richard Evelyn, of Wotton, Surrey. Evelyn 
loved art and nature, had ample means, left England because of 
the Civil War, and travelled in France and Italy ; came home in 
165 1 with his fair and clever wife, and amused himself with the 
laying out of his famous gardens at Sayes Court, quietly holding 
stout Royalist opinions, and avoiding a pledge to the Covenant. 
In 1659 he sketched a plan of a philosophical college, and pub- 
lished also an Apology for the Royal Party. There was also,, 
as Evelyn calls him, that most obliging and universally curious 
Dr. Wilkins (ch. viii. § 59, 64), who had wonderful transparent 
apiaries ; a hollow statue which spoke through a concealed 
tube ; also " a variety of shadows, dyals, perspectives, and many 

other artificial, mathematical, and magical curiosities, 

most of them of his own and that prodigious young scholar, Mr. 
Chr. Wren." Young Christopher Wren, nephew of the Bishop 
of Ely, was also in fellowship among these followers of science. 
There was William Petty (knighted in 1661), born in 1623, 
son of a clothier at Romsey, educated at the Romsey Grammar 
School, and Caen, in Normandy. He began active life with 
some experience in the navy, then, after 1643, was in France 
and the Netherlands for three years, and studied medicine and 
anatomy. In 1648 he published The Advice of W. P. to 
M?\ Samuel Hartlib for the Advancement of so7ne Particular 
Parts of Learning, that is, the extension of education to objects 
more connected with the business of life. He went to Oxford, 
taught anatomy and chemistry, became in 1649 M.D. and 
Fellow of Brazenose. Some of the first scientific gatherings 
were in his rooms. In 1652 he was physician to the army in 
Ireland; in 1654 obtained a contract for the accurate survey of 
lands forfeited by the rebellion of 1641, by which he made 
,£10,000 while instituting the first scientific survey of Ireland. 
Having surveyed the forfeited lands, Petty was a commissioner 
for parting them among the soldiery, and he enriched himself 
by profitable purchases. At the end of the Commonwealth his 
personal dealing with Irish lands was brought in question by 
Sir Hierom Sankey, but the Commonwealth and the inquiry 
into Dr. Petty^s dealings came to an abrupt end together. 

19. The garden and museum at Lambeth of John Tradescant 
the son, founded by John Tradescant the father, traveller in 



toa.d. 1660.] MEN OF SCIENCE. ANTIQUARIES. 62 1 

Europe, Asia, Africa, and afterwards gardener to Charles I., 
was one of the scientific curiosities of London under the Com- 
monwealth. Tradescant published, in 1656, a catalogue of the 
collection, the Museum Tradesca7itium. A great friend of his 
was Elias Ashmole (born 1617, died 1692), who under the 
Commonwealth studied alchemy; published, in 1652, a Theatrum 
Chemicum Britannicufn, containing several Poetical Pieces of 
our famous Philosophers who have written the Hertnetique 
Mysteries in their own Ancient Language; in 1634, a Fasciculus 
Chemiacs; and, in 1658, The Way to Bliss, which expressed 
faith as it is in the Philosopher's Stone. Ashmole published in 
1672 a History of the Garter. 

When John Xradescant the younger died, in 1662, he left his 
museum to Ashmole, and the widow contested his right unsuc- 
cessfully. Ashmole acquired the museum and gave it to Oxford, 
where, with his own books and papers afterwards added to the 
gift, it is now known as the Ashmolean Museum. 

Ashmole's taste for the marvellous in nature was shared by 
Sir Kenelm Digby. An Everard Digby, who died in 1592, 
wrote curious books ; his son, Sir Everard, knighted by James I., 
was hanged, drawn, and quartered for giving ,£1,500 towards 
expenses of the Gunpowder Plot. The eldest son of that Sir 
Everard was Sir Kenelm Digby, born in 1603, and educated at 
Oxford. He travelled in Spain, discovered, as he supposed, a 
sympathetic powder for cure of wounds, was knighted in 1623, 
was sent with a fleet into the Mediterranean in 1628, and 
returned to the faith of his fathers as a Roman Catholic in 1636. 
In the Civil Wars he helped the king among the Roman Catho- 
lics, and was then exile in France until Cromwell's supremacy 
gave him liberty to revisit England ; but he returned to France. 
He published, in 1644, a mystical interpretation of The 2ind 
Stanza in the gth Canto of the 2nd Book of Spenser's Faerie 
Queenej in 1645, Two Treatises on the Nature of Bodies and of 
Man's Soulej took lively interest in Palingenesis ; wrote Obser- 
vations upon Sir T. Browne's Religio Medici, and was in- 
genious in the pursuit of forms of learning which have proved 
to be more curious than true. He died in 1665. 

William Dugdale, the antiquary, born in 1605 at Coles- 
hill, Warwickshire, was educated at Coventry Free School, and 
by his father. In 1644 he was made Chester Herald, and was 
with Charles I. throughout the Civil Wars. Under the Common- 
wealth, he produced in 1655. w * tn Roger Dodsworth, the first of 



622 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.D. j&& 

the three folio volumes (the others followed in 1661 and 1673) 
of his Monasticon Anglicanum, giving chiefly the foundation 
charters of the English monasteries. Many Puritans saw in the 
book a first attempt towards the re-introduction of Catholicism. 
In 1656, Dugdale published the result of twenty years' research 
in a learned, accurate, and honest account of his native county., 
The Antiquities of Warwickshire, the best of our old county 
histories. This was followed, in 1658, by the History of St. 
Paul's Cathedral in Lotidon, from its Foundation until these 
Times. Dugdale was knighted after the Restoration, and made 
Garter King at Arms. He died in 1686. 

John Rushworth, born in Northumberland, in 1607, and 
educated at Oxford and Lincoln's Inn, was an expert shorthand 
writer, employed to take down the most important debates in 
Parliament and in high courts of justice. In 1640 he was one 
of the clerks of the House of Commons, and afterwards secretary 
to Fairfax. In 1658 he was member for Berwick. In was in 
1659 that he issued, dedicated to Richard, Lord Protector, the 
first of the seven folios (the last appeared in 1701) of his 
Historical Collections of Private Matters of State, Weighty 
Matters in Late/, Pemarha&le Proceedings in Five Parliaments. 
from 161 8 to 1648. The Try all of Thomas, Earl of Strafford.. 
forming an eighth volume, appeared in 1680. From Rush worth 
to light literature is a stride. 

20. Sir Richard Fanshawe, a firm Royalist, and secretary 
to Charles Prince of Wales, to whom he had dedicated, in 1647; 
his Translation of the Pastor Fido of Guarini, published in 
1655 a translation of the national epic of the - Portuguese, The 
Lusiad of Camoens. Sir T nomas Urquhaft published, in 
1653, a translation of Rabelais' Gargantua and PantagrueL 
Translations of the French romances of Magdeleine de Scuderi. 
Calprenede, and others, appeared throughout the Common- 
wealth, and an attempt was made at an original imitation of 
them by Roger Boyle (ch. viii. § 64) in his Parthenissa. But 
Nathaniel Xngelo, D.D., who looked upon the writing and 
reading of romances as " impertinencies of mankind," and 
poetry and romances as "pitiful things," produced, in 1660, an 
antidote, in form of a romance, called Bentivoglio and Urania, 
wherein Bentivoglio, or Goodwill, born in the higher Theoprepiay 
or a state worthy of God, is enamoured of Urania, who re- 
presents Heavenly Light or Divine Wisdom, and has allegorical 
experience in divers godly and ungodly states. 



toao. 1659.] ROMANCES. IZA A K WALTON. COWLEY. 623 

21. Izaak Walton, born in 1593 at Stafford, was a hosier 
in the Royal Exchange, and afterwards in Fleet Street, near 
Chancery Lane, making money enough to retire upon and take 
life easily. In 1636 he married a descendant of Cranmer. He 
was left a widower in 1640. In 1647 he married a sister of 
Bishop Ken, and he had children by each of his wives. He was 
a hearty Royalist and churchman, who loved God and Nature 
with simplicity of mind, and greatly relished a day's fishing. 
In 1653 he gave to his countrymen the first edition of The 
Compleat Angler; or, the Contemplative Man's Recreation: 
being a Discourse of Fish and Fishing, in form of dialogue, 
with pictures of the trout, pike, carp, tench, perch, and barbel. 
In 1655 a second edition appeared, almost rewritten, much 
enlarged, with three speakers, Piscator, Venator (taking the place 
ot Viator), and Auceps ; Fisher, Hunter, and Birdcatcher ; and 
with four more plates of fish. 

22. We now turn to the poets. Abraham^ Cowley (ch. viii. 
§ 48) remained in France till 1656, and then returned to Eng- 
land, was taken prisoner by messengers in search for another 
man, and released upon security given for him by a friend. 
He remained quietly in London till the death of Cromwell, 
published in 1656, in folio, the first edition of his Works, 
declaring in the preface that his desire had been for some days 
past, and did still very vehemently continue, to retire himself to 
some of the American plantations, and forsake this world for 
ever. In 1657 he was made M.D. of Oxford, and with a poet's 
sense of the charm of science, he devoted himself to the study 
of botany. Dr. Cowley took a lively interest in the fellowship 
of men of science, and the best way of advancing scientific 
knowledge. At the death of Cromwell he returned to France. 

23. Sir William Davenant (ch. viii. § 36) was living with 
Lord Jermyn in the Louvre, when, in January, 1650, he dated 
the Discourse upon Gondibert, an Heroic Poem, addressed to 
Thomas Hobbes, who had been reading the poem as it was 
written. It occurred to him to go to the loyal colony of Vir- 
ginia with a body of workmen, but the vessel .in which he 
sailed was taken by one of the ships of the Parliament, and 
Davenant carried to the Isle of Wight, where he was imprisoned 
in Cowes Castle. There he continued " Gondibert " to the 
middle of the third book, and as that was half the poem — for his 
plan was to have five books answering to five acts of a play, with 
cantos answering to scenes— he wrote a " Postscript to the 



624 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1651. 

Reader," dated " Cowes Castle, October 22, 1650," and sent it to 
the press. With its prefatory discourse and postscript this half 
of the poem, which was left a fragment, appeared in 165 1. Of 
the two books written at the date of the preface " to his much 
Honour'd Friend, Mr. Hobbes," Davenant said, " I delay the 
publication of any part of the poem till I can send it you from 
America, whither I now speedily prepare; having the folly to 
hope that when I am in another world (though not in the 
common sense of dying) I shall find my readers, even the 
poets of the present age, as temperate and benign as we are 
all to the dead whose remote excellence cannot hinder our repu- 
tation." In the Postscript to the Reader, written at Cowes Castle, 
Davenant believed that he should, in the common sense, speak 
from another world, and said, '"Tis high time to strike sail and 
cast anchor, though I have but run half my course, when at the 
helm I am threatened with Death, who, though he can visit us 
but once, seems 1 troublesome ; and even in the innocent can 
beget such a gravity as disturbs the music of verse." Davenant 
was brought to London for trial, and his life was saved, some 
say by two Aldermen of York, some say by Milton. He was 
detained a prisoner for two years, but treated with indulgence. 
Davenant and his "Gondibert" were laughed at, in 1653, by 
four writers of Certain Verses written by several of the Author's 
Friends, to be Rep?'inted in the Second Edition of Gondibert, 
and these critics were not " temperate and benign." But the 
book has interest for the student. The long, grave, half-philo- 
sophical preface, prosing about rhyming, marks very distinctly 
that influence of France upon our literature of which the 
grounds were then fully established, and which came in with the 
Restoration. As to metre, the use in a heroic poem of what 
Davenant called his " interwoven stanza of four" was preferred, 
he said, " because he believed it would be more pleasant to the 
reader, in a work of length, to give this respite or pause between 
every stanza (having endeavoured that each should contain .a 
period) than to run him out of breath with continued couplets. 
Nor doth alternate rhyme by any lowliness of cadence make 
the sound less heroick, but rather adapt it to a plain and stately 
composing of musick ; and the brevity of the stanza renders it 
less subtle to the composer and more easy to the singer, which, 
in stilo recitativo, when the story is long, is chiefly requisite." 
He adds that he was chiefly influenced by hope that the cantos 
of his poem might really be sung at village feasts. Dryden for 



a.d. i6 5 i.] DAVENANTS GONDIBERT. 625 

a time followed Davenant's adoption of this measure as the 
heroic stanza, which Davenant found ready perfected in Sir 
John Davies's Nosce Teipsum (ch. vii. § 81). In its design, the 
poem blends something of the political philosophy of Hobbes 
with the keen interest in Nature quickened by Bacon, and 
seeks to build on them a song of love and war, designed, as 
Davenant said of it in his Postscript, " to strip Nature naked, 
and clothe her again in the perfect shape of virtue." The 
Lombard Aribert rules in Verona ; his only child is a daughter, 
Rhodalind. Either Prince Oswald or Duke Gondibert, both 
mighty in war, might wed the damsel, and succeed to empire. 
Oswald is brilliant and ambitious of rule ; Gondibert has am- 
bition of a higher kind. Each has his camp and faction. 
There is a hunting of Gondibert's, leading to an ambush of 
Oswald's, and a duel, in which Gondibert is wounded, Oswald 
slain. Then, at the close of the first book, Gondibert is taken, 
by advice of the aged Ulfin, to the house of Astragon, the wise 
and wealthy. 

" Though cautious Nature, check'd by Destiny, 
Has many secrets she would ne'er impart ; 
This famed philosopher is Nature's spie, 
And hireless gives th' intelligence to Art." 

In the next book, after four cantos of events at Verona, the seat 
of empire, where Rhodalind can give supreme rule with her 
hand, we find Gondibert in the house of Astragon, which is 
more full of signs of deep inquiry into Nature than John Evelyn 
found the lodgings of " the most obliging and universally curious 
Dr. Wilkins." Over one gate is written, " Great Nature's Office," 
where old busy men are labouring as Nature's registrars; there 
is a garden, " Nature's Nursery ;" a skeleton room, called " The 
Cabinet of Death :" 

" Which some the Monument of Bodies name ; 

The Arke, which saves from graves all dying kindes; 
This to a structure led, long known to Fame, 
And call'd the Monument of Vanish'd Minds. 

** Where, when they thought they saw in well-sought books, 
Th' assembled soules of all that Men hold wise, 
It bred such awfull rev'rence in their looks. 
As if they saw the bury'd writers rise." 

There is also a triple Temple, dedicate " To Days of Praise, and 
Penitence, and Prayer." In this half mythical house of Astragon 
there is Birtha. daughter of Astragon, who tends Gondibert's 
wounds, and whose womanhood is partly an ideal of the simple 

O o 



626 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [A.D. 1651 

beauty and beneficence of Nature. Her Gondibert loves, though 
Aribert had destined him for Rhodalind. When Gondibert seeks 
Astragon's assent to this love, he has to give an account of him- 
self to the lady's father, and expresses much of the main thought 
of the poem by telling in what way he is ambitious. He has 
vanquished the Huns, he would conquer the world, but only 
because division of interest is the main cause of discord (here 
Thomas Hobbes approved the writer's principles), and Gondibert 
wished to bring the universe, for its own peace, under a single 
monarchy. A great warlike ambition ; but, he says : 

" But let not what so needfully was done, 

Though still pursued, make you ambition feare ; 
For could I force all monarchys to one, 
That universal crown I would not weare. 

" He who does blindly soar at Rhodalind, 

Mounts like seeld Doves, still higher from his ease ; 
And in the lust of empire he may finde, 
High hope does better than fruition please. 

" The victor's solid recompence is rest : 

And 'tis unjust that chiefs who pleasure shunn, 
Toyling in youth, should be in age opprest 

With greater toyles, by ruling what they wonn. 

" Here all reward of conquest I would finde ; 
Leave shining thrones for Birtha in a shade ; 
With Nature's quiet wonders fill my minde. 
And praise her most because she Birtha made." 

Davenant is artificial in his praise of Nature, but there is true 
dignity in many passages of " Gondibert," with frequent felicity 
of expression ; there is such aim at ingenuity as we find in the 
later Euphuists, modified by the new influence of the French 
critical school. Its chance of a good reception was not im- 
proved by Hobbes's declaration, made in its behalf, that "Gon- 
dibert" deserved to last as long as the vEneid or Iliad. The 
jest was ready against a book not serious enough for one-half 
of the public and too serious for the other, that said, laughing : 

" Room for the best of poets heroic, 
If you'il believe two wits and a stoic. 
Down go the Iliads, down go the ^Eneidos : 
All must give place to the Gondiberteidos." 

24. Jolin Dryden, born August 9th, i63i,at Aldwincle, in 
Northamptonshire, of good family, was educated at Westminster 
School, where he wrote some euphuistic verse, and at Trinity 
College, Cambridge, where he took his degree of B.A. in 1654, 



WA.B. i66o.] DRVDEN. WITHER. MAR FELL. MILTON. 627 

the year of his father's death. He seems to have come to 
London in the summer of 1657, and was at first in the home of 
his cousin, and Cromwell's friend, Sir Gilbert Pickering. He 
was in his twenty-eighth year when Cromwell died, on the 
3rd of September, 1658, and he wrote, after the funeral, one of 
the many tributes to his memory, Heroic Stanzas on t/ie Death 
of Oliver Cromwell, using the measure of " Gondibert." With 
customary strain to be ingenious, there was a simple close. 

George Wither (ch. viii. § 39) and Andrew Marvell 
(§8) had followed Cromwell's career with their verse. George 
Wither had published, in 1655, a poem called The Protector, 
upon Cromwell's acceptance of that office. Andrew Marvell 
had written loyally on the first anniversary of his government, 
and he was now among the mourners. 

25. The fabric held together by the might of Cromwell fell 
after his death. His amiable son Richard called a Parliament 
which vanished before the power of the army, and Richard 
Cromwell passed from the Protectorate to private life. He lived 
to see the Revolution, and he died a country gentleman, in 17 12. 
The attempt to revive the Long Parliament as a central authority 
failed also to restrain the army. George Monk marched out of 
Scotland to subdue, as he said, the military tyranny in England, 
but it was soon evident that there was no hopeful way out of the 
discord but a Restoration of the Monarchy. 

In these days John Milton, first fearing predominance of 
the Presbyterians, had addressed to the Parliament called by 
Richard Cromwell A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical 
Causes, showing that it is not lawful for any power on earth to 
compel in matters of religion. To the revived Long Parliament, 
which succeeded the short-lived Parliament called b/ Richard 
Cromwell, Milton addressed Considerations touching the Likeliest 
Meafis to Remove Hirelings out of the Church, in which he 
argued that each pastor should be maintained by his own flock. 
On the 20th of October, 1659, Milton wrote a letter to a friend On 
the Ruptures of the Commonwealth, and addressed a brief letter 
to Monk on The Present Means and Brief Delineation of a Free 
Co7nmonwealth, easy to be put 171 Practice and without Delay. 
A few months later he published a pamphlet called The Ready 
and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, and the 
Excellence thereof, co77ipared with the Inconveniences a7id 
Da7igers of Re-adi7iitti7ig Kingship in this Nation. His main 
suggestion was : " Being now in anarchy, without a counselling 

2 



628 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1660. 

and governing power, and the army, I suppose, finding them- 
selves insufficient to discharge at once both military and civil 
affairs, the first thing to be found out with all speed, without 
which no Commonwealth can subsist, must be a Senate, or 
General Council of State, in whom must be the power, first, to 
preserve the public peace ; next, the commerce with foreign 
nations ; and, lastly, to raise monies for the management of 
those affairs : this must either be the Parliament re-admitted to 
sit, or a Council of State allowed of by the army, since they 
only now have the power. The terms to be stood on are, liberty 
of conscience to all professing Scripture to be their rule of faith 
and worship ; and the abjuration of a single person." He urged 
to the last moment of hope the first principles of what he said 
is not called amiss "the good old cause •" adding, "Thus much 
I should perhaps have said, though I was sure I should have 
spoken only to trees and stones ; and had none to cry to but 
with the prophet, ' O Earth, Earth, Earth V to tell the very soil 
itself what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to. Nay, though 
what I have spoke should happen (which Thou suffer not who 
didst create mankind free, nor Thou next who didst redeem us 
from being servants of men !) to be the last words of our expiring 
liberty." 



CHAPTER X. 

FROM THE COMMONWEALTH TO THE REVOLUTION. 

CHARLES II. 

i. The second of the Four Periods into which, with reference 
to outward fashion only, English Literature is divided, was 
now passing away, and the third — the Period of French 
Influence— came in rapidly after the accession of Charles II. 
We should have felt it sooner if we had been less intent upon 
our own affairs during the Civil Wars and Commonwealth, for 
the foundations of it were laid while Charles I. was our king. 
The English Royalists who lived in France after the failure of 
the king's cause were there being educated in its fashions. 

Italian influence in France, blended as elsewhere with in- 
fluence of Spain, had produced forms answering to English 
Euphuism ; but they were of a lower kind, because there was 
not then in France, as in England, a time of special literary 
energy. There was a taste for long stories, blending the Spanish 



a.d. i66o.] PERIOD OF FRENCH INFLUENCE. 629 

chivalrous romance with the pastoral (ch. vi. § 39, 40), a more 
marked classicism, a delight in sounding phrases. In the time 
of our Elizabeth, Ronsard (b. 1524, d. 1585) was extending the 
use of the ten-syllabled line, rhymed in couplets, which became 
to the French what blank verse has become to us. Our poets 
were then experimenting, with various success, in the enrichment 
of the language with new words from Greek and Latin. Ronsard 
carried this far, tried Latin signs of comparison — docte, doctieuri 
doctinu — and made a verse of three of the words that he wished 
he might use — " ocymore, dyspotme, oligochronien." Malherbe 
(b. 1555, d. 1628) followed Ronsard with finer taste, and was, 
during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the most 
determined champion of the verbal purity of French. He was 
known as the tyrant of words and syllables. " This doctor in 
the vulgar tongue/' wrote his friend Balzac, " used to say that 
for so many years he had been trying to de-Gasconise the 
Court, and that he could not do it. Death surprised him when 
rounding a period." " An hour before his death," says his dis- 
ciple Racan, " Malherbe woke up with a start to correct his 
nurse for use of a word that was not good French ; and when 
his confessor reprimanded him for that, he said that he could 
not help himself, and that he would defend to the death the 
purity of the French language." We only understand, but 
Malherbe felt, the need of earnest critical attention to the 
unsettled language of his country as France rose in power. 
Deliberation in the choice of words made him a slow writer. 
He spent three years in the composition of an ode intended to 
console the President of Verdun for the loss of a wife. When 
the ode was finished, the president had consoled himself by 
marrying another. 

Sidney's Arcadia (ch. vii. § 44), which first blended the heroic 
with the pastoral in a long romance of adventure, had in Eng- 
land no direct imitators ; but in France books of this kind esta- 
blished themselves as the prose fiction of their day, and the best 
of them, as we have seen (ch. ix. § 20) were translated into English 
during the Civil Wars and Commonwealth. Their line began 
with the Astree of Honore d'Urfe (b.- 1567, d. 1625), first appear- 
ing in 1608, 10, 19, in three parts. His secretary, Baro, pub- 
lished the rest, completed in 1627. Our version appeared in 1657, 
as Astrea : A Romance written in Fretich, by Messere Honore' 
d'Urfe, and Translated by a Person of Quality. Its primitive 
Arcadia was placed in the valley of the Loire ; and its variety of 



630 A FIRS* SKETCH UP ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a. d. 1600 

excellent discourses and extraordinary sententiousness caused 
Richelieu to say that "He was not to be admitted into the 
Academy of Wit who had not been well read in \ Astrea.'" 

In the year 1600, Catherine de Vivonne de Pisani married, at 
the age of sixteen, the Marquis de Rambouillet, Grand Master 
of the Royal Wardrobe. In the polite society gathered about 
her at the Hotel Rambouillet ladies predominated; and they 
occupied themselves so much with the maintenance of a high 
standard of refinement in speech, that they and their imitators 
were called, in all gravity, and in their own fine phrase, Les 
Precieuses. French was unsettled. North and south of the 
Loire the difference of dialect was almost difference of language. 
The court dialect of Henry IV. and his Bearnois shocked all 
the polite Parisians; the king's oaths shocked the ladies. In 
those days polite people were reading the polite dialogue of 
" Astre'e," Malhcrbe was upholding purity of French, Vaugelas 
(b. 1585, d. 1650) was giving his mind to a refined study of the 
language, and the blossom-time ot French literature was not far 
distant. But of what use to have a literature where the language 
is unsettled, and a hundred years hence its changes will defeat 
an author's hope of outliving his body in his books ? The ladies 
of Paris began the movement of reform by exercising social 
influence; and the Marquise de Rambouillet, reinforced by four 
daughters, was still living at the accession of Charles II. Many 
English " persons of quality " in Paris during the Commonwealth 
would be among her guests. The doings of the Precieuses, 
though blended with weakness and affectation, had importance 
for the history of literature during the first thirty or forty years 
of the seventeenth century. Receiving company while on her bed, 
after a fashion of the time and the manner of the whole com- 
munity of the Precieuses, who followed in her steps — so giving- 
to fashion the phrase " courirles ruelles" — and in winter denying 
fire as perilous to the complexion of herself and of her delicate 
guests in chamber, corridor, or alcove, the Marquise de Ram- 
bouillet welcomed princes and wits at her weekly feasts of verbal 
criticism. Before her circle Pierre Corneille read his tragedies, 
and the youth Bossuet first displayed the genius of the preacher. 
Purity of speech was demanded of all who frequented the Hotel 
Rambouillet There was to be no unclean word, and much that 
was common it pleased the particular genius of the house to call 
unclean. The marchioness disdaining her own common name 
of Catherine, Malherbe tortured his wit and produced for her 



to. a.d. 1636.] THE PRECIEUSES. THE FRENCH ACADEMY. 63I 

instead of it Arthe'nice, its anagram. Vaugelas, the grammarian, 
ranked above princes at the Hotel Rambouillet. " If the word 
feliciter is not yet French/' wrote Balzac, " it will be so next 
year ; M. de Vaugelas has given me his word not to oppose it." 
Over-familiar words, if tolerated by the French at large, were 
replaced at the head-quarters of polite speech by delicately- 
conceited phrases. As the marchioness saw company in her 
night-cap, and the idea Night-cap might have to be expressed 
in conversation, while the word was too coarse for choice lips, 
its association with sleep and dreams suggested that it might 
be referred to as " the innocent accomplice of falsehood." 
Laughter was clownish, but if mentioned it might be described 
as loss of seriousness. Literature itself was not to be debased 
into a pleasure for the vulgar; it was not to be national, it was 
to be all polite. In 1629, gatherings allied to these became 
habitual at the house of Valentine Conrart, one of the king's 
secretaries, who had a turn for books ; and out of these meetings 
came Richelieu's suggestion that Conrart and his fellow- workers 
should proceed systematically, following a fashion common in 
Italy, but chiefly imitating the Academia della Crusca, founded 
in 1582, and rule over French, under royal letters-patent, as a 
French Academy, with forty members. The formation of this 
academy was completed in 1636. It was to meet once a week, 
to labour with all possible care and diligence to give fixed rules 
to the language, and to make it more eloquent and fitter for the 
treatment of the arts and sciences. It was to produce a 
dictionary. Only words in the dictionary of the Academy were 
to be esteemed good French. It was to produce also a grammar, 
a treatise on rhetoric, and a treatise of poetry, establishing its 
laws for the politest literature of all kinds. The great question 
of choice of words, and criticism about verse and prose, now 
occupied many minds; and as Regnier said of the critics of this 
school, all they did was to prose about rhyme and rhyme about 
prose. 

" S'ils font quelque cnose, 
C'est proser de la rime, et rimer de la prose." 

Poets were small and romancers long-winded. The diffuse 
pastoral romances dealt only with the love and heroism of royal 
personages. The chief writers of those romances, all born about 
the beginning of the seventeenth century, were Marin le Roy de 
Gomberville, who wrote " Polexandre," " Cytheree," and " La 
Jeune Alcidiane ; " Gautier de Costes Seigneur de la Calftrenede, 



632 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1636 

who wrote " Silvandre," "Cleopatre" (1656), "Cassandre" 
(1642), and " Pharamond" (1661). Each was in ten or twelve 
volumes, which came out by instalments, two at a time. A rich 
lady married. Calprenede, on condition that he would finish 
" Cleopatra," because there had been so long a pause that she 
feared she might go to her grave without having the last volume. 
Chief of the company of novelists was a lady, Magdeleine de 
Scudc'ri, six years younger and six times more clever than her 
prolific brother Georges, in whose name she published some of 
her stories. Georges himself wrote, says Boileau, a volume a 
month in defiance of good sense. Magdeleine, born in 1607, 
lived till 1 70 1, and was called, with classical elegance, the 
Sappho of her age, chiefly for her ten-volume romances, " Arta- 
mene; ou, le Grand Cyrus" (1650), " Clelie"(i66o), "Almahide; 
ou, l'Esclave Reine" (1660), &c. At the date of the accession of 
Charles II., French literature was about to pass out of this stage. 
The year 1660 was the year in which Boileau, then twenty- 
four years old, wrote his first satire. Nicolas Boileau Despreaux, 
born in 1636, at the same time as the French Academy, was the 
son of an actuary. His mother died in his infancy; he was a 
sickly boy, subject to an unfriendly nurse. At twenty he was an 
advocate unfit for the Bar, turning his mind to theology; but 
his place not being in the pulpit, he abandoned the Church, and 
not the Church only, but also a benefice of eight hundred livres 
that he had been persuaded to hold at least for a certain term 
of years. In laying it down, he gave to the poor all it had 
brought him. " But," said an abb£, who himself owned many 
benefices, " that was a good thing to live upon, M. Boileau." 
"Not a doubt of it," Boileau answered; "but to die upon, 
Monsieur PAbbe— to die upon ! " It was his honesty that gave 
permanent force to this man's genius. Resenting the degrada- 
tion of taste in his day, Boileau laughed at the public that could 
see a rival to Corneille in Georges Scuderi, and could read 
with delight dainty romance after the manner of the Precieuses, 
by ScudeVi's sister,* Magdeleine, whose "Almahide ; or, The Slave 
Queen," in eight volumes, appeared when the critic, a young 
man of four-and-twenty, was bent upon active war against all 
this emptiness that had usurped the place of honest wit. 
Chapelain, also, after thirty years' gestation, during which he was 
well nourished by the Due de Longueville, had brought to light, 
when Boileau was a youth of twenty with a lively sense of the 
dull and absurd, twelve cantos of his " Pucelle." u I will make 



■TOA.D.I660.] BOILEAU. MOLIERE. CORNEILLE. 633 

war against all this," said the young critic. It was urged upon 
him that he would bring a swarm of enemies about his ears. 
His answer was, " Well, I shall be an honest man, and never 
fear them." 

It had been in the time of our Commonwealth that Moliere 
produced, in 1653, the first of his now recognised plays, 
" L'Etourdi," at Lyons ; it was followed by " Le Depit Amour- 
eux," and by " Les Pre*cieuses Ridicules," in 1659. By this time 
the Precieuses had become ridiculous through weak provincial 
imitations of the ladies — eight hundred or more — who still dis- 
cussed polite language and literature in Paris. In 1660, Moliere's 
theatrical company, as the " Troupe de Monsieur," began to act 
in the hall of the Palais Royal ; and the rest of his plays were 
produced between 1660 and 1673, the year of his death. The 
elder Corneille was thirty-three years older than Racine ; the age 
of Pierre Corneille being fifty-four, and of Jean Racine twenty- 
one, at the date of the Restoration. Racine's first tragedy 
appeared in 1664. Moliere, about this time, when asked who 
were the chiefs of French literature, said, "Corneille and I. 
Racine is a 'bel esprit,' whom I have had great trouble in 
teaching to write verses." As for Corneille, before Moliere 
began he had already written twenty-one pieces and 40,000 
verses. 

Pierre Corneille (b. 1606, d. 1684) began with comedies, 
turned to tragedy, in 1635, with his "Medea;" and in 1636 this 
was followed, when he was thirty, by the " Cid;" over which the 
French Academy set up a controversy. The academy had its 
letters-patent registered a few months after the triumphant 
appearance of the " Cid." Georges de Scuderi, who had written 
a dozen bad plays, abused the " Cid," and appealed to the 
academy. Richelieu, founder and " protector " of the academy, 
disliked the " Cid," and his wish obtained from Corneille the 
author's assent, which had been made necessary by its rules, 
before the academy could pass official judgment upon any work. 
Then the academy appointed a committee, and in due time 
published its "sentiments," in the midst of a shower of ink 
from the small critical pens. Study of Lope de Vega and 
Calderon (ch. viii. § 7) influenced Corneille, and, through him 
and others, the French drama generally. Their direct and 
indirect influence is visible in the comedies of intrigue which 
became common on the English stage after the Restoration. 
The vapid criticism of the French Academy caused Corneille 



634 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1660 

to turn awhile from his work in disgust; but " Les Horaces" 
followed in 1639, and "Cinna" but a few months later, then 
" Polyeucte," &c. Corneille aimed at producing impressions of 
the heroic, and it was he who gave rise in this country to the 
Heroic Play that formed one feature in our literature under 
Charles II. At first there was a simple dignity in Corneille's 
tragedies ; but in his later pieces he sought more intricacy of 
plot. His plays became less simple in form, more declamatory 
and inflated. They were, in fact, the progenitors of the heroic 
plays of Dryden. His measure, alike in comedy and tragedy, was 
the rhyming couplet of ten-syllabled lines, which now became 
known, from its use in French tragedies, as the heroic couplet. 
So it is still called, though with us Chaucer had used it in his 
" Canterbury Tales" but as an easy form of narrative verse ; 
and Stephen Hawes evidently looked upon it as the measure for 
familiar and comic narrative (ch. vi. § 7). Corneille's heroic 
verses were establishing among French critics the measure of 
their serious drama. Italian criticism, soon to be surpassed in 
France, was still regarded as the best in Europe ; and in Italy, in 
1655, Cardinal Sforza Pallavicino published his " Erminigildo, ,; 
with a long prefatory discourse to recommend the use of rhyme 
in tragedy. Corneille had at that time ceased awhile to produce 
dramas. He said that his poetry was decaying with his teeth; 
and employed himself in writing his three Essays on Dramatic 
Poetry — one on the Dramatic Poem generally, one on Tragedy 
in particular, and one on The Three Unities. These essays were 
finished in 1659 ; and thus it was just at the time of the accession 
of Charles II. that the much talk of the Three Unities of Time, 
Place, and Action, was put into the mouths of critics. Though 
partly drawn from Aristotle and the practice of the Greek 
theatre, it was from Corneille that they took the form in which 
they became current. Aristotle dwelt much and rightly upon 
unity of the fable — that is, Unity of Action — in a tragedy. He 
said also, incidentally, that " tragedy endeavours, as far as 
possible, to confine its action within a single revolution of the 
sun, or nearly so" — that is Unity of Time. As to Unity of Place, 
Corneille owned that he could not find it required by a single 
precept either in Aristotle or in Horace. In 1659, Corneille 
returned to the stage again, with " CEdipe," and wrote seven or 
eight weak plays between 1660 and 1665. 

2. The English drama after the Restoration of the Stuarts, . 
in 1660, was marked strongly by this influence of France. 



toa.d. 1664.] THE DRAMA. DAVENANT. KILLIGREW. 635 

Sir William Davenant (ch. viii. § 36 ; ix. § 23), after his release 
from imprisonment, had evaded the interdict upon dramatic enter- 
tainments by opening Rutland House, Charterhouse Yard, on the 
21st of May, 1656, for what he called operas. Blending of music 
with dramatic action had its origin in Italy. An Italian drama 
with musical accompaniments had been represented at the 
Castle of St. Angelo, in 1480 ; but the first opera was performed 
at Venice, in 1634. Davenant, therefore, was following a new 
Italian fashion that had already found its way to France. At 
Rutland House, Davenant produced the first part of his Siege of 
Rhodes, with various scenery, each entry prepared by instru- 
mental music, with dialogue in recitative interspersed with songs 
and choruses; his attempt was that of the musician in his Play- 
Jwuse to Let, who says : 

" I would have introduced heroique story 
In stilo recitative" 

With the Restoration arose two patented dramatic com- 
panies, servants of the king and of his brother, the Duke of 
York. Sir William Davenant's company was that of the Duke 
of York's players, acting first at a theatre in Portugal Row, 
Lincoln's Inn Fields, and afterwards in Dorset Gardens. Thomas 
Betterton was the best actor in his company. The king's players 
acted at the Cockpit until they were ready, in April, 1663, with a 
new Theatre Royal, on the site of the present house in Drury 
Lane. Their chief was Thomas Killigrew (b. 161 1, d. 1684), 
son of Sir Robert Killigrew, of Hanworth, near Hampton Court, 
chamberlain to Queen Henrietta Maria. Thomas Killigrew had 
been page of honour to Charles I., and had married a maid of 
honour. He was witty and profligate, amused Charles II., who 
made him Groom of the Bedchamber, and was one of the king's 
familiar companions. Killigrew published, in 1664, nine Plays, 
and thought it worth noting that he had written them in nine 
different cities — London, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Turin, Florence, 
Venice, Naples, and Basle. KiLigrevv, then, was manager of 
the king's company ; and Davenant, formally appointed Poet 
Laureate, manager of the duke's. A clause in his patent said 
that, "Whereas the women's parts in plays have hitherto been 
acted by men in the habits of women, at which some have taken 
offence, we do permit and give leave for the time to come that all 
women's parts be acted by women on the stage." The actress's 
profession, therefore, became established at the Restoration, and 



636 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. r A .D. 1661. 

women acted at both houses. Actresses began to appear in 
the time of Charles I. In the Court Beggar, a comedy by Ben 
Jonson's old servant, Richard Brome, acted in 1632, although not 
printed till 1653, Lady Strangelove says, "The boy's a pretty 
actor, and his mother can play her part. The women now are 
in great request." Changes of scenery, also, which had been 
introduced by Davenant under the Commonwealth, became at 
the Restoration an established custom in both theatres. In 1661, 
Davenant revised his Siege 0} Rhodes, and produced the second 
part, still including music and variety of measures, but using the 
rhymed couplet as the staple of heroic dialogue. It was the 
first English play of its time that did so. Davenant had, in 
his former plays, written what had come to be taken for blank 
verse ; but its degeneration had been rapid (ch. viii. § 34), and 
blank verse in Davenant yielded such lines as these : 

" How did the governours of the 
Severe house, digest th' employment my 
Request did lay upon their gravities?" 

3. John Dry den (ch. ix. § 24) was among those who wel- 
comed the new order of things, and his Astraa Redux, in honour 
of the Restoration, was published at once by Henry Herring- 
man. Although this poem follows in Dryden's works the heroic 
stanzas on the Death of Cromwell, it must be remembered that 
there was an interval of eighteen months between their dates — 
months busy with events that would be strong argument to a 
mind like Dryden's against the political faith in which he had 
been bred. Until the death of Cromwell, nothing occurred to 
change the course of family opinion which Dryden had inherited 
and drew from those about him ; but the disposition of his 
mind placed him among those whose nature it is to seek 
peace by the upholding of authority. The experience of the 
last eighteen months of the Commonwealth made him no 
mere flatterer of Monarchy, but, throughout the reign of 
Charles II., the most active supporter of its claim to the 
obedience of all. In religion, the same tendency of mind led 
him at last to find peace in reliance upon the supreme authority 
of Rome. He left opinions in which he had been bred for those 
to which he had been born, and never swerved from them. 
Maintenance of one central authority was the principle on which 
philosophers, statesmen, poets, and a large part of the common 
crowd of men based a consistent view of what was best for the 
well-being of society. The men who laid chief stress wpon 



a.d. i66i.] JOHN DRYDEN. SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. 637 

the freedom of each to think and speak and act up to his 
own high sense of right, untrammelled by laws that could serve 
only to check individual development, had Milton for their chief; 
and though in apparent disrepute under Charles II., they were 
still the moving power in the country. But in the continual re- 
adjustment of the limit of authority made necessary by increasing 
power of thought in the many, the progress of England has been 
assured equally by the men of both parties, by the action and 
reaction on each other of these two natural types of opinion. 
There would be little use in a watch all spring and no cog-wheel, 
or all cog-wheel and no spring. Wider and deeper education of 
the people will some day make freedom in diversity produce a 
nobler harmony than was conceived by those who, in the time of 
a low general culture, saw hope of peace only in general sub- 
mission of all wills to one. 

4. In the Siege of Rhodes, Davenant held by the extension 
of that theory of Hobbes's to contending nations as well as to 
contending men of the same country, which he had made the 
ground of Gondibert's ambition to subdue the world. His life 
was too much given to low pleasures, and he was called upon to 
entertain the frivolous. If Davenant could have felt with 
Milton that he who would excel in poetry should be himself a 
poem, his genius had wings to bear him higher than he ever 
reached. Among the musical love-passions of the Siege oj 
Rhodes, he was still aiming at some embodiment of his thought 
that the nations of Christendom fail in their work for want of 
unity. They let the Turks occupy Rhodes because they could 
not join for succour. In his dedication of the published play to 
the Earl of Clarendon, Davenant (referring with honour to " the 
great images represented in tragedy by Monsieur Corneille") 
says : " In this poem I have revived the remembrance of that 
desolation which was permitted by Christian princes, when they 
favoured the ambition of such as defended the diversity of 
religions (begot by the factions of learning) in Germany ; whilst 
those who would never admit learning into their empire (lest it 
should meddle with religion, and intangle it with controversie) 
did make Rhodes defenceless ; which was the only fortified 
academy in Christendom where divinity and arms were equally 
professed." 

5. Opposite opinions were in conflict then in England ; such 
conflict, whenever it occurs, breeds thought in men ; and those 
who in quiet times would have thought with their fathers, often 



638 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1661 

changed their faith and were zealous in the new cause, as con- 
verts are apt to be, because of the strength of fresh conviction. 
Dryden, in artificial strain, but not essentially dishonest, wrote 
his Astrcza Redux in 1660; and in "661 addressed a panegyric 
To his Sacred Majesty, on his coronation, and New Year's-day 
verses, in 1662, To my Lord Chanctllor, Lord Clarendon. 

John Dryden's first comedy, in prose — The Wild Gallant, 
produced in February, 1663, by the king's company — was a 
failure. He had no aptitude for the licentious light comedy now 
in favour ; but "The Wild Gallant" was followed, at the same 
theatre, before the end of the year, by a tragi-comedy,7#<? Rival 
Ladies, which brought into play some of his higher powers, and 
was a success. Dryden was at the same time working with 
Sir Robert Howard at his play of The Indian Queen, which 
was produced at the king's theatre, with rich scenery and dresses, 
in January, 1664. Sir Robert Howard, born in 1626, was the 
youngest son of the Earl of Berkshire. He had been educated 
at Magdalene College, Oxford, was now member for Stock- 
bridge, and had shown his literary tastes by publishing, in 
1660, A Panegyrick to the King; Songs and Sonnets; the 
Blind Lady, a Cotnedy ; The Fourth Book of Virgil; Statins 
his Achillcis, with Annotations ; and A Panegyrick to General 
Monk. Very complimentary lines by Dryden were prefixed 
to that volume. Sir Robert Howard, who was now one of 
the better dramatists of the time, must not be confounded 
with his contemporary, the Hon. Edward Howard, who 
wrote worse plays, whose poem of Bonduca, the British Princess 
'1669), became a jest of the wits, and whose verse the Earl 
of Dorset called the " solid nonsense that abides all tests/' 
A friendship had been established between John Dryden 
and Sir Robert Howard. Dryden went with his friend to 
the Earl of Berkshire's house at Charlton, in Wiltshire, worked 
with him at The Indian Queen, and won his sister Elizabeth for 
wife. They were married in December, 1663, and The Indian 
Queen, all written in heroic couplets, was produced in the 
following month. Dryden's Rival Ladies had been written in 
blank verse, with some passages of heroic couplet. In the 
dedication of the published play (1669) to Roger Boyle, Earl of 
Orrery, Dryden discussed his reasons for this. Roger Boyle 
(ch. ix. § 20), since we last met with him, was secretly helping 
Charles under the Commonwealth, till Cromwell called upon 
him. showed him intercepted letters, and invited him to choose 



ruA.D. 1004. J JOHN DRYDEN. SIR ROBERT HOWARD. 639 

between prosecution and fidelity to the Republic. Boyle changed 
his party, and gave Cromwell the aid of his large Irish influence. 
In those days he began Part/ienissa, which was in six volumes, 
the sixth volume not appearing until 1676. After the death of 
Cromwell, Roger Boyle worked for the Restoration. Charles II. 
made him Earl of Orrery and Lord Justice of Ireland. In his 
dedication of his Rival Ladies to this Earl of Orrery, Dryden 
started an argument upon the comparative merits of rhyme and 
blank verse in plays. The argument is interesting for the 
evidence it gives of the depths into which blank verse had fallen 
while Milton was using it for the measure of his " Paradise Lost." 
It should be remembered that, with insignificant exception 
(ch. vii. § 29), blank verse had never been used in our literature 
as the measure of a great narrative poem. On both sides of the 
controversy it was being taken for granted that the measure was 
too mean for that ; the question was only whether its resem- 
blance to common prose did not make it proper for the dialogue 
of plays. Dryden, following Corneille, though he repudiated a 
French influence, now began to argue that the dignity of tragedy 
demanded rhyme. This was not, he said, a new way so much as 
an old way revived ; " for many years before Shakespeare's plays 
was the tragedy of 'Queen Gorboduc' in English verse." Gor- 
boduc (ch. vii. § 8) was a king, not a queen ; and the play was in 
blank verse, not in rhyme, as Dryden supposed. But supposing, 
he went on, the way were new, " Shall we oppose ourselves to 
the most polished and civilized nations of Europe?" All the 
Spanish and Italian tragedies he had seen were in rhyme (but 
see ch. vi. § 41) ; for the French, he would not name them, 
because we admitted little from them but " the basest of their 
men, the extravagance of their fashions, and the frippery of their 
merchandize." Shakespeare, "to shun the pains of continual 
rhyming, invented that kind of rhyming which we call blank 
verse (but see ch. vi. § 47), but the French more properly prose 
mesure'e" Rhyme leads to inversions, but not in a skilful writer, 
and if they be avoided it has all the advantages of prose besides 
its own. " But the excellence and dignity of it were never fully 
known till Mr. Waller taught it ; he first made writing easily 
an art : first shew'd us to conclude the sense most commonly 
in distichs, which in the verse of those before him runs on 
for so many lines together that the reader is out of breath 
to overtake it." 

6. Edmund Waller (ch. viii. § 42) was then living; he 



64O A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1C63 

died in 1687, aged eighty-two, and he showed his superiority 
to predecessors by writing a new fifth act to Beaumont and 
Fletcher's Maid's Tragedy (ch. viii. § 6). That play was inter- 
dicted under Charles II., because it was personal to His Majesty 
in the suggestion that 

" On lustful kings 
Unlooked-for sudden deaths from heaven are sent." 

Waller reconciled it to the new morality by a new fifth act, 
in which the wronged Melantius is overpowered by the con- 
descension of the lustful king, who offers him " satisfaction " in 
a duel : 

" The royal sword thus drawn, has cur'd a wound 
For which no other salve csuld have been found. 
Your brothers now in arms ourselves we boast, 
A satisfaction for a sister lost. 
The blood of kings exposed, washes a stain 
Cleaner than thousands of the vulgar slain." 

And the stern condemnation of the original play was ingeniously 
conjured into 

" Long may he reign that is so far above 
All vice, all passion but excess of love !" 

7. Such were Mr: Waller's couplets with the sense con- 
cluded in distichs ; and Dryden was here one of the first to 
show that ignorance of our literature before the Commonwealth 
which characterized the English critics of the French school. 
Out of this ignorance arose false estimates which have passed 
from book to book, and would lead the unwary to suppose that 
the art of writing good English in all its forms was discovered 
by men who were alive to flatter one another in the reign of 
Charles II. Dryden went on : " The sweetness of Mr. Waller's 
lyric poesie was afterwards followed in the epic by Sir John 
Denham, in his ' Cooper's Hill' (ch. viii. § 46) ; a poem which 
your lordship knows, for the majesty of the style is, and ever will 
be, the exact standard of good writing." Sir John Denham, 
who died in 1668, was also alive to be praised, and pleased no 
doubt to hear his good meditations on the view from Cooper's 
Hill described as an epic poem. It was Davenant's turn next. 
" But if we owe the invention of it " (z. e. the right use of rhyme) 
" to Mr. Waller, we are acknowledging for the noblest use of it 
to Sir William Davenant, who at once brought it upon the 
stage and made it perfect in the ' Siege of Rhodes.' " Dryden 
then specified these advantages of rhyme over blank verse — (1) 
aid to memory ; (2) sweetness of rhyme adding grace to the 



to a.d. 1665.] RHYME v. BLANK VERSE. 64 1 

smartness of a repartee ; and (3) that it bounds and circum- 
scribes the fancy which, without it, tends to outrun judgment. 
In 1665, Dryden produced with success a play of his own, The 
Indian Emperor, a sequel to " The Indian Queen," but it was 
not published until 1667. In the same year, 1665, the Plague 
in London closed the theatres. Dryden's brother-in-law, Sir 
Robert Howard, publishing in 1665, as Four New Plays, 
his comedies of The Surprisal and The Committee, and his 
tragedies, The Indian Queen and The Vestal Virgin, put into 
his preface the chief points of his private argument with Dryden 
on behalf of blank verse in the drama. " Another way," he 
says, " of the ancients, which the French follow and our stage 
has now lately practised, is to write in rhyme ; and this is the 
dispute betwixt many ingenious persons, whether verse in rhyme 
or verse without the sound, which may be called blank verse 
(though a hard expression), is to be preferred?" He held both 
proper, " one for a play, the other for a poem or copy of verses ; 
a blank verse being as much too low for one as rhyme is un- 
natural for the other : a poem being a premeditated form of 
thought upon design'd occasions, ought not to be unfurnish'd of 
any harmony in words or sound : the other is presented as the 
effect of accidents not thought of." He argued that rhyme in 
a repartee, which should have its charm in sudden thought, 
makes it " rather look like the design of two than the answer of 
one." As to the checking of luxuriant fancy, he said, " he that 
wants judgment in the liberty of his fancy may as well show the 
defect of it in its confinement." He argued that great thoughts 
are not " more adorned by verse than verse unbeautified by 
mean ones, so that verse seems not only unfit in the best use of 
it, but much more in the worse, as when a servant is called or a 
door bid to be shut in rhyme. It is true Lord Orrery's plays 
in verse" — his History of Henry V, Mustapha, Black Prince, and 
T?yphon were published in 1669 — "are all majesty and ease, 
meeting every conceivable objection ; this does not convince 
my reason, but employ my wonder." Let us share wonder at the 
verse of Roger Boyle, " all majesty and ease." Mustapha, son 
of Solyman the Magnificent, addresses the Queen of Hungary, 
whom he loves : 

" This visit without leave may rude appear : 
Yet, Madam, when you shall vouchsafe to know 
That I to-morrow must tow'rds Syria go, 
The opinion of my rudeness you'l re-call : 
I must attend you now or not at all." 

P P 



642 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1660 

Thus it was that French example set our writers prosing 
about rhyme, and this dignified style replaced the verse of 
Shakespeare, which had sunk so low in polite estimation. Yet 
in these days Milton, never to be understood by France, was 
attuning his divine song to the measure which was not held, 
even by the chief advocate for its use in tragedy, to be dignified 
enough for li a paper of verses." For Milton was 

Unchanged 
" To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil da--.s, 
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues ; 
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, 
And solitude ; yet not alone, while thou 
Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when morn 
Purples the east : still govern thou my song, 
Urania, and fit audience find, though few." 

8. Jolm Milton (ch. viii. § 30, 51—55, 60, 62, 63, 65, 69; 
ch. ix. § 2 — 8, 25) at the Restoration withdrew from danger to a 
friend's house in Bartholomew Close, while his prosecution was 
voted by the Commons, and his " Iconoclastes" and " Defence 
of the People of England" were ordered to be burnt by the 
hangman. His friend, Andrew Marvell, was member for Hull; 
but Anthony a Wood says that Davenant now returned an old 
obligation (ch. ix. § 23), and saved Milton from being placed 
among the exceptions to the Act of Oblivion passed on the 29th 
of August. Milton was nevertheless arrested, but his release was 
ordered by the House of Commons on the 15th of December, 
and he appealed against the excessive fees charged for his 
imprisonment. For about a year he lived in Holborn, near 
Red Lion Square. In 1662 he was in Jewin Street, whence he 
removed to a small house in Artillery Walk, by Bunhill Fields, 
his home for the rest of his life. Robert Boyle's sister, Lady 
Ranelagh (ch. viii. § 64 ; ch. ix. § 18), was a kind and active friend, 
but his daughters were growing up in the home of a blind father 
without a mother's care, and he, too, needed domestic aid and 
comfort. In Jewin Street, by the advice of Dr. Paget, his phy- 
sician, Milton again married. He was then fifty-four years old, 
and his third wife was a distant relation of the doctor's — Eliza- 
beth, daughter of Sir Edward Minshull, of Cheshire. Her age 
must have been little more than twenty. She devoted herself to 
her husband ; but the addition of a young wife into the house- 
hold did not benefit the daughters. In 1662, Milton's eldest 
daughter, Anne, was sixteen ; his second daughter, Mary, was 
fifteen ; and Deborah, his youngest, ten. Milton's home life was 



toa.d. 1665.] JOHN MILTON. 643 

simple. He rose at four in summer, five in winter, heard a 
chapter of the Hebrew Bible, and was left till seven in medita- 
tion. After breakfast he listened to reading and dictated till 
noon. From twelve to one he walked, or took exercise in a 
swing. At one he dined ; then until six he was occupied with 
music, books, and composition. From six to eight he gave to 
social chat with friends who came to visit him. His youngest' 
daughter, Deborah, said of Milton, many years after his death, 
u that he was delightful company ; the life of the conversation, 
not only on account of his flow of subject, but of his unaffected 
cheerfulness and civility." At eight Milton supped, then smoked 
a pipe, and went to bed at nine. 

One of those who read to him was a young Quaker, Thomas 
Ellwo.od. The History of the Life of Thomas Ell-wood . . . 
Written by his Own Hand, is a most interesting record of the 
persecution suffered by the Quakers (ch. ix. § 16) in the reign of 
Charles II. His troubles had been chiefly at home in Oxford- 
shire, when his desire to improve himself in knowledge urged on 
his friend, Isaac Pennington, of Chalfont, caused Ellwood to 
come to London. His "friend had an intimate acquaintance 
with Dr. Paget, a physician of note in London, and he with John 
Milton, a gentleman of great note for learning throughout the 
learned world, for the accurate pieces he had written on various 
subjects and occasions. This person having filled a public 
station in the former times, lived now a private and retired life 
in London, and having wholly lost his sight, kept always a man 
to read to him, which usually was the son of some gentleman of 
his acquaintance, whom, in kindness, he took to improve in his 
learning." Ellwood, when twenty-three years old, obtained in 
1662, through Dr. Paget, the liberty of coming to Milton's house 
" when I would, and to read to him what books" he should ap- 
point me, which was all the favour I desired." Ellwood tells of 
his courteous reception ; of Milton's teaching him the foreign 
pronunciation of Latin ; and how Milton, " perceiving with what 
earnest desire I pursued learning, gave me not only all the en- 
couragement but all the help he could. For, having a curious 
ear, he understood by my tone when I understood what I read, 
and when I did not ; and accordingly would stop me, examine 
me, and open the most difficult passages." 

9. In 1665, London was desolated by the plague, and most 
people who were able to escape from it into the country did so. 
Young Thomas Ellwood, at Milton's request, took a small house 

P P 2 



644 A FIRST SKETCH Oh ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a. u. 1665 

for him in ChalFont St. Giles. When Milton came to it Ell wood 
was in Aylesbury Prison, under a new and severe law, made 
specially against the meeting of Quakers for worship. " But 
now," he wrote, "being released and returned home, I soon 
made a visit to him to welcome him into the country. After 
some common discourses had passed between us, he called for a 
manuscript of his, which, being brought, he delivered to me, 
bidding* me take it home with me and read it at my leisure, 
and when 1 had so done return it to him with my judgment 
thereupon. When I came home, and had set myself to read it r 
I found it was that excellent poem which he entitled Paradise 
Lost. After 1 had, with the best attention, read it through, I 
made him another visit, and returned him his book, with due 
acknowledgment of the favour he had done me in communi- 
cating it to me. He asked me how I liked it, and what I thought 
of it, which i modestly but freely told him ; and, after some 
further discourse about it, I pleasantly said to him, ' Thou hast 
said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of 
Paradise Found ?' He made me no answer, but sat some time 
in a muse ; then brake oft that discourse, and fell upon another 
subject. After the sickness was over, and the city well cleansed 
and become safely habitable again, he returned thither. And 
when afterwards I went to wait on him there (which I seldom 
failed of doing whenever my occasions drew me to London), he 
showed me his second poem, called Paradise Regained, and in 
a pleasant tone said to me, ' This is owing to you ; for you put 
it into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont, 
which before I had not thought of.'" It is still the same John 
Milton, sociable and kindly to the last. Ellwood's question was 
not a very wise one, because Milton's first poem did include 
what he had to say about Paradise Found. But Milton had 
tried its effect on a simple, pious mind, and Ellwood's question 
indicated to him that the average mind of a religious English- 
man wanted yet more emphasis laid on the place of Christ in his 
religious system. His fit audience, though few, was of men who 
would put their souls into the reading of his poem. Ellwood, he 
knew, had no skill as a critic ; what he would bring to his 
reading would be a religious mood. It was this which had 
prompted the question, indicating that in him there was yet a 
religious want unsatisfied. Milton resolved to make his purpose 
sure, and wrote the second poem. Paradise Lost, then, was 
finished before the end of 1665 ; and Paradise Regained probably 



to a.d. 1667.] MILTON'S PARADISE LOST. 645 

was written before April 27, 1667, the date of Milton's agree- 
ment with Samuel Simmons to sell him the copyright of 
•"Paradise Lost" for £$, with conditional payment of another 
£$ when 1,300 copies had been sold, and of another £5 after 
the sale of 1,300 copies of the second edition, and of the third 
— each edition to be of not more than 1,500. Milton received 
altogether in his lifetime £10 for Paradise Lost; and his widow 
received £& for her remaining interest in the copyright. The 
poem, divided at first into ten books, was well printed in a little 
quarto volume, price three shillings. It was without preface or 
note of any kind, and had no " Arguments " before the books. 
It was simply Paradise Lost : a Poem written in Ten Books by 
John Milton, and published in 1667/ It had to be licensed. 
Cromwell had got rid of the licenser, but he was now revived, 
and the Rev. Thomas Tomkyns, chaplain to the Archbishop of 
Canterbury, suspected a political allusion in the lines 

" As when the sun, new risen, 
Looks through the horizontal misty air, 
Shorn of his beams ; or, from behind the moon, 
In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds 
On half the nations, and with fear of change 
Perplexes monarchs." 

This perplexed Tomkyns ; but the difficulty was overcome, and 
Milton, the stronger as a poet for the years of waiting while he 
■did day labour in the service of his country, gave to his country- 
men the poem to which he had aspired when in his youth he 
nursed his wings at Horton, and whispered his dream of 
immortality into the ears of his friend Diodati (ch. viii. § 54). The 
subject chosen was the worthiest he had been able to conceive. 
He would enshrine in his work the religion of his country. 
Opening with invocation of the Holy Spirit, he made it his 
labour to 

" Assert Eternal Providence, 
And justify the ways of God to men." 

Dryden was among the visitors of the companionable poet in 
his later years; and in the preface to his u Fables/' Dryden 
wrote : " Milton is the poetical son of Spenser. Milton has 
confessed to me that Spenser was his original. 5 ' Spenser and 
Milton, indeed, have a distinct relation to each other as 
combatants on the same side in the same battle at two 
different points. Each, with his own marked individuality, 
expressed also, as a representative Englishman, the life of his 
own time. Different as their two great poems are in form and 



646 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1667. 

structure, there is likeness in the difference ; for the Faei'ie 
Queene, in which all qualities of mind and soul are striving 
heavenward, was a religious allegory on the ways of men to 
God. " Paradise Lost * was designed to approach the national 
religion from the other side, and show the relation, justify the 
ways, of God to men. Milton furnished his epic with sublime 
machinery, after the manner of Homer and Virgil, by taking 
from the fathers of the Church the doctrine of angels and arch- 
angels, and the story of the fall of Lucifer, which had from old 
time been associated with the Scripture narrative (ch. iv. § 5), 
The legend of Lucifer originated in a cry of the prophet against 
Babylon (Isa. xiv. 12 — 15) : — " How art thou fallen from heaven, 
O Lucifer, son of the morning ! how art thou cast down to the 
ground, which didst weaken the nations ! For thou hast said 
in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne 
above the stars of God : I will sit also upon the mount of the 
congregation, in the sides of the north : I will ascend above the 
heights of the clouds ; I will be like the most High. Yet thou 
shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit." From 
the time of St. Jerome downward, this symbolical representa- 
tion of the King of Babylon in his splendour and his fall has 
been applied to Satan in his fall from heaven, probably because 
Babylon is in Scripture a type of tyrannical self-idolizing power, 
and is connected in the book of Revelation with the empire of 
the evil one. The use of this machinery, and that of the arch- 
angels, enabled Milton to place Adam on earth between the 
powers of heaven and hell, and represent the contest vividly 
to the imagination. To represent the unseen by new combina- 
tions of the seen was inevitable. It is simply impossible to 
describe that of which no man has ever had experience on earth. 
Therefore Raphael tells Adam — 

" What surmounts the reach 
Of human sense, I shall delineate so 
By likening spiritual to corporal forms 
As may express them best ; though what if earth 
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein 
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?" 

Milton's poetry shows deep traces of his study of Plato ; and this 
last question enables the mind of the reader to pass from ad- 
mission that new combinations of the known must represent 
the unknown, through philosophic thought, into a livelier 
acceptance of the narrative so prefaced. 

The poem, as we now have it in twelve books, falls naturally 



A.D. 1667.] MILTON'S PARADISE LOST. 5^7 

into three equal parts. We begin in the midst of the story. In 
the first four books Heaven, Earth, and Hell are opened to the 
imagination, and man is placed at his creation between the con- 
tending powers of good and evil. The next four books (v. — 
viii.) contain Raphael's narrative of the Past, through which 
we learn the events that concerned man before Adam was 
created. In the last four books we have the Fall and its conse- 
quence, with Michael's vision of the Future. This includes 
the Redemption of Man, and the whole dealing of God with him 
through Christ. 

" Now amplier known, thy Saviour and thy Lord : 
Last, in the clouds, from heaven to be reveal'd 
In glory of the Father, to dissolve 
Satan with his perverted world ; then raise 
From the conflagrant mass, purged and refined, 
New heavens, new earth, ages of endless date, 
Founded in righteousness, and peace, and love ; 
To bring forth fruits, joy and eternal bliss." 

Paradise Lost is not to be judged prosaically by the standard of 
each reader's personal opinion on points of faith. It is the religion 
of its time, intensely biblical, and deals only with great features 
of national theology. Milton's chief argument for Divine justice 
is in answer to the questions, "Why was man permitted to fall ?" 
and, " Man having fallen, how has God dealt with him ?" The 
answer to the first question came from Milton's soul : God 
made man free. He made a wrong use of his freedom ; but had 
he been formed capable only of choosing one of two alternatives, 
he would have had no choice, no liberty, no use of reason. The 
spirit of Milton's answer to the second question is expressed in 
the words of Adam : 

" O goodness infinite, goodness immense ! 
That all this good of evil shall produce, 
And evil turn to good ; more wonderful 
Than that which by creation first brought forth 
Light out of darkness ! Full of doubt I stand, 
Whether I should repent me now of sin 
By me done and occasion'd ; or rejoice 
Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring ; 
To God more glory, more good-wi 1 to men 
From God, and over wrath Graces all abound." 

Not unwilling to dwell on this theme, Milton, in the four 
books of Paradise Regained, represented in another form the 
contest of Christ with the Power of Evil, by taking for his 
subject the Temptation in the Wilderness. But this is no 
sequel to " Paradise Lost," which, including the whole reach 



648 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1667. 

of time, began and ended in infinity. The reader whose form 
of religion is not Milton's may find its spirit at the heart of 
" Paradise Lost" in the predominant conviction that God is 
supreme in Wisdom and Beneficence, and the resolve to draw 
for himself and his countrymen this truth of truths out of the 
national theology. Paradise Lost repays long and close study 
of the distribution of its parts, the subtle skill of its transitions, 
the blending" of sweet echoes from the noblest wisdom of the 
past with the fresh thought of a poet who can approach the 
Mount of God, hymning His praise, can make the hollow deep 
resound with bold defiance of Omnipotence, can sing with 
tender grace of Eve in Paradise, and out of his own innocence 
can speak her purity. Milton's precision in the use of words, 
conspicuous in his early poems, fills "Paradise Lost" with subtle 
delicacies of expression. Thus, when it is asked in hell who 
shall cross the dark unbottom'd infinite abyss to the new world. 

" Upborne with indefatigable wings 
Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive 
The happy isle ; " 

familiar as we are with books in which we had better not look 
at each word with all our understanding, we may not stay to 
observe that " arrive " strictly means " come to the shores of." 
So Chaucer said of his Knight : 

" In the greete see 
At many a noble arrive hadde he be." 

Among passages in " Paradise Lost" interesting for their re- 
lation to the life and times of Milton are the reference to his 
blindness in the opening of Bk. III., 11. 1 — 54, the reference to 
hirelings in Bk. IV., 11. 183—193, and the opening of Bk. VII., 
11. 1—39. 

10. John Dry den (§ 7) also left London during the plague. 
He went to the house of his father-in-law, at Charlton, and there 
still discussed rhyme and blank verse with Sir Robert Howard. 
Dryden's eldest son was born at Charlton, in 1665 or 1666, for 
he remained there in 1666, the year of the Fire of London 
and of a great sea-fight with the Dutch. Both these events he 
celebrated in a poem, " Annus Mirabilis," the wonderful year ; 
and his reply to his brother-in-law in discussion of the question 
of blank verse, also written at Charlton, formed part of his 
" Essay of Dramatic Poesy." 

Dryden's Annus Mirabilis adopted the name of a Puritan 
"book published in 1661, " Mirabilis Annus ; or, the Year of Pro- 



JLD. %66 7 .] DRYDEN'S ANNUS MIRABILIS. 649 

digies and Wonders," &c, with texts on its title-page pointed 
directly against Charles and his court, and in its substance a 
marvellous collection of " Prodigies Seen in the Heavens " and 
" Strange Accidents and Judgments befalling Divers Persons" 
during the first year of the Restoration. The design of the book 
was to comfort the faithful with this warning to the rout of un- 
godly and profane men. " Let especially the oppressors and 
persecutors of the true Church look to themselves, when the 
hand of the Lord in strange signs and wonders is lifted up 
among them ; for then let them know assuredly that the day of 
their calamity is at hand, and the things which shall come upon 
them make haste. The totall and finall overthrow of Pharaoh 
and the ^Egiptians (those cruell task -masters and oppressors of 
the Israelites) did bear date not long after the wonderfull and 
prodigious signes which the Lord had shown in the mid'st of 
them." Dryden's "Annus Mirabilis" was a shot from the other 
side. It was treated by him as a year that brought honour and 
strength to the king. The Dutch War, one of its themes, began 
with a quarrel between traders. In 1664, James, Duke of York, 
was governor of the African Company, which had been esta- 
blished by charter to import gold-dust from Guinea, and slaves 
for the West Indian planters. The Dutch traders had, during 
the Civil War, erected forts along the coast ; hence rivalry. 
The African Company, seconded by the East India Company, 
complained to Parliament. James advocated their cause, and 
urged that now, while seamen who had been with Blake were 
to be had, was the right time for war. Charles opposed. The 
merchants complained that the Dutch had not executed the 
terms of the treaty of April, 1653, with the Commonwealth; 
that they molested the African coast by inciting natives to 
destroy English factories, and established fictitious wars for the 
sake of excluding English trade by blockades of the most fre- 
quented ports, whereby there was a loss of ,£700,000 to English 
merchants, besides four million lost by their not giving up Rou, 
a small island in the Indian seas. Then Parliament addressed 
the king, petitioning for- redress, and promising to stand by 
him. Charles assented. De Witt ruled Holland at the head of 
the Louvestein faction, which had despised Charles in his exile. 
Meanwhile the African Company had sent Sir Robert Holmes 
with a few small ships of war to recover Cape Coast Castle that 
the Dutch had taken. He found in a Dutch vessel papers that 
induced him to exceed his commission. In February, 1664, he 



650 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1665 

reduced Cape Coast Castle, destroyed Dutch factories, took the 
forts on Goree, then crossed the Atlantic to New Amsterdam, 
lately recovered to England by Sir R. Nicolas, and named, in 
honour of his patron the duke, New York. This action brought 
on the war, and gave to Holmes his character in Dryden's 
poem as " Holmes, the Achates of the Generals' fight." The 
allusion is to three lines in the ^Eneid (Bk. I., 11. 174 — 6), which 
tell that when the tempest-tost ^Eneadae had landed on the 
Libyan coast, Achates lighted a fire, and from a little spark 
made a great flame. 

" And first from flints together clash'd 
The latent spark Achates flash'd, 
Caught in sere leaves and deftly nursed 
Till into flame the fuel burst." 

Conington's Translation. 

So the single act of Sir Robert Holmes spread into a general 
war. The Dutch ambassadors remonstrated. The king said that 
the expedition had been sent by private authority of the African 
Company ; that Holmes should be tried when he came back r 
and justice done. By order of De Witt, De Ruyter, who was 
cruising with Sir John Lawson in the Mediterranean against 
Turkish pirates, separated on the plea that he had orders to 
attack a squadron of pirates in the Canaries, and made reprisals 
on the English along the coast of Guinea; then crossed to the 
West Indies, and captured above twenty sail of merchantmen. 
Lawson, without instructions, took indemnity by sweeping 130 
Dutch traders into English ports, and holding them there, 
Charles now counted cost. A war was estimated at two millions 
and a half, but the people were ready, and Sir R. Paston, a 
country gentleman, moved for the vote. A known dependent of 
the Ministers met the motion with a feigned proposal for a smaller 
sum. He was eagerly interrupted by two members supposed to 
be independent, and the vote was obtained by a majority of 
seventy. The Lords assented, and in February, 1665, Charles 
declared war. Until this time the clergy had taxed themselves 
in Convocation. Their right was now waived, though saved by 
a proviso in the Act. The precedent was stronger than the 
saving clause, and thus the vote for a Dutch war gave a death- 
blow to the power of the clergy in Convocation. James, Duke 
of York, sailed in the Royal Charles, with a fleet in three 
squadrons, and gained a victory over Opdam, on the 3rd of 
June, 1665, off the coast of Suffolk. The Dutch admiral was 
blown up with his flag-ship. 



toa.d. 1667.] DRYDEN. CHARLES SACKVILLE 65 * 

11. It was on the eve of this deadly encounter that Charles 
Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, afterwards Earl of Dorset 
(b. 1637, d. 1706), produced his Song written at Sea, in the First 
Dutch War, 1665, the Night before an Engagement. Charle 
Sackville, in these days, was a licentious wit of the court ; but 
he had taste, and came into much honour among patrons of 
literature. His song before the battle has always passed as his 
best piece, and it represents him with no thought but of court 
gallantry to the ladies, on the eve of a conflict that would scatter 
death around him : 

" To pass our tedious hours away 

We throw a merry main ; 
Or else at serious ombre play ; 

But why should we in vain 
Each other's ruin thus pursue ? 
We were undone when we left you. 

With a fa la, la, la, la." 

It does not follow that the writer had no serious thought when 
he wrote thus ; but serious thought was out of fashion at the 
court of Charles II. 

12. After the Duke of York's victory followed, in history and in 
Dryden's poem, the attempt on the Dutch merchant fleets in the 
neutral harbour of Bergen, which Dryden made the best of, but 
which was alike dishonourable and unsuccessful. In October, 
1665, the Parliament at Oxford granted an additional million 
and a quarter for the war, with a gift of ;£ 120,000 to the Duke 
of York. In January, 1666, the King of France joined the 
Dutch ; Prince Rupert and General Monk (now Duke of Albe- 
marle) were made generals of the English fleet, and the four 
days of the sea-fight off the North Foreland, specially celebrated 
in a hundred stanzas of the Annus Mirabilis, were the first four 
days of June. It was a drawn battle. Rupert was gone with 
twenty ships in search of the French. Monk found the Dutch, 
and attacked them ; on the second day the Dutch were reinforced, 
and Monk had to burn some disabled vessels ; on the third day 
English ships ran on the Galloper Sands, and the ruin would 
have been complete if, on the evening of that day, Rupert had not 
at last come with his twenty sail ; on the fourth day the vessels 
passed each other five times in line, and separated in a mist. 
But from the next sea-fight, on the 25th of June, De Ruyter 
retreated, often turning on the enemy, till he was in safe shelter. 
Monk and Rupert then interrupted Dutch commerce at will, and 
Holmes, with a squadron of boats and fire-ships, entered the 



652 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE^ [a.d. 1667. 

channel between Ulie and Schelling, the rendezvous of the 
Dutch Baltic trade. He burnt two men-of-war, 150 merchant- 
men, and 3,000 houses of the peaceable and unarmed town of 
Brandaris. The second battle and this achievement also form 
part of the subject of Dryden's poem ; and the celebration of 
battle by sea is broken by a digression upon shipping and 
navigation, with a glance at triumphs of the future which are to 
be attained by that study of God and nature for which men of 
science were now banded together. 

Here Dryden introduces an apostrophe to the Royal Society, 
which originated in the peaceful gathering of men of science 
during the Civil Wars (ch. ix. § 18). In 1645, Wilkins, Wallis, 
Dr. John Goddard, and others, began to meet, sometimes at 
Dr. Goddard's lodgings in Wood Street, or some convenient 
place near, on occasion of his keeping an operator for grinding 
glasses for telescopes and microscopes ; and sometimes at a 
convenient place in Cheapside, sometimes in Gresham College, 
or some place near adjoining. "About the year 1648-1649, 
Wallis records, "some of us being removed to Oxford — first 
Dr. Wilkins, then I, and soon after Dr. Goddard — our com- 
pany divided. Those in London continued to meet there, as 
before, and we with them when we had occasion to be there. 
And those of us at Oxford . . . continued such meetings in 
Oxford, and brought those studies into fashion there, meeting 
first at Dr. Petty's lodgings, in an apothecary's house, because of 
the convenience of inspecting drugs and the like, as there was 
occasion ; and after his remove to Ireland, though not so con- 
stantly, at the lodgings of Dr. Wilkins, then Warden of Wadham 
College ; and after his removal to Trinity College, in Cambridge, 
at the lodgings of the Honourable Mr. Robert Boyle, then 
resident for divers years in Oxford. Those meetings in London 
continued, and after the king's return, in 1660, were increased 
with the accession of divers worthy and honourable persons, and 
were afterwards incorporated by the name of the Royal Society." 
It was incorporated as " The President, Council, and Fellows of 
the Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge," in April, 
1662^5 and Dryden, elected a fellow on the 19th of November, 
1662, was doubtless present at its first anniversary meeting, on 
St. Andrew's Day, November 30, 1663. His generous sympathy 
with the new impulse to science caused him to make occasion 
for paying honour to the Royal Society in his A?mus Mii'abilis 
(st. i6q, 1 66V 



a.d. 1667. J THE ROYAL SOCIETY, PEPYS. EVELYN. 653 

From the successes at sea Dryden passed to an elaborate 
depiction of the Fire of London, the generous exertions of the 
king, and his own prophetic forecast of the greater London that 
should rise, and of the national prosperities to come. As im- 
mediate prophecy, the close was falsified by the disgrace to us 
in June, 1667, of the Dutch in the Medway, burning English 
ships at Chatham. 

13. These events, and many details of life in the reign of 
Charles II., are brought near to us by the diary of Samuel 
Pepys (b. 1632, d. 1703), the son of a tailor. He went to St. 
Paul's School and Cambridge, married at twenty-three a girl of 
fifteen, and was helped up in life by the patronage of Sir Edward 
Montagu, afterwards Earl of Sandwich, to whom he was related. 
He became, as Clerk of the Acts, a busy and useful member of 
the Navy -Board, not unmindful of profits to be made in his 
position, but watchful over the best interests of the navy. This 
was his position during the years in which he kept his amusing 
Diary. It extends from January, 1660, when his age was twenty- 
seven, to May, 1669. The unguarded small-talk of the diary, 
a mixture of simplicity and shrewdness, which entertains us 
while it gives life to our knowledge of the past, should not 
make us forget that Pepys was a sensible and active public 
servant. The liveliest impression of the Fire of London is that 
given us in his " Diary," from Sunday, the 2nd of September, 
when a maid called Mr. and Mrs. Pepys up at three in the 
morning " to tell us of a great fire they saw in the city ; so I rose 
and slipped on my night-gown, and went to her window, and 
thought it to be at the back-side of Mark Lane at farthest," 
through all the work, misery, and confusion of the week, to the 
next Sunday, the 9th, when at church they had "a bad, poor 
sermon, though proper for the time ; nor eloquent, in saying 
at this time that the city is reduced from a large folio to a 
decimo-tertio. ,> Pepys's " Diary," in six manuscript volumes, was 
among the books and papers bequeathed by him to Magdalene 
College. It was first published by Lord Braybrooke, in 1825. 

The Diary of John Evelyn (ch. ix. § 18) began with his 
birth, in 1620, became full after the death of his father, at 
the end of 1640, and was continued to the close of his life, in 
1706. It was first published by Mr. William Bray, in 181 8. 
John Aubrey (b. 1626, d. 1697), who, in 1646, by his fathers 
death, inherited estates in Wiltshire, Surrey, Herefordshire, 
Brecknockshire, and Monmouthshire, had a taste for anti- 



654 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1667 

quarian gossip, but was so credulous and superstitious that his 
records are worth little. His " Miscellanies," upon various 
subjects, first published in 1696, are an amusing gathering of 
superstitious notes upon Day-Fatalities, Apparitions, &c. Aubrey 
left behind him a work on The Natural History and Antiquities 
of the County of Surrey. He lost his property, by litigation 
and otherwise. Anthony a Wood, after twenty-five years ac- 
quaintance, said of him, spitefully, " He was a shiftless person, 
roving and magotie-headed, and sometimes little better than 
crazed ; and being exceedingly credulous, would stuff his many 
letters sent to A. W. with folleries and misinformations." 

14. Anthony k Wood was born in 1632, at Oxford, opposite 
Merton College, where he afterwards was educated. He was 
admitted B.A. in 1652, M.A. in 1655, and -then began a per- 
ambulation of Oxfordshire. He was inspired by Leland's 
collections in the Bodleian. Anthony a Wood's chief pleasures 
thenceforth were music and the study of Oxford antiquities. As 
he says in his own account of his life, "All the time that 
A. W. could spare from his beloved studies of English history, 
antiquities, heraldry, and genealogies, he spent in the most 
delightful facultie of music, either instrumental or vocal." In 
1669 he had written, in English, his History and Antiquities of 
the Unive7'sity of Oxford, which was translated into Latin under 
the superintendence of Dr. Fell, who altered and added at dis- 
cretion. As Anthony a Wood had not a sweet temper, and was 
accustomed to speak his mind roughly, he did not take this very 
kindly. The book appeared, in Latin, in 1674. His chief work, 
Athena Oxonienses; an Exact History of all the Writers who 
have had their Education in the University of Oxford: to which 
are added the Fasti, or A finals of the said University, was first 
published, in two folios, in 169 1-2. When the second volume 
appeared he was cited before the Vice- Chancellor's Court for 
two libellous accusations of corruption (pp. 220 and 269) against 
the late Chancellor, the Earl of Clarendon. The book was burnt, 
its author expelled, and gazetted as an infamous libeller, a year 
before his death, in 1695. 

15. Dry den published his Annus Mirabilis in January, 
1667, a heroic poem, in 1,216 lines of Davenant's heroic stanza, 
in which there is yet some trace of that taste for ingenious 
conceit, derived of old from Italy, which caused Mr. Pepys's 
minister to say in his sermon that London had been reduced by 
the Great Fire from folio to decimo-tertio. But the vigour of a 



toa.d. 1674. j ANTHONY WOOD. DRYDEN. HOWARD. 655 

masters hand appears in this attempt of Dryden's at heroic 
treatment of events yet fresh, dignifying the king's cause by the 
places given in the poem to Charles and his brother. In 1667 
appeared also Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesie, a dialogue 
between Eugenius (Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst), Lisideius 
(Sir Charles Sedley), Crites (Sir Robert Howard), and Neander 
(Dryden). In June, 1666, he says, they went down the river 
towards Greenwich to hear the noise of cannon in the sea-fight 
with the Dutch. As the sound seemed to recede they judged 
that the Dutch were retreating, and conversation turned on the 
plague of bad verse that would follow victory. So they passed 
to an argument on ancient and modern poets, soon limited to 
Dramatic Poesie. The dialogue so introduced dealt with the 
subject of a play, " the famous rules which the French call 
Des Trois Unitez," action, plot, &c. Lisideius spoke of the 
beauty of French rhyme, and of the just reason he had to prefer 
that way of writing in tragedies before ours in blank verse, and 
then the argument went through all its points (§ 30). Crites 
reproduced Sir Robert Howard's case against rhyme. Neander 
answered "with all imaginable deference and respect, both to 
that person from whom you have borrowed your strongest 
arguments, and to whose judgment, when I have said all, I 
finally submit." There was no discourtesy here to Sir Robert 
Howard. In the next year, 1668, Sir Robert published his 
tragedy of The Duke of Lerma, and took occasion in its preface 
to reply, on behalf of blank verse, to the arguments of Dryden 
in his essay. The controversy amused the polite readers, to 
whom it supplied matter of talk, but there was not a trace in it 
of private quarrel ; although Shadwell afterwards, in a scurrilous 
attack on Dryden, said that he and his brother-in-law nearly 
fought. 

16. In the midst of such talk, Milton's " Paradise Lost" (§ 9) 
came out in blank verse ; for the first time in our literature a 
great poem, an epic, in blank verse. And there was not a line 
of explanation or apology. Milton's publisher — in the face of a 
controversy that on both sides assumed blank verse to be mean 
— applied to the author and got from him that blunt little preface 
of three Miltonic sentences, headed "The Verse." It was 
printed with Arguments to the books, on a leaf added to the 
volume. 

Sir Charles Sedley, the Lisideius of the "Essay of Dra- 
matic Poesie," was about twenty-one years old at the Restoration, 



656 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1667 

and another of the dissolute clever light wits of the court. In 
1667 he had just written a tragedy on Anto?iy and Cleopatra 
(published 1677), and in 1668, his comedy of the Mulberry Gar- 
den was very successful He had skill in frivolous love- verses, of 
which the Earl of Rochester wrote : 

*' Sedley has that prevailing, gentle art 
That can with a resistless charm impart 
The loosest wishes to the chastest heart ; " 

and died about 1728. Both Sedley and the Earl of Dorset, in 
the next reign, favoured the Revolution. 

Dryden continued to earn money by writing for the stage* 
In March, 1667, his Secret Love was produced with success at 
the king's theatre, and printed next year. Nell Gwyn shone 
in it as Florimel. Dryden's Sir Martin Marr-all, a version of 
Moliere's " L'Etourdi," was produced in the same year ; and 
also a new version of Shakespeare's Tempest, based upon a 
suggestion by Davenant that Shakespeare's play of a woman 
who had never seen a man could be improved by adding to it 
a man who had never seen a woman. This adaptation of 
Shakespeare to the taste of the court of Charles II. was one of 
Davenant's latest devices. He died in April, 1668, aged sixty- 
three, and Dryden succeeded to his dignity as Poet Laureate. 

17. At this time George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, 
whose age was thirty-three at the Restoration, was amusing him- 
self with the production of a burlesque on the heroic dramas of 
the day, which in due time was to be acted under the name of 
The Rehearsal. He had begun when Davenant was laureate, 
and given to his hero, Bayes, who wore the laurel, some of 
Davenant's characteristics. Now Dryden wore the bays, and 
Dryden presently produced some notable examples of heroic 
sound and fury. The jest, therefore, was now pointed more 
especially at Dryden. George Villiers was with Prince Charles 
in Scotland, was at the battle of Worcester in 165 1, came over 
* to England, and, in November, 1657, married Andrew Marvell's 
pupil (ch. ix. § 9), heiress and only daughter of Lord Fairfax. 
By this marriage he saved the greater part of his own estate. 
At the Restoration he had an income of ,£20,000 a year, became 
Gentleman of the King's Bedchamber, Privy Councillor, and 
Master of the Horse. He was lively, careless, extravagant, and 
variously clever, with taste for chemistry and literature, and 
music and intrigue. 

Dryden produced in 1668 his All for Love, an ambitious 



toa.d. 1671.] HEROIC PLAYS. BUCKINGHAM'S REHEARSAL. 0$f 

reconstruction of Shakespeare's " Antony and Cleopatra ;" and 
A?i Evening's Love ; or, the Mock Astrologer, a careless version 
of the French comedy Le Feint Astrologue, by Corneille's 
younger brother Thomas. In 1669 Dryden produced a tragedy, 
called Tyratmic Love ; or, the Royal Martyr, on the story of St. 
Catherine. In the prologue to this, he extended Horace's 
" serpit humi tutus " into 

" He who servilely creeps after sense 

Is safe, but ne'er will reach an excellence." 

He knew very well that he was often pleasing his audiences 
with ranted nonsense in heroic strain. Porphyrius defying the 
tyrant Maximin, at the end of the fourth act, replied to him in 
this fashion : 

" Max. The Si-jht with which my eyes shall first be fed 

Must be my Empress and this Traitor's head. 
" Por. Where'er thou stands't, I'll level at that place 
My gushing blood, and spout it at thy Face, 
Thus, not by Marriage, we our Blood will join : 
Nay, more, my Arm, shall throw my Head at thine." 

Dryden's next play was Almanzor and Almahide j or, the Con- 
quest of Granada, in two parts, of which the first appeared in 
1670. In that year his mother died. 

In 1671 the Duke of Buckingham's caricature of such plays 
in The Rehearsal was at last produced, at the King's Theatre, with 
immense success. This was really a plea for good sense against 
showy nonsense ; merry, and free from the indecency then com- 
mon in dramatic jests. It was only in the preceding year, 1670, 
that Dryden had the grant of the office of Poet Laureate, vacant 
in 1668 ; but there was joined to it the office of Historiographer- 
Royal, vacant since 1666. In The Rehearsal, Smith from the 
country and Johnson of the town meet, plays are talked of ; 
Mr. Bayes passes across the stage, and is caught as an author. 
He has a new play in his pocket, explains his method of pro- 
ducing plays, is going to the Rehearsal of his new play, takes 
them to it, instructs the actors, and discourses with Smith and 
Johnson over a jumble of burlesque scenes, which would be re- 
cognised by playgoers of the time as caricatures of passages in 
plays of Davenant, Dryden, Sir Robert Howard, and others. 
There is a plot, which is no plot, of their gentleman usher 
and physician against the two kings of Brentford ; there is 
an army concealed at Knightsbridge ; there is Prince Volscius, 
who falls in love as he is pulling on his boots, and makes his 

Q Q 



658 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1671. 

legs an emblem of his various thought ; there is a Draw- 
cansir, whose name pairs with Dryden's Almanzor. Almahide, 
in The Conquest of Gra?iada, says to Almanzor, " Who dares to 
interrupt my private walk ? " Almanzor replies : 

" He who dares love ; and for that love must die, 
And knowing this, dares yet love on, am I." 

Usurping King Physician says to Drawcansir, " What man is 
this that dares disturb our feast ?" Drawcansir replies : 

"He that dares drink, and for that drink dares die. 
And knowing this, dares yet drink on, am I." 

And so forth. The last words of the Epilogue were : 

" May this prodigious way of writing cease. 
Let's have, at least once in our lives, a time 
When we may hear some Reason, not all Rhyme : 
We have these ten years felt its influence ; 
Pray let this prove a year of Prose and Sense." 

That was produced in 1671. In 1672, Dryden printed his 
" Conquest of Granada," with an essay prefixed to it, " Of Heroick 
Plays." Here he assumed the question of rhyme in heroic plays 
to be settled by the fact that " very few Tragedies in this age shall 
be receiv'd without it." He gave Davenant the place of honour 
as originator of the heroic play, taking his music from Italian 
operas, and heightening his style from the example of Corneille. 
He said that his own plays, with love and valour for their proper 
theme, were based on principles of the heroic poem, and that 
he formed his much-abused Almanzor from Homer's Achilles, 
Tasso's Rinaldo, and Calprenede's Artaban. He might have 
added that he took the first suggestion of his play from the 
Almahide of Magdeleine Scudery, which did not appear in its 
English translation until 1677. Finally, Dryden said, " I have 
already swept the stakes ; and with the fortune of prosperous 
gamesters can be content to sit quietly, to hear my fortune curst 
by some, and my faults arraign'd by others, and to suffer both 
without reply." 

iS. In 1671, when the town was being amused with Buck- 
ingham's " Rehearsal, " John Milton published, in one volume, his 
" Paradise Regained" (§ 9), and Samson Agoiiistes. There is a 
double sense in the word Agonistes. It may mean a striver in 
actual contest, or a striver in games for the amusement of the 
people. Samson was both. Milton at last working out his 
early notion of a sacred drama moulded on those of the Greek 



a.d. 1671.] MILTON'S SAMSON AGONISTES. 659 

tragedians, took for his theme Samson as a type of the main- 
tainers of what Milton knew as " the good old cause" in Eng- 
land. Their party was now as Samson, blind, powerless, the 
scorn of the Philistines of Charles II/s court. Samson was 
called to make them sport, was for them Agonistes in the 
second sense, while for himself and God true striver ; and he 
would yet prevail. Although the mockers had the mastery to- 
day, God was not mocked. The drama closely followed the 
Greek model, even in the construction of its choruses, which 
had only a few rhymes interspersed among their carefully con- 
structed metres. In nearly all the poetry of this last period of 
Milton's life, the grandeur of the poet's thought and his supreme 
skill in the use of language, caused him almost wholly to put 
aside the ornaments of rhyme — " invention," as he now called 
it, "of a barbarous age (ch. iii. § 30, 35) to set off wretched matter 
and lame metre." Samson's lament for his blindness (11. 75 — 109) 
could, of course, be realised by the blind poet. He blended 
with his argument a thought of his own temperate life ending 
in pains of gout, the scourge of the luxurious, when the chorus 
gave dramatic expression (11. 667 — 709) to the question of God's 
dealings with the nation and with many a true Agonistes of 
the Commonwealth ; not 

" Heads without name no more remembered, 
But such as thou hast solemnly elected, 
With gifts and graces eminently adorn'd, 
To some great work, thy glory, 
And people's safety, which in part they effect ; 
Yet toward these thus dignified, thou oft 
Amidst their highth of noon 

Changest thy countenance, and thy hand, with no regard 
Of highest favours past 
From thee on them, or them to thee of service." 

They are left open to the hostile sword, 

" Or else captiv'd, 
Or to th' unjust tribunals under change of times, 
And condemnation of th' ungrateful multitude. 
If these they 'scape, perhaps in poverty 
With sickness and disease thou bow'st them down — 
Painful diseases, and deform'd, 
In crude old age : 

Though not disordinate, yet causeless suffering 
The punishment of dissolute days." 

But the doubt is expressed only like the doubt in Lycidas : 

" Were it not better done as others use, 
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade ? " 

Q Q 2 



66o A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d, i66x 

expressed, because the answer is to follow in the last lines of 
the play. And they were Milton's last words as a poet : 

"All is best, though oft we doubt 
What the unsearchable dispose 
Of Highest Wisdom brings about. 
And ever best found in the close. 
Oft he seems to hide his face, 
But unexpectedly returns ; 
And to his faithful champion hath in place 
Bare witness gloriously ; whence Gaza mourns, 
And all that band them to resist 
His uncontroulable intent : 
His servants he, with new acquist 
Of true experience, from this great event, 
With peace and consolation hath dismiss'd, 
And calm of mind, all passion spent." 

In 1673, the year before his death, there was a second and 
enlarged edition — only the second edition — twenty-eight years 
after the first, of Milton's Poems both Latin and English. In 
the same year he published one more prose tract upon a 
question of the day, of True Religion^ Heresy, Schism, and 
Toleration. The Duke of York, heir to the throne, was" a 
Roman Catholic. Protestant England looked with dread to 
his succession, and the argument over Catholicism was again 
active. Milton pleaded still for perfect liberty of conscience, 
but held that the Roman Catholics, by maintaining a foreign 
despotism that weighed alike on civil and religious liberty, shut 
themselves out from a full toleration. He would not have civil 
penalties inflicted on them, but he shared the common dread of 
their predominance, and wished to restrain them where that 
could be done without denying them what they thought neces- 
sary to salvation. 

In 1674 Milton published the second edition of (t Paradise 
Lost," almost without change beyond the placing of the 
Arguments before the books, and changing the number of the 
books from ten to twelve, by dividing what had been the seventh 
and tenth books into those which are now the seventh and 
eighth, eleventh and twelfth. There is all the grace of his youth 
in Milton's manner of introducing these new breaks. Raphael's 
narrative of the seven days of creation is in the seventh book. 
In the first edition the discourse now in the eighth book followed 
without break, the lines running together thus : 

" If else thou seek'st 
Aught not surpassing human measure, say. 
To whom thus Adam gratefully replied." 



toa.d. 1674] JOHN MILTON. JEREMY TAYLOR. 66 1 

Milton did not make his break by simply writing 
" Book VIII.," but made a poet's pause by this fresh opening : 

"The angel ended, and in Adam's ear 
So charming left his voice, that he awhile 
Thought him still speaking, still stood fix'd to hear ; 
Then, as new wak'd, thus gratefully replied." 

The first five lines of Book XII. were added for the same good 
reason. John Milton, aged sixty-six, died on Sunday, the 8th of 
November, 1674. 

19. Jeremy Taylor (ch. viii. § 61, 70 ; ch. ix. § 14), aged 
forty-seven at the Restoration, published in June, 1660, his 
Ductor Dubitantium j or, the Rule of Conscience in all her 
General Measures, a book of casuistry, which he had designed 
to be the great work of his life. It was dedicated to Charles II., 
and followed in two months by The Worthy Communicant. 
In August he was nominated Bishop of Down and Connor; 
he was made also Vice-Chancellor of Dublin University, and 
a member of the Irish Privy Council. In April, 1661, he 
had the adjacent bishopric of Dromore united with Down 
and Connor, in consideration of his " virtue, wisdom, and 
industry." At the opening of the Irish Parliament, in May, 
1661, Jeremy Taylor preached, and admonished his hearers 
to oppress no man for his religious opinions, to deal equal 
justice to men of all forms of faith, and " do as God does, 
who in judgment remembers mercy." He still lived near Port- 
more, and made pious use of his newly-acquired wealth. He 
apprenticed poor children, maintained promising youths at the 
University, and rebuilt the choir of Dromore Cathedral. In 
1664 he issued, with addition of a second part, his Dissuasive 
from Popery, first published in 1647. His son by his second 
marriage died before him. Of his sons by the first marriage, the 
elder, in the army, was killed in a duel with an officer of his own 
regiment ; the younger, destined for the Church, had been drawn 
to the court, became secretary to George Villiers, Duke of 
Buckingham, was corrupted by court manners of the Restora- 
tion, and a profligate life with a consumptive constitution 
caused his death about the same time as his father's. Jeremy 
Taylor died, aged fifty-five, on the 13th of August, 1667, in the 
year of the publication of " Paradise Lost." Of Milton's three 
daughters, the .eldest, Anne, who had a deformed body and 
pleasing face, married an architect, and died at the birth of her 
first child ; Mary, the second, did not marry. Deborah, who 



662 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. i6^-> 

loved her father, left home to avoid her mother-in-law, went 
with a lady to Ireland, married Mr. Clarke, a weaver in Spital- 
fields, and had ten children. 

20. John Bunyan (ch. ix. § 15), incurring the penalty for 
unauthorised preaching, was committed to prison in November, 

1660, on the charge of going about to several conventicles in the 
country, to the great disparagement of the government of the 
Church of England. He was sent, aged thirty-two, to Bedford 
Jail for three months. As he would not conform at the end of 
that time, he was re-committed. He was not included in the 
general jail delivery at the Coronation of Charles II., in April, . 

1661. His wife — she was his second wife — appealed three times 
to the judges, and urged that she had "four small children that 
cannot help themselves, one of which is blind, and we have 
nothing to live upon but the charity of good people." She 
appealed in vain. " I found myself," said Bunyan, " encom- 
passed with infirmities. The parting with my wife and poor 
children hath often been to me in this place as the pulling of 
the flesh from the bones, and that not only because I am some- 
what too fond of these great mercies, but also because I should 
have often brought to my mind the many hardships, miseries, 
and wants that my poor family was like to meet with should I 
be taken from them, especially my poor blind child, who lay 
nearer my heart than all besides. Oh, the thoughts of the hard- 
ships I thought my poor blind one might go under would break 
my heart to pieces. ' Poor child!' thought I, 'what sorrow art 
thou like to have for thy portion in this world ! Thou must be 
beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand 
calamities, though I cannot now endure the wind should blow 
upon thee.'" So felt the great warm heart that was pouring out 
in Bedford Jail its love to God and man. Depth of feeling, 
vivid imagination, and absorbing sense of the reality of the 
whole spiritual world revealed to him in his Bible, made Bunyan 
a grand representative of the religious feeling of the people. In 
simple direct phrase, with his heart in every line, he clothed in 
visible forms that code of religious faith and duty which an 
earnest mind, unguided by traditions, drew with its own simple 
strength out of the Bible. Bunyan wrote much, profoundly 
religious tracts, prison meditations, a book of poems — Divine 
Emble7ns; or, Temporal Things Spiritualized, fitted for the use 
of Boys and Girls, and other occasional verse. The whole 
work of his life was like that indicated in his child's book, a 



toa.d. 1678.] JOHN BUNYAN. THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 663 

spiritualizing of temporal things. Matter for him was the 
shadow, soul the substance ; the poor man whose soul Bunyan 
leads by thoughts that it can follow, passes through a hard life 
with its dull realities all glorified. Look where he may, a man 
poor and troubled as himself has stamped for him God's image 
on some part of what he sees. As Bunyan himself rhymes : 

" We change our drossy dust for gold, 
From death to life we fly ; 
We let go shadows, and take hold 
Of immortality." 

The poor man's child, ill taught, and with small power of 
advancing in the world, may look at a snail and think of what 
John Bunyan Wrote for children, in his prison, of the snail : 

" She goes but softly, but she goeth sure ; 

She stumbles not, as stronger creatures do : 
Her journey's shorter, so she may endure 
Better than they which do much farther go. 

Then let none faint, nor be at all dismay'd, 
That life by Christ do seek, they shall not fail 

To have it ; let them nothing be afraid : 
The herb and flow'r are eaten by the snail." 

The first part of The Pilg7'infs Progress from this World 
to that which is to Come, delivered under the similitude of a 
Dream, wherein is discovered the Manner of his Setting Out, his 
Dangerous Journey, and Safe Arrival at the Desired Country, 
was written in Bedford Jail, where Bunyan was a prisoner for 
more than eleven years, from November, 1660, to March, 1672, 
when a Royal declaration allowed Nonconformists (except Roman 
Catholics) to meet under their licensed ministers. His Holy 
City had been published in 1665 ; and after his release Bunyan 
published a Defence of the Doctrine of Justification by Faith, 
a Confession of his Faith, an appeal entitled Come and Welcome 
to Christ, before that First Part of the PilgrinHs P?'ogress ap- 
peared in 1678, four years after the death of Milton. The 
allegory is realized with genius akin to that of the dramatist. 
Christian, with the Burden on his back and the Book in his 
hand, sets out on his search for eternal life, and is at once 
engaged in a series of dialogues. Neighbours Obstinate and 
Pliable attempt to turn him back. Pliable goes a little way with 
him, but declines to struggle through the Slough of Despond, and 
gets out on the wrong side. Then Christian meets Mr. Worldly 
Wiseman, from the town of Carnal Policy, hard by, has a talk 



664 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [ad. 1660 

with him before he enters in at the Strait Gate, triumphs over 
Apollyon, passes through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, 
overtakes his townsfellow Faithful, who tells his experiences of 
the journey, and they then come upon Talkative, who was also 
of their town, son of one Say-well, of Prating Row. All the 
dialogue is touched with humorous sense of characters drawn 
from life and familiar to the people, while the allegory blends 
itself everywhere with the poor man's Bible reading, and 
has always its meaning broadly written on its surface, so that 
the simplest reader is never at a loss for the interpretation. 
The adventures of Christian in Vanity Fair are full of dramatic 
dialogue. Then there is still talk by the way between Christian 
and Hopeful before they lie down to sleep in the grounds of 
Doubting Castle, where they are caught in the morning by its 
master, the Giant Despair. There is life and character still in 
the story of their peril from the giant, before Christian remem- 
bers that he has " a key in his bosom," called Promise, that will 
open any lock in Doubting Castle. And so the allegory runs 
on to the end, lively with human interest of incident and shrewd 
character-painting by the way of dialogue, that at once chain 
the attention of the most illiterate ; never obscure, and never 
for ten lines allowing its reader to forget the application of it all 
to his own life of duty for the love of God. The story ends' 
with the last conflict of Christian and Hopeful, when at the hour 
of death they pass through the deep waters, leaving their mortal 
garments behind them in the river, and are led by the Shining 
Ones into the Heavenly Jerusalem. In 1682 appeared Bunyan's 
allegory of the Holy War; and in 1684 the second part of 
" Pilgrim's Progress," telling the heavenward pilgrimage of 
Christian's wife and seven children. England was England 
still, under a king who was tainting fashionable literature. Her 
highest culture produced in the reign of Charles II. " Paradise 
Lost ;" and from among the people who had little culture except 
that which they drew for themselves from the Bible, came the 
" Pilgrim's Progress." 

21. Richard Baxter (ch. ix. § 13) was also an active writer 
throughout the reign of Charles II. Soon after the Restoration, 
in 1662, there were more than 4.200 Quakers in prison at one 
time. In 1670, Bobert Barclay, of Ury, near Aberdeen, then 
twenty-two years old, defended the Friends, whose society he 
had joined, in a treatise, published at Aberdeen, entitled, Truth 
cleared from Calumnies. In 1676 he was confined with others in 



f TO A.D. *684:3 BUNYAlf. R. BARCLAY. RALPH CUDWORTH. 665 

a prison so dark that unless the keeper set the door open or 
brought a candle they could not see to eat the food brought in 
to them. In the same year appeared Barclay's Apology for the 
True Christian Divinity as the same is held forth and preached 
by the People called in scorn Quakeis, being a full Explanation 
and Viiidicatioti of their Principles and Doctrines. It was first 
published in Latin, at Amsterdam, and then, translated by the 
author, published in England. The address to Charles II., in 
the place of a dedication, called upon him for justice on behalf of a 
most peaceful body of his subjects, and said : " Thou hast tasted 
of prosperity and adversity ; thou knowest what it is to be 
banished thy native country, to be overruled as well as to rule 
and sit upon the throne ; and being oppressed, thou hast reason 
to know how hateful the oppressor is both to God and man. If, 
after all these warnings and advertisements, thou dost not turn 
unto the Lord with all thy heart, but forget Him who remem- 
bered thee in thy distress, and give up thyself to follow lust and 
vanity, surely great will be thy condemnation." 

22. In the reign of Charles II., the Episcopal Church had 
among its representatives (besides, for a year, Thomas Fuller) 
Jeremy Taylor, Cudworth, Barrow, Tillotson, Leighton, Beve- 
ridge, and Burnet. Thomas Fuller (ch. viii. § 59) under 
Charles II. was restored to his prebend of Salisbury, and made 
D.D. and chaplain to the king ; but he lived only until August, 

1661. His History of the Worthies of England appeared in 

1662, and is the most popular of all his works. 

Kalph Cudworth, born in 1617, at Aller, Somersetshire, 
became Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 1644 he 
was Master of Clare Flail ; in 1645, Regius Professor of Hebrew", 
and devoted himself to Jewish antiq^ties. He became D.D. 
in 165 1 ; in 1654, Master of Christ's College (meanwhile also 
rector of North Cadbury, Somersetshire). He then married, and 
spent the rest of his life at Cambridge. In 1678 he published 
the first part of The True Intellectual System of the Universe. 
The work was planned in three parts, of which this first part 
was devoted to the refutation of atheism. The other two parts 
were to have been on Moral Distinctions and Free Will. His 
philosophical method and liberality of mind offended many 
theologians, who cried out on him as an atheist for his method 
of refuting atheism. He died in the year of the Revolution, 
leaving one daughter, who married Sir Francis Masham. 

Isaac Barrow, born in 1630, educated at Charterhouse 



666 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1660 

and Cambridge, became Fellow of Trinity, subscribed to the 
Covenant, but insisted on the erasure of his name. He studied 
science as well as divinity — astronomy, botany, chemistry, and 
even anatomy. In 1655 he sold his books that he might have 
money for travel. He found friends on his road ; visited Paris, 
Florence, Venice, and Constantinople, and came home, in 1659, 
through Germany and Holland. Then he took orders, was 
Professor of Greek at Cambridge, next also of Geometry at 
Gresham College ; and after that Lucasian Mathematical Lec- 
turer at Cambridge until 1669, when he gave place to his friend, 
Isaac Newton. In 1672 the king made him Master of Trinity, 
and he was Vice-Chancellor of the University when he died, 
in 1677, a ged forty-seven. He wrote mathematical works, and 
sermons full of sense and piety. A collected edition of Isaac 
Barrow's works was published by Archbishop Tillotson, in four 
volumes folio, in 1683-7. 

John Tillotson was born in the same year as Barrow 
(1630), son of a clothier at Sowerby, near Halifax. He went as 
a Nonconformist to Clare Hall, Cambridge, and began life as a 
private tutor and curate to Dr. Wilkins, at St. Lawrence Jewry. 
He made himself agreeable to authority, both after the Restora- 
tion and after the Revolution ; rose in the Church, upholding 
simple acceptance of the ruling powers ; and was made Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury in 1691, after the suspension of Sancroft. 
He died in 1694, and left to his widow unpublished sermons 
that fetched 2,500 guineas. Yet Tillotson was not, like Leighton, 
a man of genius, capable of deep thought and grand expression. 

Robert Leighton (born 161 3, died 1684) was the son of a 
man who in the reign of Charles I. had his nose slit and his 
ears cut, and was whipped from Newgate to Tyburn for offend- 
ing Government with two books called " Zion's Plea" and "The 
Looking-Glass of the Holy War." Robert Leighton was a 
Scottish divine, thoughtful as well as eloquent. He came to 
London to resign the bishopric of Dumblane, vexed by conten- 
tion with the Presbyterians, and was sent back Archbishop of 
Glasgow. But he could endure the strife against Episcopalians 
in Scotland only for another year, resigned, withdrew to Sussex, 
and died, there in 1684. His sermons, published in 1692, are 
those of the greatest preacher in the Episcopal Church of the 
later Stuart period. 

William Beveridge (born 1638, died 1708), educated at 
Cambridge, was a Hebrew scholar at eighteen, and published at 



toa.d. 1685.] CHURCH DIVINES. FRENCH INFLUENCE. 667 

the age of twenty, in Latin, a Syriac grammar and treatise on 
the excellence and usefulness of Oriental languages. He has 
left 150 published sermons, besides theological tracts. Beveridge 
became chaplain to William III. at the Revolution, but was not 
made a bishop till Queen Anne's reign. 

Gilbert Burnet, born in 1643, studied at Aberdeen. In 
1669 he was Divinity Professor at Glasgow. In 1674 he settled 
in London, and became preacher at the Rolls Chapel. In 1677 
Burnet published Memoirs of the Lives and Actions of James 
atid William, Dukes of Hamilton, &*c. t in Seven Books, upon 
which he had been at work in Scotland ; and in 1679 appeared 
the first of the three volumes of his History of the Reformation 
in the CJuirch of England, which agreed so well with the feeling 
of the time against Catholicism that he received for it the thanks 
of both Houses of Parliament, with a desire that he would go 
on and complete the work. The second volume followed in 
1681 ; the third not until 17 15. In 168c Burnet wrote an account 
of the penitent close of the dissolute life of John Wilmot, 
Earl of Bochester, one of the court wits who trifled in verse, 
and whose best piece of verse is upon Nothing. 

23. A courtier and poet of much higher mark was Went- 
worth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, born in 1633, nephew 
and godson to the Earl of Strafford. He was at the Protestant 
College at Caen when, by the death of his father, he became 
Earl of Roscommon, at the age of ten. He remained abroad, 
travelled in Italy till the Restoration, when he came in with 
the king, became captain of the band of Pensioners, took for a 
time to gambling, married, indulged his taste in literature, 
strongly under the French influence, and had a project for an 
English academy like that of France. 

Boileavs influence became supreme upon the publication of 
his "Art of Poetry" (L'Art Poetioue), in 1673. ^ ts f° ur cantos 
embodied his main doctrine as the Poet of Good Sense. In idea 
and execution it was inspired by Horace's "Art of Poetry;' 7 but 
its polished maxims, applied specially to French poetry, are more 
systematically arranged. The order of its cantos is: — 1. Gene- 
ral rules, with a short digression on the history of French poetry 
from Villon to Malherbe. 2. Rules and characteristics of the 
eclogue, elegy, ode, sonnet, epigram, balade, madrigal, satire, 
and vaudeville. 3. Rules of tragedy, comedy, and epic. 4. 
General advice to poets on the use of their powers ; choice of a 
critic ; origin, rise, and decline of poetry ; praise of Louis XIV. 



668 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.t>. 1673 

The critical shortcomings of this work, which may be said to 
have given the law for some years to French and English 
literature, nearly all proceed from a wholesome but too servile 
regard for the example of the ancient classic writers. The 
chief authors of Greece and Rome were to be as much the 
models of good literature as the Latin language was a standard 
of right speech. This led, indeed, to a sound contempt of 
empty trivialities, but it left the critic with faint powers of re- 
cognition for a Dante, a Shakespeare, or a Milton. Boileau 
was even hindered by it from perceiving how far Terence was 
surpassed by his friend Moliere. His discipline thus tended 
obviously to the creation of an artificial taste for forms of correct 
writing excellent in themselves, but as means of perfect expres- 
sion better suited to the genius of the French than of the 
English people. He was a true Frenchman, and English 
writers erred by imitation even of his excellence, in adopting 
too readily for a nation Germanic in origin and language forms 
that harmonized better with the mind and language of a Latin 
race. But, at the same time, they shared with their ne'ghbours 
the benefit of assent to the appeal in his "Art Poetique" on 
behalf of plain good sense against the faded extravagancies of 
that period of Italian influence from which life and health had 
departed : 

" Evitons ces exces. Laissons a 1'Italie 
De tous ses faux brillans l'eclatante folic 
Tout doit tendre au Bon Sens." 

These lines declare the living spirit of the poem, in which, if 
we are to see only in one foremost work the altered temper of a 
generation, it may especially be said that the period of Italian 
influence ended and French influence became supreme. 

We are now, therefore, to find in English literature a rising 
race of critics who test everything by Latin forms. The English 
must be, for dignity, as Latin as possible in structure, because so 
the French had determined. That was obedience to them in 
the letter, not in the spirit. In origin and structure, their 
language was chiefly Latin : they, therefore, other things being 
equal, preferred words of Latin origin. In origin and structure 
our language is Teutonic : and had we really followed their 
example, we should, other things being equal, have preferred 
words of Teutonic origin. Critics now abounded in France. 
Dominique Bouhours (born 1628, died 1702), an accomplished 
Jesuit, wrote criticisms both on style and language. Rene le 



toa-D. 1684.] BOILEAITS ART PO&TIQUE. ROSCOMMON. 669 

Bossu (born 1631, died 1680) published in 1675 a treatise on the 
Epic, which became the critical authority upon that subject. 
Rene Rapin (born 1621, died 1687), who wrote, in four books, a 
Latin poem ,l Of Gardens," was so much esteemed that Dryden 
said he was " sufficient, were all other critics lost, to teach 
anew the rules of writing." 

The Earl of Bos common, who died in 1684, was bred in 
the same school, followed its fashions, and wrote about writing. 
He translated into verse Horace's Art of Poetry, translated 
into verse Virgil's sixth Eclogue, one or two Odes of Horace, 
and a passage from Guarini's " Pastor Fido." Of his original 
writing the most important piece is an Essay on Translated 
Verse, carefully polished in the manner of Boileau, sensible, and 
often very happy in expression. Himself, in a corrupt time, a 
poet of " unspotted lays," he was true to his doctrine that 

" Immodest words admit of no defence ; 
For want of decency is want of sense." 

When he tells the translator that he must thoroughly understand 
what he is translating, he says : 

" While in your thoughts you find the least debate. 
You may confound, but never can translate. 
You still will this through all disguises show, 
For none explain more clearly than they know." 

He pities from his soul unhappy men compelled by want to 
prostitute the pen ; but warns the rich : 

" Let no vain hope your easy mind seduce, 
For rich ill poets are without excuse." 

And let no man mistake every stir to write verse for a sign of 
power : 

" Beware what spirit rages in your breast ; 
For ten inspired, ten thousand are possest." 

With all its great faults, the court of the Restoration must be 
credited with a good society of men of high rank who made, it 
a point of fashion to cultivate their minds, acquire, according to 
the new standard of France, a fine critical taste, write verse 
themselves— as Lord Mulgrave wrote, "Without his song no 
fop is to be found," — receive sweet incense of praise from poorer 
writers, and give in return for it a kindly patronage. 

John Sheffield (b. 1649, d. 1721) became by his father's 
death Earl of Mulgrave, at the age of nine. At seventeen he 
was in the fleet against the Dutch, and he served afterwards also 



670 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1662 

in fleet and army. He was made Duke of Buckinghamshire in 
1703, and is, therefore, known to modern literature by that title. 
In the days of Charles II. he wrote light pieces of verse, and two 
poems in the new critical fashion, which were his chief efforts — 
an Essay on Satire, in 1675, and an Essay on Poetry, which is 
a little "Art of Poetry" applied to England. The wholesome 
stress is still laid on good sense, in strong reaction against the 
paste brilliants of the decayed Italian school. "'Tis wit and 
sense that is the subject here," he writes : 

" As all is dulness where the Fancy's bad ; 
So, without Judgment, Fancy is but mad : 
And Judgment has a boundless influence 
Not only in the choice of Words or Sense, 
But on the World, on Manners, and on Men ; 
Fancy is but the Feather of the Pen ; 
Reason is that substantial, useful part, 
Which gains the Head ; while t'other wins the Heart." 

Lord Mulgrave placed Shakespeare and Fletcher at the head of 
modern drama ; but wrote some years afterwards two tragedies, 
Julius Ccesar and Marcus Brutus, in which he set his own 
taste above Shakespeare's. Profoundly ignorant of the real 
unity of plan in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," and of the place 
of tyrannicide at the heart of the drama, the polite patron and 
cultivator of literature in the new manner of France saw that 
Shakespeare could not be saved by the dramatic gospel of 
Corneille, and reconstructed his " Julius Caesar," with the unities 
respected : " This play begins the day before Caesar's death, 
and ends an hour after it." His rebuilding threw out material 
enough for another play, the tragedy of " Marcus Brutus." 
Here " the play begins the day before the battle of Philippi, 
and ends with it ; but Lord Mulgrave regretted the inevitable 
change scene from Athens to Philippi, whereby, he said, he 

" Commits one crime that needs an Act of Grace, 
And breaks the Law of Unity 01 Place." 

Comparison of Shakespeare in his habit as he lived, with Shake- 
speare as dignified with a Louis Quatorze wig by Lord Mulgrave, 
illustrates very well the weak side of the French influence on 
English literature. The polite lord even corrected Antony's 
speech over Caesar's body. Shakespeare made him say ; 

" The evil that men do lives after them, 
The good is oft interred with their bones." 

Eones ! Vulgar and unpleasant. His lordship polished this 



toa.d. 1685.] LORD MULGRAVE. ABRAHAM COWLEY. 671 

into " The good is often buried in their graves." Each play 
has a closing thought to mark the adapter's want of sympathy 
with Brutus. Indeed, Lord Mulgrave had written an ode in 
depreciation of Brutus as reply to Cowley's in his praise. 

24. Abraham Cowley (ch. yiii. § 48 ; ix. § 22) published 
in 1662 two books in Latin verse Of Plants, which sang of 
herbs in the manner of the elegies by Ovid and Tibullus. 
Four other books were added: two upon flowers in the various 
measures of Catullus and Horace ; and two upon trees, in the 
manner of Virgil's " Georgics." The last book is patriotic 
and political. The British oak, in an assembly of the trees, 
enlarges upon the king's troubles and the beginning of the 
Dutch War. This work, Plant 'arum, Libri VI. , was first pub- 
lished complete with Cowley's other Latin poems, in 1678. 
Cowley, after the Restoration, was neglected by the court, 
and owed his means of retirement to the good-will of Lord 
St. Albans, whom he had served as secretary, and the Duke of 
Buckingham. His Cutter of Coleman Street, which was his 
juvenile play of The Guardian in an altered form, was censured 
as a satire upon the king's party. He was also guilty of an ode 
in which Brutus was honoured, and it is said that a request to 
the king for some recognition of his faithful service to the royal 
family in its adversity was met by Charles II. with the answer, 
" Mr. Cowley's pardon is his reward." Cowley translated two 
of Pindar's odes, the Second Olympic and the Third Nemean, 
turned into a Pindaric ode the thirty-fourth chapter of Isaiah, 
and wrote odes of his own in the same manner. He had 
a lively fancy and a generous mind, capable of real elevation 
of thought, although for high flight as a poet his wings were too 
much clogged with ornament. He died in July, 1667, the year 
of the publication of that Annus Mirabilis in which the writing 
even of Dryden still had traces of the later Euphuism. But 
the Pindaric ode, as an imitation from the ancients, became one 
of the recognised forms of verse under the new influence. Neither 
Cowley nor any other of these new writers of Pindarics came 
near to Ben Jonson, whose noble " Pindaric Ode on the Death 
of Sir H. Morison " was true to the ancient model. But now, if 
a poet, bound by rule, and condemned to the heroic couplet 
as the safe classical measure, wished for a little liberty to be 
wilful in metre and audacious in thought, he could still be 
polite and classical by taking out his freedom under shadow of 
the name of a Pindaric ode, 



672 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. x£6tf 

Cowley said, in his " Ode to Brutus: " 

" From thy strict rule some think that thou didst swerve 
(Mistaken honest men) in Caesar's blood ; 
What mercy could the tyrant's life deserve 
From him who killed himself rather than serve ? " 

Lord Mulgrave, in his argumentative Pindaric " Ode on Brutus," 
in reply to Cowley, followed the poet's ode all through with his 
antagonism. When quoting one passage he could not keep 
his polite taste from " improving " it, and thus called attention 
in a note to the fact that he had done so : " In repeating these 
four verses of Mr. Cowley, I have done an unusual thing ; for 
notwithstanding that he is my adversary in the argument, and 
a very famous one too, I could not endure to let so fine a 
thought remain as ill-expressed in this ode as it is in his ; 
which anybody may find by comparing them together. But I 
would not be understood as if I pretended to correct Mr. Cowley, 
tho' expression was not his best talent : For, as I have mended 
these few verses of his, I doubt not but he could have done as 
much for a great many of mine." Cowley remained true to his 
opinions on the great conflict before the Restoration, but he had 
nothing in common with this intellectual foppery, or with the 
course of life at the court of Charles II. He passed, therefore, 
his last seven or eight years by the Thames, " in calm of life, all 
passion spent,'' away from the stir of London, first at Barn 
Elms, where he had a dangerous fever, and then at Chertsey. 
The wise thoughtfulness of these last years is shown by Cowley's 
Essays in Verse and Prose. Although he was a man who found 
much pleasure in solitude, and is said often to have left the room 
when a woman entered, he animated these essays with the*love of 
liberty in a social form. Solitude meant liberty to think. " The 
first Minister of State," said Cowley, " has not so much business 
in public as the wise man has in private." The private station, 
not in bonds to poverty nor under the restraints of artificial 
form, was his ideal of a freeman's life, "with so much know- 
ledge and love of piety and philosophy (that is, the study of 
God's laws and of his creatures) as may afford him matter 
enough never to be idle, though without business ; and never 
to be melancholy, though without sin or vanity." And again, 

" If ife should a well-ordered poem be 
(In which he only hits the white 
Who joins true profit with the best delight), 
The more heroique strain let others take, 
Mine the Pindarique way I'll make ; 



a.d. i6S 5 .] COWLEY'S ESSAYS. SAMUEL BUTLER. 673 

The matter shall be grave, the numbers loose and free ; 

It shall not keep one settled pace of time, 

In the same tune it shall not chime, 

Nor shall each day just to its neighbour rhime. 

A thousand liberties it shall dispense, 

And yet shall manage all without offence 

Or to the sweetness of the sound, or greatness of the sense." 

One source of the charm of Cowley's Essays is that they came 
straight from the heart, and that there is this unity of thought in 
their variety of treatment. Whatever his theme — Liberty, or 
Solitude, or Obscurity, or Greatness, or Avarice, or the Danger 
of an Honest Man in Much Company, or the Shortness of Life 
and the Uncertainty of Riches, or Nature in the Fields and 
in the Garden, or if he was only giving verse translation of 
Claudian's " Old Man of Verona," Horace's " Country Mouse,' 
or those lines from the second book of Virgil's " Georgics " 
which begin " O fortunatos nimium," or Martial's " Vis fieri 
Liber?" — the theme is always one, — Peace in the form of life 
which gives the highest Freedom to fit use of a full mind. 

25. In excuse for the king's indifference to Cowley, it may be 
said that as there was no possible accord in the vibration of the 
two minds, one could get no tone out of the other. Why, then, 
did Charles also neglect Samuel Butler, who aided the court 
party with lively jest against the Puritans, and was in much 
need of friendly patronage ? Charles shone in shallow mimicry 
of earnest men, and could put all his mind into the telling of an 
idle story ; he enjoyed ridicule of his adversaries, and he there- 
fore found much to enjoy in "Hudibras." But it was the work 
of a man who laboured and read, and who liked work. His 
Majesty liked sauntering through life. He preferred the com- 
pany of Killigrew (§ 2) and men whose jests were idle ; but even 
then he was apt to forget their faces if they were a week out 
of his sight, and Butler was too proud to stand in the throng of 
the court suitors. Samuel Butler was born in February, 161 2, 
at Strensham, Worcestershire, the fifth of seven children of a 
small farmer, who had sent him to the college school at Wor- 
cester. He began life as clerk to a justice of the peace, Mr. 
Jefferies, of Earl's Croombe, and he then amused himself with 
music and painting. Probably at this time he compiled in law 
French a complete syllabus of " Coke upon Littleton ; " there 
also existed in Butler's handwriting a French Dictionary, com- 
piled and transcribed by him. Afterwards Butler came into 
the service of the Earl of Kent, at Wrest, in Bedfordshire. He 

R R 



674 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1663 

was then about seventeen. Selden (ch. viii. § 19, 68) acting as 
solicitor and steward to the family, employed Butler to write 
and translate for him. Here Butler had access to books, and 
must have been an active and attentive reader. After several 
years at Wrest, he passed into the service of Sir Samuel Luke, 
at Wood End, or Cople Hoo Farm, three miles from Bedford. 
Sir Samuel Luke was a wealthy man, justice of the peace, 
colonel in the army of the Parliament, and member for Bedford- 
shire in the Long Parliament. Sir Samuel Luke and his Puritan 
friends seem to have suggested to Butler his burlesque poem ; 
indeed, Butler, in closing the first canto of his first part, indicated 
Sir Samuel Luke in a blank, when he made Hudibras, preparing 
" to keep the peace 'twixt dog and bear," say : 

" 'Tis sung there is a valiant Mameluke 

In foreign land, yclep'd 

To whom we have been oft compared 
For person, parts, address, and beard ; 
Both equally rsputed stout, 
And in the same cause both have fought ; 
He oft, in such attempts as these, 
Came off with glory and success ; 
Nor will we fail in th' execution, 
For want of equal resolution." 

After the Restoration, Butler was made secretary to Lord Car- 
bery, and steward of Ludlow Castle ; for Lord Carbery, Jeremy 
Taylor's friend, had become Lord President of Wales. In 
Ludlow Castle, Butler prepared for the press the first part of 
" Hudibras," which appeared in 1663. As a burlesque romance 
it is in the octosyllabic rhyme of our old metrical romances 
(ch. iii. § 30), with a frequent use of extra syllables for comic 
double and treble rhymes, like that which has kept alive the 
name of Alexander Ross, a busy ephemeral writer, with a 
bent towards religious history, who had been master of South- 
ampton School and chaplain to Charles I., and who died in 
1654. He had published, in 161 7- 19, a Latin poem on the 
History of the Jews ; in 1634, a Life of Christ, in words and 
lines taken from Virgil (Virgilius Evangelizans); and after 
divers other books, in 1652, Arcana Microco3ini ; or, the Hid 
Secrets of Man's Bodiej in the same year, in six books, a con- 
tinuation or second part of Raleigh's History of the World; 
and, in 1653, A View of All Religions. It was as Historian of 
the World and Viewer of All Religions that Butler whim- 
sically cited him, in the lines : 



a.d. 1663.] SAMUEL BUTLER. HUDIBRAS, 675 

" There was an ancient sage philosopher 
That had read Alexander Ross over, 
And swore the world, as he could prove, 
Was made of fighting and of love." 

So Butler, at the opening of " Hudibras," spoke of the times 
" when civic fury first grew high : " 

" And pulpit, drum ecclesiastic, 
Was beat with fist instead of a stick." 

So of the stocks, described as a castle : 

" In all the fabric 
You shall not see one stone nor a brick." 

\ 

Or the single rhyme could be made whimsically, as 

" If animal, both of us may 
As justly pass for bears as they ; 
For we are animals no less, 
Although of different specieses." 

The form of -Butler's mock heroic was influenced by his reading 
of " Don Quixote," whom he quoted now and then. " Don 
Quixote" had been translated by Thomas Shelton, from an 
Italian version, and first published in two quarto volumes, in 
1612 and 1620, afterwards in one folio volume, in 1652. Hudibras, 
on a horse clearly related to Rosinante, went " a colonelling " as 
a Presbyterian Quixote, and had his Sancho in Squire Ralpho, 
through whom Butler caricatured the Independents. In the 
debates between Hudibras and his squire, the points of difference 
between Presbyterians and Independents are touched lightly ; 
and what story there is proceeds, in good romance fashion, no 
faster than Chaucer's " Sir Thopas " (ch. iv. § 47). But the 
whimsical dialogues, descriptions, and turns of fancy that make 
up the poem, sparkle with keen wit applied incessantly to the 
real life and deeper thought of England in its day. The man 
of true genius never spends his energy on the mere outward 
fashions of his time. The story of the first part of the poem 
told how Sir Hudibras and Ralpho went forth to make an end 
of a bear-baiting, were drubbed in battle with the folk concerned 
in the bear-baiting, but were left, by the escape of the bear, 
masters of the field and of a one-legged fiddler, whom they 
carried off and put in the stocks. The escaped bear having been 
rescued, his friends came in search of the warriors, beset the 
house of Hudibras, and when he came out with Ralpho betimes 
in the morning, being stirred by a sense of victory to present 
himself with new hope to a disdainful widow who had goods and 

R R 2 



676 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1663 

chattels, he was in trouble again, and finally vanquished in 
single combat by a woman. Trulla then claimed his arms, 
adorned him with her petticoat, caused Hudibras and Ralpho to 
be put in the stocks from which the one-legged fiddler was re- 
leased. So they were left, Presbyterian and Independent, in 
high argument together about synods. There was no book so 
popular at court as " Hudibras " when it came out. The king 
quoted its couplets ; Lord Clarendon hung Butler's portrait on 
his wall ; it was, as Pepys records, the book most in fashion. 
The second part, equally popular, appeared in the following year, 
1664. Butler married, but not money. The king and court did 
nothing for him, and he was saved from absolute starvation only 
by the liberality of a bencher of the Middle Temple, Mr. Longue- 
ville, who at last paid for his funeral. The discredit of this 
neglect was felt by other men of genius who were Butler's con- 
temporaries. Dryden, in asking for unpaid arrears of his own 
salary, wrote, " It is enough for one age to have neglected Mr. 
Cowley and starved Mr. Butler." Otway, not long before he 
also died in hunger, wrote in the prologue to a play : 

" Tell 'em how Spenser died, how Cowley mourned, 
How Butler's faith and service were return'd." 

And Oldham asked, " On Butler, who can think without just 
rage ? " After publishing two parts of " Hudibras," Butler 
turned from his labour sick at heart. There was an interval of 
fourteen years, during which he lived in obscurity, before the 
third part appeared, in 1678; and he died in September, 1680. 

26. Otway, who prospered least among the dramatists of 
Charles II/s time, was the least frivolous. Thomas d'Urfey, 
born in Devonshire about 1630, lived to be very old, was known 
n the reign of George I. as one of the wits of the time of 
Charles II., and was " Tom" to the last, so that even the stone 
over his grave recorded of him "Tom d'Urfey: died February 
26, 1723." He wrote plays, operas, poems, and songs, and was a 
diner-out among great people, whom he entertained by singing 
his own songs to his own music. That was his chief title to 
honour, and he was so well known that a country gentleman 
who came to London must not go home till he was able to 
say that he had met Tom d'Urfey. In 1676, D'Urfey began 
with Archery Revived, a heroic poem; a tragedy, The Siege of 
Memphis; and a comedy, The Fond Husband j or, The Plotting 
Sister. Comedies, with an occasional tragedy or tragi-comedy, 



toa.d. 1694.] D'URFEY. ETHEREGE. SHADWELL. 6jJ 

then followed one another fast. In 1682, D'Urfey, who' had 
nothing of Butler's substance in him, published a satire, called 
Butler's Ghost ; or, Hudibras, the Fourth Part: with Reflec- 
tions on these Times. An imitation of Butler by Samuel 
Colvil, The Mock Poem; or, Whiggs' Supplicatio?i, some- 
times called the Scottish " Hudibras," had appeared in 1681, the 
year after Butler's death. A volume of songs by D'Urfey 
appeared in 1687, and the collection made from time to time 
was completed in six volumes by 1720, as Wit and Mirth j or, 
Pills to Purge Mela7icholy : being a large Collection of Ballads, 
Sonnets, &>c, with their Times. D'Urfey was of about Dryden's 
age, or a year or two older. Sir George Etherege was about 
four years, Thomas Shad well eight years, younger than Dry den ; 
and Elkanah Settle was eight years younger than Shadwell. 

Sir George Etherege, after some University training at 
Cambridge, some travel abroad, and some reading of law, gave 
himself to easy enjoyment of life among the men of fashion. 
He made himself a comrade of George Villiers, Sedley, Roches- 
ter, and their friends, by the success of his first comedy, The 
Comical Revenge s or, Love in a Tub, published in 1664. This 
was followed, in 1668, by She Would if She Could ; and, in 
1676, by his third and last comedy, The Man of Mode j or, Sir 
Fopling Flutter. There was ease and liveliness in these 
images of the corrupt life gathered about Charles II., by one 
who found enjoyment in its baseness. Etherege got his knight- 
hood to enable him to marry a rich widow ; was sent as English 
Minister to Ratisbon, and died there about 1694, by breaking 
his neck in a fall down-stairs when, as a drunken host, he was 
lighting his guests out of his rooms. 

Thomas Shadwell, of a good Staffordshire family, was 
born in 1640, at Stanton Hall, Norfolk. He was educated at 
Caius College, Cambridge, studied law in the Middle Temple, 
went abroad, came home, and at once became popular as a 
dramatist. He began, in 1669, with The Royal Shepherdess, a 
tragi-comedy. This was followed by the comedies of The 
Sullen Lovers and The Humourists; and, in 1671, The Miser, 
from Moliere. The tragedy of Psyche, in 1675, was followed in 
1676 by the tragedy of The Libertine and the comedy of Epsom 
Wells. In 1678, Shadwell made the requisite improvements in 
Timon of Athens, which he said in the dedication " was origi- 
nally Shakespeare's, who never made more masterly strokes 
than in this ; yet I can truly say I have made it into a play.' 



6/8 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1671 

Shadwell's Lancashire Witches and Teague O'Divelly, the Irish 
Priest, first printed in 1682, held the stage for some time, 
and contains one of the earliest specimens of the stage Irish- 
man. This play not only ridiculed the Roman Catholics, but 
was spoken of before its production as containing an attack 
on many clergy of the Church of England, in the character 
of Smerk, chaplain to Sir Edward Hartfort, "foolish, knavish, 
Popish, arrogant, insolent ; yet for his interest slavish." Abuse 
of the office of domestic chaplain was satirized in this character, 
and also the spirit of Church intolerance against the Noncon- 
formists ; a great part of the dialogue that developed Mr. 
Smerk was struck out by the Master of the Revels, and ap- 
peared only in the published play, where it was printed in italics. 
Thus it was said to Smerk : 

" With furious zeal you press for discipline, 
With fire and blood maintain your great Diana, 
Foam at the mouth when a Dissenter's named ; 
(With fierie eyes, wherein we flaming see 
A persecuting spirit) you roar at 
Those whom the wisest of your function strive 
To win by gentleness and easie ways." 

The stage Irish of that time had a touch of the stage Welsh. 
One says to Teague, " You are a Popish priest ? " He 
answers, " Ah, but 'tis no matter for all daat, Joy : by my shoul, 
but I will taak de oades, and I think I vill be excus'd ; but 
hark vid you a while, by my trott, I shall be a Papist too for all 
dat, indeed, yes." In such comedies of Shad well as Epsom 
Wells, Bury Fair (1689), and The S cower ers (1690), we have 
a clear surface reflection of certain forms of life in the later 
Stuart time. 

Elkanah Settle, born at Dunstable in 1648, studied at 
Trinity College, Oxford, but left the University without a degree, 
came to London, and in 1673 achieved a great success with his 
tragedy in rhyme of The Einpress of Morocco. Settle showed 
some vanity in the dedication of the play, which was published 
with illustrative engravings— a frontispiece of the outside of the 
Duke's Theatre, and pictures of the stage set with the chief 
scenes. His fellow dramatists did not admire the young man's 
self-satisfied contempt of " the impudence of scribblers in this 
age," that " has so corrupted the original design of dedication." 
Having no very great genius to be proud of, he sneered at Dry- 
den's critical dedications and prefaces with a " But, my lord, 
whilst I trouble you with this kind of discourse, I beg you would 



toa.d. x6go.] SHADIVELL. SETTLE. CROWNE. 679 

not think I design to give rubs to the Press as some of our tribe 
have done to the Stage." Settle's popular play was open to 
criticism, and his vanity invited it. " The Empress of Morocco" 
was accordingly pulled to pieces in a pamphlet written chiefly 
by John Crowne, with aid from Shadwell and Dryden. Settle 
replied, and the controversy seemed to give him more import- 
ance with his public. Other tragedies by Settle followed: — 
Love and Revenge, in 1675 ; then Cambyses j The Conquest of 
China by the Tartars j Ibraham, the Illustrious Bass a, from 
Magdeleine de Scuderi's novel (§ 1); Pastor Fido, from 
Guarini's pastoral drama ; Fatal Love; The Female Prelate, 
being a History of the Life and Death of Pope Joan. All 
these were written before 1681. 

John Crowne, who had been foremost in attack on Settle's 
fl Empress of Morocco," was the son of an Independent minister 
in Nova Scotia. He was for a time gentleman usher to an old 
lady of quality; but in 1671 he appeared as a dramatist with 
the tragi-comedy of Juliana, the first of seventeen plays written 
before his death in 1703. He attached himself to the court 
party, and in 1625 satirized the Whigs in a comedy called City 
Politics. In the same year he produced at court the masque of 
Calisto. In 1677 Crowne brought out a tragedy in two parts 
on The Destruction of Jerusalem. It is said that after the 
appearance of this play, Rochester, who introduced Crowne at 
court, ceased to be his friend; also that he made enemies and 
hindered his future success by attacking the Whigs in his City 
Politics. The king promised to do something for him when he 
had written one comedy more, and gave him for groundwork, a 
Spanish play by Moreto, No Puede Ser (" It Cannot Be "), 
founded on the Mayor hnposible of Lope de Vega. This was 
the origin of Crowne's most successful comedy, Sir Courtly 
Nice; but Charles II. died on the last day of its rehearsal, 
and the dramatist had afterwards to live as he could by his 
talent. 

There was a marked influence of the Spanish comedy of 
intrigue upon our stage after the Restoration, and to the plays 
of Lope de Vega and Calderon had now been added those of 
Agustin Moreto, who died in 1669, aged fifty-one. Between 
1654 and 1 68 1 his works were being printed in three volumes, 
besides many detached pieces not included in the volumes. 
Moreto, besides religious and heroic plays, wrote comedies of 
intrigue which excelled in light character-painting. His fop, 



68o A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1672 

" the handsome Don Diego," passed into a proverb, and the 
same kind of light character-painting is a characteristic of much 
of the later Stuart comedy. 

27. Lee and Otway produced their first plays in the same 
year, 1675. Nathaniel Lee (b. 1650, d. 1690), the son of Dr. 
Lee, Incumbent of Hatfield, was educated at Westminster 
School and at Trinity College, Cambridge ; but, left to his own 
resources, he took to the stage, and, in 1672, played at the 
Duke's Theatre the part of Duncan in " Macbeth." Although 
an admirable reader, he was unable to get his living as an actor. 
He then produced, at the age of twenty-five, the first of his 
eleven plays, Neroj and between 1675 and 1684, this was followed 
by eight other plays of his own, including his two most popular, 
The Rival Queens; or, Alexander the Great (1677), and Theo- 
dosius j or, the Force of Love (1680). He also joined Dryden 
in the plays of CEdipus (1679) and The Duke of Guise (1683). 
There was a wildfire of imagination in Lee, and he drank too 
freely. In November, 1684, he was received into Bedlam, where 
he remained four years. A scribbler said to him when he was 
there, " It is easy to write like a madman." " No, said Lee, " it is 
not easy to write like a madman ; but it is very easy to write like 
a fool." Between his recovery and his death, at the age of forty, 
Lee wrote, in 1689 and 1690, two more plays, The Princess of 
Cleve and The Massacre of Paris j but he was chiefly dependent 
upon ten shillings a week from the Theatre Royal. He brought 
elevation of thought and occasional pathos, with frequent passion 
of love, into the sound and fury of the heroic style. There was 
more in him of the finer touch of nature than in any other of 
the dramatists of his time but Otway. 

Thomas Otway, son of the Rev. Humphrey Otway, 
Rector of Woolbeding, was born at Trotton, near Midhurst, 
Sussex, in March, 165 1. He was educated at Winchester 
School, and then at Christ Church ; but left Oxford without a 
degree, and became an unsuccessful actor in the Duke of York's 
company, failing at once in Mrs. Behn's tragedy of The Jealotis 
Bridegroom. The Earl of Plymouth, one of the king's natural 
sons, got Otway a commission as cornet of horse in the new 
levies for Flanders. He came back poor, produced Alcibiades 
in 1675, and soon afterwards, in the same year, Don Carlos, 
Prince of Spain, which was a great success, was played for 
thirty successive nights, and brought Otway some money. He 
took his plot (as Schiller did long afterwards) from Dom Carlos, 



toa.d. 1690.] NATHANIEL LEE. THOMAS OTVTaY. 68l 

Nouvelle Historique, published in 1672 by the Abbe de St. 
Real, a clever French writer of that time, who had taste and 
refinement, and who enjoyed the study of striking passages of 
history, and like his friend, Varillas, cared rather to make them 
interesting by the interweaving of fictitious incident than to 
distinguish himself by fidelity of record. In 1677 Otway pub- 
lished his tragedy of Titus and Berenice, from Racine's Bere?iice, 
produced at the same time as Corneille's Tite et Berenice, in 
1670. The plays of Racine and Corneille were both written to 
order. Otway followed in his own way Racine's plot, using the 
same characters, and compressing the piece into three acts. 
With his version of " Berenice," Otway published a version from 
Moliere's comedy (first acted in 167 1) of The Cheats of Scapin. 
A comedy, Friendship in Fashion, which reflected the low 
morals of the court, was followed, in 1680, by two tragedies 
very different in character. One of them, Caius Marius, illus- 
trated the predominance of the French school and the neglect 
of Shakespeare ; for here Otway, not indeed with the self-suffi- 
ciency of a Lord Mulgrave, but with expression in the prologue 
of a poet's reverence for Shakespeare, mixed with his play 
a great part of " Romeo and Juliet/' in a form that suited the 
new sense of the polite in literature. The classical discords of 
Marius and Sulla replaced those of the Capulets and Montagues, 
and Romeo became a Marius Junior. Some speeches of Mer- 
cutio were given to Sulpitius; Nurse remained Nurse, but Juliet 
was changed into Lavinia. Otway's other play, produced in 
1680, was The Orphan. In both these plays Otway abandoned 
rhyme, and adopted blank verse as the fit measure for tragedy. 
In The Oiphan he abandoned also the French faith in kings 
and queens, princes and princesses, as the sole objects of tragic 
interest. Monimia, the orphan daughter of an old brother-in- 
arms, whose whole wealth and nobility were in his worth as a 
man, is bred in the house of a nobleman who lives retired from 
court, with two sons and a daughter. Her brother, an impulsive 
honourable soldier, comes as guest to the house. These, with 
the chaplain and various servants in the country house, are all 
the persons of the play. The tragedy is a domestic drama, 
written in verse with much care. Animal passion is too obtru- 
sively the mainspring of the plot ; but the appeal was meant to 
be throughout to the higher feelings of the audience, and The 
Orphan held the stage for years as a touching picture of inno- 
cence and beauty cast down into uttermost distress. If the 



682 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1674 

passions were overstrained, they yet had truth of nature for their 
starting-point ; and Otway drew natural tears from many who 
found only an artificial excitement in heroic plays which did not 
" servilely creep after sense." Having found in blank verse the 
fitting instrument, Otway put out his strength again in a play, 
Venice Preserved, which is still occasionally acted. He took his 
story from another book of the same French writer to whom he 
was indebted for the plot of his " Don Carlos." " Venice Pre- 
served" is founded on the best book written by St. Rdal, entitled 
Histoire de la Conjuration que les Espagnols formerent, en 161 8, 
conti'e la Republique de Venise, published in 1674, and, like the 
" Dom Carlos," a passage of history transformed into historical 
romance. Otway, who produced in The Orphan and Venice 
Preserved the two best plays of the later Stuart drama, and who 
was a stout supporter of the Royal cause in detached poems as 
well as through his plays, was suffered to die of want. He 
died in April, 1685, in a public-house on Tower Hill, in which he 
had taken refuge to escape a debtor's prison. It is said that, in 
passion of hunger, he asked a shilling from a gentleman, who gave 
him a guinea ; that he at once bought bread, and was choked in 
eager swallowing of the first mouthful. Probably that is an in- 
vention ; but it is an invention founded on the fact of Otway's 
absolute distress and poverty. In his Orphan, although he laid 
the scene in Bohemia, there was England meant in the old 
noble's language of devotion to the king, but he said to his 
sons, bitterly : 

" If you have Children, never give them Knowledge, 
'Twill spoil their Fortune, Fools are all the Fashion. 
If you've Religion, keep it to yourselves : 
Atheists will else make use of Toleration, 
And laugh you out on't ; never shew Religion, 
Except ye mean to pass for Knaves of Conscience, 
And cheat believing Fools that think ye honest." 

Reaction against past restraint, and scorn of a mere self-seeking 
show of righteousness among the meaner part of their oppo- 
nents, made it with many a mark of loyalty to seem licentious 
and profane. The corruption of the time appeared therefore 
to be more than it was ; but was much more than it would have 
been if Charles II. could have served his country in any other 
way than by giving the help of his bad character towards 
the Revolution. 

28. One woman was among those who maintained the more 
corrupt form of the later Stuart drama. This was Aphra 



toa.d. 1689.] THOMAS OTWAY. APHRABEHN. 683 

Behn, born at Canterbury, in ;'i642, daughter of a General 
Johnson, who obtained through his kinsman, Lord Willoughby, 
the post of Governor of Surinam and the thirty-six West India 
Islands. He went when Aphra was very young, and died on 
the passage ; but his widow and family settled in Surinam, where 
Aphra became acquainted with the African prince, Oroonoko, a 
slave who suffered torture and death for his love of liberty. 
Upon his story she founded afterwards the best of her novels. 
Aphra returned to England after some years in South America, 
married Mr. Behn, a Dutch merchant in London, and was soon 
left a widow. Charles II. delighted in her, and sent her in 1666, 
during the Dutch War, to use her charms of wit and liveliness as 
a political spy at Antwerp. She obtained an ascendancy over 
Van der Albert, an influential man, who enabled her to report 
home De Ruyter's design of coming up the Thames, but her 
report was not believed. Van der Albert died afterwards when 
he was about to marry Mrs. Behn. On her way home she was 
nearly shipwrecked. Her character suffered by the freedom of 
her manners. She began her career as a dramatist in 1671, and 
wrote for her livelihood seventeen plays, chiefly comedies, which 
reflected the gross manners of the court, and now and then be- 
laboured the Roundheads, who gave their name to one comedy 
produced in 1682. Her most popular play was The Rover; or, 
the Banished Cavaliers, in 1677, followed by a second part in 
1681. She translated Rochefoucauld's "Maxims" and Fonte- 
nelle's "Plurality of Worlds," wrote model love-letters, wrote 
poems, and was called " the divine Astraea." She wrote also short 
novels, among which, and among all her writings, Oroonoko j 
or, the Royal Slave, stands foremost, generous in temper, pure 
in tone, and the first book in our literature that stirred English 
blood with a sense of the negro's suffering in slavery. The 
story was a romance founded on fact, told as from the writer's 
personal experience in Surinam, in clear, good, unaffected 
English. Mrs. Behn, with a slave for her hero, known as 
Caesar among the planters, a slave whose thirst for freedom 
drew other slaves from their work, who was flogged and rubbed 
with pepper, and at last was hacked to death limb by limb, re- 
presented him as a man with high and tender feeling. When 
she had told of his fortitude, she wrote of the unhappy negro as 
" this great man." " Thus," she says, " died this great man ; 
worthy of a better fate, and a more sublime wit than mine to 
write his praise : yet I hope the reputation of my pen is con- 



684 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1660 

siderable enough to make his glorious name to survive to all 
ages, with that of the brave, the beautiful, and the constant 
Imoinda." The second strong call upon Englishmen for sym- 
pathy with the slave was produced by this novel. Mrs. Behn 
died in 1689; in 1699, Southerne's best play, " Oroonoko," 
founded upon her novel, enforced its argument upon the stage. 

Of another lady known as a writer, who died early in the 
reign of Charles II., and who was praised in style of the Pre- 
cieuses as " the matchless Orinda," none but pleasant memories 
remain. She was Katherine Philips, for whom Jeremy 
Taylor wrote his treatise on Friendship (ch. ix. § 14), and who 
was worthy to be Jeremy Taylor's friend. Although praised at 
court she preferred quiet life with her husband in Wales, and 
died of small-pox in 1664, when only thiity-one years old. She 
published nothing in her lifetime. A few months before her 
death a publisher had collected copies of her poems that had 
passed among her friends, and issued them without her consent, 
as Poems by the Incomparable Mrs. K. P. Five years after 
her death a friend edited the first full and accurate edition of 
her works, as Poems by the most deservedly Admired Mrs. 
Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda. To which is added 
Monsieur Cornell le's Pompey and Horace Tragedies. With 
several other Translations out of 'French. Cowley was among 
the writers of the prefatory verses in her honour. There is one 
note never absent from the praise : 

" She does above our test examples rise 
In hate of vice and scorn of vanities." 

The verses themselves, touched by the French school in their 
manner, are not of the highest mark as poetry, but natural in 
their topics, and full of the kindly grace of womanhood. Friend- 
ship is a prominent theme. The volume includes various poems 
to special friends, Lucasia (Mrs. Anne Owen, by her second 
marriage Lady Dungannon) and Rosania (Regina Collier) ; 
occasional verses upon marriages and deaths among the friends 
of her home circle ; an epitaph on her mother-in-law ; praise 
of country life ; of the Welsh language ; lines to her husband 
upon a short parting ; lines on the last sad parting from two 
children ; — all that she wrote showing what Cowley called " the 
tender goodness of her mind." Not long before her own death 
she lost her first-born, in his thirteenth year, and her lament 
for him closed thus : 



to a.d. 1687.] KATHERINE PHIL1I-S. HENRY MORE. 685 

"Alas ! we were secure of our content ; 
But find too late that it was only lent 
To be a mirrour, wherein we may see 
How frail we are, how spotless we should be. 
But if to thy blest soul my grief appears, 
Forgive and pity these injurious tears ; 
Impute them to Affection's sad excess, 
Which will not yield to Nature's tenderness, 
Since 'twas through dearest ties and highest trust 
Continued from thy cradle to thy dust ; 
And so rewarded and confirm'd by thine, 
That (wo is me ! ) I thought thee too much mine. 
But I'll resign, and follow thee as fast 
As my unhappy minutes will make hast. 
Till when, the fresh remembrances of thee 
Shall be my emblems of mortality. 
For such a loss as this (bright Soul) is not 
Ever to be repaired or forgot." 

29. The Life of the Soul had been the chief subject of the 
poetry of Henry More (ch. viii. § 58), who lived throughout the 
reign of Charles II., and produced, in 1675 an d 1679, first his 
theological works, and then his philosophical works translated 
into Latin. Henry More died in 1687. 

Robert Boyle, throughout the reign of Charles II., was 
still blending religion with his philosophical researches into 
nature. Henry More, doubtless, was in good sympathy with 
Robert Boyle's letter on Seraphic Love, addressed to a young . 
" Lindamor" disappointed in courtship; a commendation to him 
of that purely spiritual love to which More found both Chris- 
tianity and Platonism inviting men. This, although written in 
1648, was first published in 1660, a little before the book which 
set forth Boyle's New Experiments Physico-mechanical, touching 
the Spring of the Air and its Effects, made for the most part in 
a New Pneumatical Engine. 

These were experiments made with the air-pump, a con- 
trivance first suggested, in 1654, by Otto Guericke, a magistrate 
of Magdeburg, but more perfectly worked out, in 1658 or 1659, 
by 'Robert Boyle, with the help of Robert Hooke, who was 
then about twenty-three years old, living with Boyle as a 
chemical assistant. Hooke was made, in 1662, Curator of the 
Experiments of the Royal Society ; in 1664, its Professor of 
Mechanics ; and, in 1665, Professor of Geometry in Gresham 
College. He improved the microscope, was at the head of 
English microscopic research, and published, in 1666, his Micro- 
graphia,; or, some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies, 
made by Magnifying Glasses. Robert Hooke, who was made 



686 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d 1661 

M.D. by Tillotson in 1691 and died in 1702, was one of the 
best representatives of the activity of scientific thought under 
Charles II. 

Robert Boyle's publications continued to witness to his 
active interest in science. In 1661 he published considerations 
on the conduct of experiments, and some more experiments of 
his own, in Certain Physiological Essays; published, also, his 
Sceptical Chemist, in argument against those short-sighted 
philosophers who " are wont to endeavour to evince their salt, 
sulphur, and mercury to be the true principles of things." In 
1663 he published Some Considerations touching the Usefulness 
of Experimental Natural Philosophy, and Experiments and 
Considerations touching Colours, also Considerations touching 
the Style of the Holy Scriptures; and among many other little 
books, with God and Nature for their theme, was one, published 
in 1665, but written when he was very young — "in my infancy," 
he says, .writing to his sister, Lady Ranelagh, who had asked 
him to find it — entitled, Occasional Reflectioiis upon Several 
Subjects : whereto is premised a Discom'se about such kind of 
Thoughts. This was the book afterwards ridiculed by Swift, in 
his " Meditations on a Broomstick." 

There was much ridicule of the Royal Society in its first 
years, and a belief in many that its new ways of research were 
destructive of true learning, and even of religion. This caused 
Thomas Sprat to publish, in 1667, his History of the Royal 
Society. Sprat, born in Devonshire in 1636, was a clergyman's son. 
He studied at Wadham College, Oxford, became M.A. in 1657, 
and obtained a fellowship. His turn for science meant no more 
than activity of mind under the influence of Dr. Wilkins (ch. viii. 
§ 59, 64), who was Warden of Wadham. His turn for verse 
seems to have meant no more than activity of mind under the 
influence of Cowley, who, since 1657, had been, as Dr. Cowley, one 
of Wilkins's circle of philosophers. Sprat's last poem was upon 
Cowley's death, his first was on the death of Cromwell, " To the 
Happy Memory of the late Lord Protector ;" and he published 
also, in 1659, a Cowleian poem, in thirty-one " Pindaric" stanzas, 
on The Plague of Athens, suggested by the description of it in 
Thucydides. Sprat took orders at the Restoration, was chaplain 
to the Duke of Buckingham, and soon afterwards to the king. 
Cowley, with whom he was intimate, died in 1667 ; and Sprat's 
enthusiastic ode on Cowley's poetry was written in the year of 
the publishing of his " History of the Royal Society." Cowley 



toa.d. 1691.] ROBERT BOYLE. SPRAT. WILKINS. 687 

had entrasted to his friend Sprat the care of his writings, and 
in 1668 Sprat published Cowley's Latin works, prefaced with a 
Life of Cowley, also in Latin. This was amplified and prefixed, 
in 1688, to an edition of Cowley's English works. Thomas Sprat's 
life after the age of thirty-two does not concern literature. In 
1688 he had been four years Bishop of Rochester. He complied 
as passively as he could with the Revolution, and died at the 
age of seventy-seven. 

In 1668, Dr. John Wilkins (ch. ix. § 18), who had become 
Dean of Ripon, was made Bishop of Chester; and in the same 
year his most interesting work, An Essay towards a Real 
Character and a Philosophical Language, was printed by the 
Royal Society. This applied natural philosophy to language, 
and laboured towards the deduction from first principles of 
quickened intercourse among men, by an easy common lan- 
guage in which significant signs were to build up the meaning 
of each word. Bishop Wilkins died in 1672, at his friend 
Tillotson's house in Chancery Lane. 

Robert Boyle's writings chiefly concerned experiments on 
air and on flame, till 1674, when he published Observations about 
the Saltness of the Sea, and a book written during his retirement 
from London in ( the plague-time of 1665, The Excellency of 
Theology compared with Natural Philosophy, as both are the 
Objects of Men's Study. In the following year, 1675, appeared 
his Considerations about the Reconcilableness of Reason and 
Religion. Robert Boyle, who never named God without a 
reverent pause, refused to take orders with assurance of high 
Church promotion ; he said that he could serve religion more 
effectually as a layman. He sent to a friend in the Levant, for 
distribution, Dr. Edward Pocock's translation into Arabic of 
Grotius on the "Truth of Christianity," printed at Boyle's 
expense, after a liberal reward to the translator. Boyle caused 
also an Irish Bible to be produced, and this too was printed at 
his expense. As one of its directors, he was active in urging the 
East India Company to use its influence in spreading Christianity 
with trade ; and he was the first governor of a corporation for the 
propagation of the Gospel and the conversion of the American 
natives in New England. For six years he helped to provide 
Burnet with the means that enabled him to write and publish 
the first volume of his " History of the Reformation" (§ 22). 
In 1680 Robert Boyle declined the Presidency of the Royal 
Society, because he was unwilling to be bound by test and oaths 



688 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1664 

on taking office. He was not a Nonconformist, but was zealous 
against intolerance. He also declined the Provostship of Eton, 
and several times refused a peerage. He is said to have spent 
^1,000 a year in works of benevolence. Robert Boyle was tall, 
very thin, and of feeble constitution. He never married. His 
dearest female friend was his sister, Lady Ranelagh, whom he 
survived only a week. He died at the end of December, 1691. 

30. Isaac Newton (not Sir Isaac till Queen Anne's reign) 
was born at the manor of Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, on Christ- 
mas-day, 1642. His father's death left the manor to him in his 
childhood, and a few years afterwards his mother married again. 
He went to the free school at Grantham, and was then taken 
home to learn the management of his small property ; but his 
bent for study caused him to be sent back to Grantham School, 
and entered, at eighteen, Trinity College, Cambridge, where he 
took his degree as B.A. in 1664. There his interest in mathe- 
matics was quickened by Isaac Barrow, who became, in 1663, 
the first Lucasian lecturer in mathematics (§ 22). From Euclid, 
understood at the first reading, Newton turned to Descartes, 
whose new methods were then being followed at Cambridge, 
and from Descartes passed to the mathematical writings of 
John Wallis (ch. viii. § 64; ch. ix. § 18), and these, especially 
his Arithmetica Infinitorum, were the books that stimulated 
Newton's own genius, and led him to his theory of fluxions 
(differential and integral calculus) promulgated in 1665, at the 
age of twenty-three. Leibnitz afterwards contested with him 
honours of discovery. This was an addition to mathematical 
science which gave the most essential aid to exact calculation of 
the movements of the heavenly bodies. Newton occupied him- 
self, also, at this time, with the grinding of object-glasses. 
Observations with a prism led Newton to views upon the 
decomposition of light, which were developed into a new revela- 
tion of the processes of Nature. In 1667 he became M.A. and 
Fellow of his College. In 1669 he succeeded his friend Barrow 
as mathematical professor ; and the course of his researches at 
that time caused him to give lectures on optics, in Latin. In 
167 1 Isaac Newton became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and 
communicated to it his new theory of Light. His first discovery 
of the law of Gravitation was made also in the reign of 
Charles II., although not published until 1687. Newton's mar- 
vellous insight into the order of Nature increased his reverence 
for the Creator. Ke spent much time in study of the Bible; 



toa.d. 16S7. 1 ISAAC NEWTON. POLITICAL ECONOMISTS. 689 

and when he became foremost in fame among philosophers, and 
there was wonder at the comprehensive character of his dis- 
coveries, he said only, " To myself I seem to have been as a 
child picking up stones on the sea-shore, while the great ocean 
of truth lay unexplored before me." 

31. The busy spirit of inquiry that had advanced from 
reform of Church discipline to active study of the foundations 
of religion and government, that sought more and more to 
interpret and apply to the use of man the laws of external 
nature, was at the same time occupied with a scrutiny of those 
natural laws which affect the results of human intercourse and 
the social well-being of nations. Attempts were made in the 
direction of a science of Political Economy. In 1664, with some 
curious documents upon our trade with the East Indies, 
appeared England s Treasure by Foreign Trade, by Thomas 
Mun, the ablest advocate of the East India Company. He was 
then dead, and might have written the book five-and-twenty 
years before. In this work Mun upheld foreign commerce as 
the best source of a nation's wealth ; and held by an old theory 
of the balance of trade, that our exports should exceed our 
imports, so that the difference between them — the balance of 
trade — should always be coming in as bullion or money. 
Another of the reasoners on commerce in the reign of 
Charles II. was Sir Josiah Child (b. 1630, d. 1699), who 
published, in 1668, a New Discourse of Trade. It argued inci- 
dentally against the dread of depopulation by colonies, and 
other errors ; but its main object was to advocate reduction of 
the legal rate of interest. Sir William Petty (ch. ix. § 18) 
published, in 1667, a treatise On Taxes a7id Cont?'ibutions J and in 
it he was, incidentally, the first to lay down the doctrine that 
the value of commodities is determined by the labour and time 
needed for producing them. Petty died in 1687. His widow 
was made Baroness Shelburne. The elder of his two sons 
succeeded to that title, and died childless. The title was then 
revived in Henry, the second son, great uncle of the first 
Marquis of Lansdowne. 

In medicine the advance made by Thomas Sydenham 
from traditions in the treatment of disease to fresh observation 
and thought was so great that the modern art of healing was, 
in a sense, founded by him. Sydenham was born of a good 
Dorsetshire family in 1624, went to Oxford at eighteen, and at 
the age of twenty-four, in 1648, took the degree of M.B., and 

S S 



690 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1663 

obtained a fellowship at All Souls. He visited the medical 
school at Montpellier, and then practised medicine at West- 
minster. In 1663 he was made Licentiate of the Royal College 
of Physicians. His medical writings are not voluminous, but 
they are very practical. He observed nature minutely, and 
was a fellow-thinker with Rcbert Boyle, who had a most lively 
interest in the application of the study of nature to the practice 
of medicine. Among Boyle's suggestions was an anticipation of 
the observing of sounds within the body as a help to a know- 
ledge of the nature of disease. Writing of a certain fever, 
Sydenham described his treatment, and said : " Meanwhile I 
watched what method Nature might take, with the intention of 

subduing the symptoms by treading in her footsteps 

more could be left to Nature than we are at present in the habit 
of leaving her. To imagine that she always wants the aid of 
Art is an error— an unlearned error, too." The physician must, 
he argued, follow and aid the processes by which Nature relieves 
herself of a disease, or else he must discover a specific The 
search for specifics, dwelt upon by Robert Boyle as one duty of 
the physician, seemed to Sydenham also of highest importance. 
One of the few known specifics, Peruvian bark, which has a 
supreme power over ague, Sydenham used with the best effect. 
It became known to the Jesuits in 1638, from its use by the 
natives when the Countess of Cinchona, wife of the vice-regent 
of Peru, was cured of ague by it. In 1639 the Jesuits carried it 
to Spain. It was introduced into England in 1653, against medi- 
cal condemnation as quackery. In 1658 much was said of an 
alderman who died of ague with bark, and the prejudice was so 
strong that Cromwell died of a tertian ague when bark might 
have saved his life. Not long before the use of bark, one in 
four and a half of all the destths in England was from ague. 
A century later the proportion of deaths from ague had come 
to be one in 3,767. Sydenham established the use of "Jesuits' 
Powder" in ague, and was the first to introduce a great 
reform into the treatment of small-pox. His medical writings 
chiefly dealt with the epidemics that spread death in our towns, 
because in this direction he might help to do in his own art 
the highest service to society. He died in 1689. 

32. Observation of nature was not yet applied to history. 
William Prynne (ch. viii. § 56), when he had ended his battle 
with Episcopacy, and had his revenge on Laud, turned his 
bitterness against the Independents. He was strong for recon- 



toa.d. 1G89.] THOMAS SYDENHAM. LORD CLARENDON. 69 1 

cilement with the king. Under the Commonwealth he was in 
opposition to the Independents, openly defied Cromwell's 
authority, and was imprisoned. He assisted in the Restoration, 
sat for Bath in Parliament, and became under Charles II. 
Keeper of the Records in the Tower, with a salary of ^500 a 
year. In this reign he published the three folios known as 
Prynne's Records, An Exact Chronological and Historical 
Demonstration of our British, Roman, Saxon, Danish, 
Norman, English Kings' 1 Supreme Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction 
in and over all Spiritual or Religious Affairs, &c. These 
records of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the kings of England 
extend to the end of the reign of Edward I. Prynne died 
in 1669. 

33. Edward Hyde was made at the Restoration Earl of 
Clarendon and Lord Chancellor. After his fall, in November, 
1667, he went to France, and died at Rouen, in December, 
1674- His Brief View of the Pernicious Errors in Hobbes's 
Leviathan appeared two years after his death ; but his History 
of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, begun in the Year 
1641, was first published at Oxford, in three folios, in 1702-4. 
Still later, in 1727, appeared in folio A Collection of several 
Tracts of the Right Honourable Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 
containing his "Vindication" from the charge of high treason 
that closed his political career ; " Reflections upon several 
Christian Duties, Divine and Moral, by way of Essays," all 
written after his fall ; a " Dialogue on Education," and a 
complete set of " Contemplations and Reflections on the Psalms 
of David." The MSS. of Clarendon's own Account of his Life, 
from his Birth to the Restoration in 1660, and a Continuation 
from 1660 to 1667, written for the information of his children, 
were given by Clarendon's descendants to the University of 
which he had been chancellor, and first published at Oxford in 
1759. The Continuation serves at the same time as a con- 
tinuation of the History of the Rebellion, Clarendon's life 
being as inseparable from the events in which he played a 
leading part as his history is inseparable from the bias of 
mind which determined his career. 

34. Thomas Hobbos (ch. viii. § 66; ch. ix. § n), living far 
into the reign of Charles II., published, in 1675, a Translation 
of the Iliad and Odyssey into English verse, after an experiment 
with four books of the "Odyssey" as The Voyage of Ulysses. He 
died in 1679. at the age of ninety-two. In the year of his death 

S S 2 



692 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1665 

appeared a Latin poem by him on his own Life, written at the 
age of eighty-four, and his Behemoth ; The History of the Civil 
Wars of England, and of the Coancels and Artifices by which 
they were cai'ried on, from the Year 1640 to the Year 1660. 
This is discussed in the form of a dialogue between A and B, 
and sets forth Hobbes's opinions on the place of the Roman 
Catholics, Presbyterians, and Independents in their relation to 
the Civil War, upon ship-money, the action of the Long Parlia- 
ment and the Commonwealth, and other topics interesting to a 
philosophical inquirer with some strong opinions of his own. 

B says in the course of this dialogue that he should like to 
see " a system of the present morals written by some divine cf 
good reputation and learning, and of the late king's party." 
" I think, 1 ' A answers, " I can recommend unto you the best 
that is extant, and such a one as (except a few passages that I 
mislike) is very well worth your reading. The title of it is, The 
Whole Duty of Man laid down in a Plain and Familiar Way:' 
This popular book, with prayers appended, including a prayer 
for the Church and prayers " for those who mourn in secret in 
these times of calamity," was first published in 1659, was trans- 
lated into Welsh in 1672, into Latin in 1693, and has been attri- 
buted by different speculators to three archbishops, two bishops, 
several less dignified clergymen, and a lady. 

35. Sarnuel Parker was a worldly defender of the Church 
against Nonconformity. He was born in 164c, the son of one 
of Cromwell's committee-men, and a strict Puritan until the 
Restoration, when he had been a year at Oxford. In 1665, at 
the age of twenty-five, he became one of the Fellows of the 
Royal Society, and carried experimental science into theology 
with a book in Latin of " Physico-Theological Essays concern- 
ing God" — Tentamina Physico-Theologica de Deo — which got 
him the post of chaplain to Archbishop Sheldon, who also 
made him Archdeacon of Canterbury. In 1670 he published 
A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Polity, wherein the Authority of 
the Civil Magistrate over the Consciences of Subjects in Matters 
■ of Eternal Religion is Asserted; and in 1672 he wrote a preface 
to a posthumous work of Archbishop Bramhall's, A Vindica- 
tion of the Bishops from the Presbyteria?i Charge of Popery. 
This brought down on Samuel Parkers head the satire of 
Andrew Marvell (ch. ix. § 9), who under the Restoration re- 
presented Hull in Parliament, and fought for liberty of con- 
science with satire, the one weapon effective among triflers in 



toa.d. 1675. j SAMUEL PARKER. ANDREW MARVELL. 693 

high places. According to the custom of an older time, Hull 
paid its members, and private news-letters then furnishing 
what we find now in the newspapers, Marvell maintained a 
steady correspondence with his constituents, sending almost 
every post-night an account of the proceedings of Parliament. 
He seldom or never spoke in the House, but his pen was a 
known power. Indolent King Charles relished the sharpness 
of it, although his own follies and vices were not spared. The 
court party would have been glad to secure the one lively 
satirist who was not on their own side. Lord Danby found his 
way up to Mar veil's second floor in a court leading from the 
Strand, with message of regard from the king and expression 
of His Majesty's desire to serve him. Marvell answered that 
His Majesty had it not in his power to serve him. When a 
place at court was suggested, Marvell replied that if he accepted 
it he must either be ungrateful to the king in opposing court 
measures, or a traitor to his country in complying with them. 
His Majesty must believe him a loyal subject, and true to the 
king's real interest in remaining independent. Lord Danby 
ended with offer of a present of a thousand pounds from His 
Majesty, and that was refused as firmly. In one of his verse 
satires, " Hodge's Vision from the Monument, December, 1675," 
the member for Hull refers to the bribery of members of 
Parliament : 

" See how in humble guise the slaves advance 
To tell a tale of army, and of France, 
Whilst proud prerogative in scornful guise, 
Their fear, love, duty, danger does despise. 
There, in a bribed committee, they contrive 
To give our birthrights to prerogative : 
Give, did I say ? They sell, and sell so dear 
That half each tax Danby distributes there. 
Danby, 'tis fit the price so great shall be, 
They sell religion, sell their liberty." 

Marvell told the king in his verse that, as the astronomer de- 
scribed spots in the sun, he loyally described his faults, and 
pointed out that those who seemed his courtiers were but his 
disease. He attacked those who for their own advantage 

" About the common prince have raised a fence ; 
The kingdom from the crown distinct would see, 
And peel the bark to burn at last the tree. 
As Ceres corn, and Flora is the spring, 
As Bacchus wine, the Country is the king. 

Let him get rid of his " scratching courtiers " — " The smallest 



694 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1672 

vermin makes the greatest waste"— let him choose for his 
companions and counsellors generous men too noble to flatter, 
and too rich to steal : 

" Where few the number, choice is there less hard- 
Give us this court, and rule without a guard." 

The spots in the sun were assuredly not spared in Marvell's 
rhymes. In the dialogue between the horses of the two statues, 
that of Charles I. at Charing Cross, set up by Lord Danby, and 
that of Charles II. at Woodchurch, set up by Sir Robert Viner, 
tiiey agreed in lament 

" To see Dei Gratia writ on the throne, 
And the king's wicked life say, ' God there is none.' " 

The horse of Charing said to the horse of Woodchurch : 

" Thy rider puts no man to death in his wrath, 
But is buried alive in lust and in sloth ;" 

and thought he " had rather bear Nero than Sardanapalus." 

" Woodchurch. What is thy opinion of James, Duke of York? 
Charing. The same that the frogs had of Jupiter's stork. 

With Turk in his head, and the Pope in his heart, 

Father Patrick's disciples will make England smart. 

If e'er he be king I know Britain's doom, 

We must all to a stake or be converts to Rome. 

Ah Tudor ! ah Tudor ! of Stuarts enough ; 

None ever reigned like old Bess in the ruff." 

And presently we have this question and answer : 

" ' But canst thou devise when things will be mended ? ' 
' When the reign of the line of the Stuarts is ended.' " 

So spoke the verse of Marvell, whose satire both in verse and 
prose dealt only with the vital questions of his time. Thus, 
when Samuel Parker not only attacked the Nonconformists, but 
argued for the supreme power of a king to bind the consciences 
of his subjects, he brought Andrew Marvell down in unmerciful 
prose satire on himself and his cause. It was in 1672, and the 
town was then being amused with Buckingham's " Rehearsal," 
just produced. Marvell at once took from the popular play the 
machinery of his satire, and its name, The Rehearsal Trans- 
prosed, came from a passage in it. Mr. Bayes, explaining to 
Smith and Johnson his rules, as a dramatist, says, " ' Why, sir, 
my first rule is the rule of transversion, or regulus duplex : 
changing verse into prose, or prose into verse, alternative as 
you please.' Smith. * How's that, sir, by a rule, I pray?' Bayes. 
■ Why, thus, sir ; nothing more easy when understood : I take 



to a.d. !673.] THE REHEARSAL TRANSPROSED. 695 

a book in my hand, cither at home or elsewhere, for that's all 
one. If there be any wit in't, as there is no book but has some, 
I transverse it : that is, if it be prose, I put it into verse (but that 
takes up some time) ; if it be verse, put it into prose.' Johnson. 
1 Methinks, Mr. Bayes, that putting verse into prose should be 
call'd transprosing. Bayes. ' By my troth, a very good notion, 
and hereafter it shall be so.'" Following this notion, Andrew 
Marvell, when he put the Rev. Samuel Parker into the part of 
Bayes, and applied the new joke of the town to a comment on the 
advocate for a royal supremacy over men's consciences, called 
his book of prose satire The Rehearsal Transprosed. It was 
written against such doctrines as these : That unless princes 
have power to bind their subjects to that religion they appre- 
hend most advantageous to public peace and tranquillity, and 
restrain those religious mistakes that tend to its subversion, they 
are no better than statues and images of authority. That in 
cases and disputes of public concernment, private men are 
subject to the public conscience, and if there be any sin in the 
command, he that imposed it shall answer for it, and not I whose 
whole duty it is to obey. The commands of authority will 
warrant my obedience ; my obedience will hallow, or at least 
excuse my action, and so secure me frcm sin, if not from error ; 
and in all doubtful and disputable cases 'tis better to err with 
authority than to be in the right against it. That it is absolutely 
necessary to the peace and happiness of kingdoms that there be 
set up a more severe government over men's consciences and 
religious persuasions than over their vices and immoralities. 
MarvelPs satire upon Parker and his principles produced various 
answers,with such titles as, Rosemary and Bayes, The Transp?-oser 
Rehearsed, A Commonplace Book out of the Rehearsal Digested 
wider Heads, and Stoo him Bayes; or, Some Animadversions on 
the Humour of Writing Rehearsals. Samuel Parker, who, 
as chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury, had a voice in 
licensing, sought to withdraw the licence from Marvell's book. 
At last he replied to it with a Reproof to the Rehearsal Trans- 
prosed, and Marvell rejoined at once (in 1673) with u The Re- 
hearsal Transpros'd : The Second Part. Occasioned by Two 
Letters : The first Printed by a nameless Author, Intituled A 
Reproof &c. The Second Letter left forme at a Friend's House, 
Dated Nov. 3, 1673, subscribed 'J. G.,' and concluding with 
these words : ' If thou darest to Print or Publish any Lie or Libel 
against Doctor Parker, by the Eternal God I will cut thy 



696 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1673 

Throat.' Answered by Andrew Marvell." That was the title- 
page, and where the licenser's imprimatur should be there was 
a sentence from the Rep?-oof taken in place of license; for the 
author of the " Reproof," being the archbishop's chaplain, was 
an official licenser, and this was the sentence : " Reproof, p. 67. 
If you have anything to object against it, do your worst. Ycu 
know the press is open." Under this sentence, therefore, 
.Marvell wrote " Licensed the 1st of May, 1673. By the Author 
and Licenser of the P^cclesiastical Polity." Marvell never lost 
sight of the principle for which he was contending in the form 
of battle then most likely to prevail. Simply direct reasoning 
would have been read only by those who agreed with it already, 
but the worrying of Doctor Parker and his cause with reason in 
the form of a shrewd bantering satire, not free from a coarseness 
and rough personality more pleasant and convincing then than 
now, was a delightful spectacle even to Doctor Parker's friends. 
There was no better way of knocking the support from under a 
shallow and intemperate apostle of a king's right to direct the 
consciences of his people. Anthony a Wood says that Parker 
"judged it more prudent to lay down the cudgels than to enter 
the lists again with an untowardly combatant, so hugely well- 
versed and experienced in the then but newly refined art, 
though much in mode and fashion ever since, of sporting and 
jeering buffoonery. It was generally thought, however, by many 
of those who were otherwise favourers of Parker's cause, that the 
victory lay on Marvell's side, and it wrought this good effect on 
Parker, that for ever after it took down his great spirit." Burnet 
says he " withdrew from the town and ceased writing for some 
years." But Samuel Parker, who was made Bishop of Oxford 
by James II., and died in 1687, poured out his impotent rage 
against his adversary in a Latin History of his Own Time (from 
1660 to 16S0). De Rebus sui Te7iiporis Commentariorum Libri 
IV., which was not printed until 1726, appeared in an English 
translation by Thomas Newlin in 1727, and became known as 
" The Tory Chronicle." Marvell's character of Parker, in " The 
Rehearsal Transprosed," may not be so very far from the truth 
as Parker's account of Marvell in the History of his Own 
Time ; but in no case can a man's character be taken from an 
antagonist while, in the act of controversy, he is endeavouring 
to break his credit. Marvell's next prose satire was called forth 
about three years later by Dr. Francis Turner. The Bishop of 
Hereford, Dr. Croft, had published a book urging forbearance 



TOA.D. 1674.] ANDREW MARVELL. JOHN DRYDEN. 697 

and charity upon all the contending parties in religion. This 
book, called The Naked Truth; or, the True State of the Pri- 
mitive Church : by a Humble Moderator, had been attacked 
without forbearance or charity by Dr. Turner, Master of St. 
John's College, Cambridge, in Animadvei'sions on the Naked 
Trtith. That was in 1675, when the popular new play (printed 
in 1676) was Etherege's "Man of Mode" (§ 26). Marvell 
at once fitted Dr. Turner with a character out of it, as Mr. 
Smirkej or, the Divine in Mode, and again charged home on 
the court party with allusion fresh from the last new play, 
and a force of satire that cut off the unlucky Dr. Turner from 
the support and fellowship he looked for. Marvell added to his 
" Mr. Smirke " A Short Historical Essay co7icei'ning General 
Councils, C?-eeds, and Impositio?is in Matters of Religion. In 
1677 Marvell defended John Howe (ch. ix. § 13) against three 
assailants of a book of his on " Divine Prescience," and in the 
following year he published An Account of the Growth of 
Popery and Arbitrary Government in England. In August, 
1678, he died. 

36. John Dryden (§ 10 — 12, 15) also was being forced by 
the new taste of the court into expression of his most vigorous 
thought through satire. He still wrote for the stage. In 1673, when 
Settle published his " Empress of Morocco" (§ 26), Dryden wrote 
a poor tragedy to encourage public feeling against the Dutch 
after the breaking of the Triple Alliance. This was Amboynaj 
or, the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants. He 
printed also Marriage a la Mode, acted the year before, in 
which he blended prose scenes with blank verse again, as well 
as heroic couplets. Another play, produced in 1672, unsuccess- 
fully, The Assignation, was in prose, with a little blank verse, 
chiefly in the last act. In Amboyna, the dialogue is chiefly a 
loose blank verse printed as prose. In 1674, the year of Milton's 
death, Dryden published — it was not acted — an opera based on 
his " Paradise Lost,'' called The State of Innocetice and Fall of 
Man. It is in heroic rhyme, with little provision for song, but 
much for machinery and spectacle. The adaptation was made 
in good faith, but it is instructive to compare Milton's dialogue 
between Adam and Eve in their innocence with Dryden's 
endeavour to reproduce its effect on the minds of people who 
enjoyed the comedies of Etherege and Mrs. Behn. John Dryden 
was among those who had vLited John Milton, for, in the 
preface to his " Fables/ 5 Dryden quotes from a conversation 



698 a first sketch of English literature. [a.d. 1675 

with him. He is said to have asked Milton's leave to adapt 
*' Paradise Lost," and to have been answered with a good- 
humoured, "Ay, you may tag my verses." In 1675, Dryden 
produced a heroic play, Aurenge Zebe; or, the Great Mogul, 
which remained popular. It was the last play written by him 
in heroic rhyme, and he expressed in its dedication to Lord 
Mulgrave some weariness of play-writing, with a manifest feeling 
that he had not, as a dramatist, done justice to himself. Instead 
of rhyming plays, he was hoping for leisure to rhyme a great 
poem. " If I must be condemn'd to rhime," he said, " I should 
find some ease in my change of punishment. I desire to be no 
longer the Sisyphus of the Stage; to rowl up a stone with 
endless labour (which, to follow the proverb, gathers no moss), 
a-nd which is perpetually falling down again ; I never thought 
myself very fit for an employment where many of my pre- 
decessors have excell'd me in all kinds ; and some of my con- 
temporaries, even in my own partial judgment, have outdone 
me in comedy. Some little hopes I have yet remaining, and 
these too, considering n\y abilities, may be vain, that I may 
make the world some part of amends for many ill plays by an 
heroick poem. Your lordship has been long acquainted with 
my design, the subject of which you know is great, the story 
English, and neither too far distant from the present age, nor 
too near approaching it. Such, it is my opinion, that I could 
not have a nobler occasion to do honour by it to my king and 
country, and my friends; most of our ancient nobility being 
concerned in the action. And your lordship has one particular 
reason to promote this undertaking, because you were the first 
who gave me the opportunity of discoursing it to His Majesty 
and His Royal Highness. They were then pleas'd both to com- 
mend the design, and to encourage it by their commands. But 
the unsettledness of my condition has hitherto put a stop to my 
thoughts concerning it. As I am no successor to Homer in his 
wit, so neither do 1 desire to be in his poverty. I can make no 
rhapsodies, nor go a-begging at the Graecian doors, while I sing 
the praises of their ancestors. The times of Virgil please me 
better, because he had an Augustus for his patron. And to 
draw the allegory nearer you, I am sure I shall not want a 
Mecaenas with him. 'Tis for your lordship to stir up that 
remembrance in His Majesty, which his many avocations of 
business have caus'd him, I fear, to lay aside." This invocation 
is not equal to Milton's : 



TOA.D. i6 7 8.] JOHN DRYDEN. THOMAS RYMER. 699 

'• Chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer 

Before all temples the upright heart and pure, 

Instruct me 

what in me is dark 

Illumine, what is low raise and support."^ 

But no heroic poem came of a looking up to the divine majesty 
of Charles II. 

After " Aurenge Zebe," Dryden did cease for a time from 
writing plays, his next being in 1678, an ambitious revision of 
Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra/' as All jor Love ; or, The 
World Well Lost. In his preface, he said, " I have endeavour^ 
in this play to follow the practice of the ancients, who, as Mr. 
Rymer has judiciously observeJ, are, and ought to be. our 
masters. ... In my stile I have profess'd to imitate the 
divine Shakespear; which, that I might perform more freely, I 
have disincumber'd myself from rhyme. Not that I condemn 
my former way, but that this is more proper to my present 
purpose." 

37. Thomas liymer, here quoted with respect, was, in 1678 
about forty years old, a Yorkshireman, educated at Northallerton 
School and Cambridge, who had entered at Gray's Inn. When 
this preface was written, Rymer had just taken a foremost place 
among the critics who, following Boileau's argument for classical 
models and good sense, applied French Laws to English 
Literature, by publishing, early in 1678, The Tragedies of the 
Last Age Consider 'd and Examin'd by the Practice of the 
Ancients, and by the Common Sense of aH Ages. In a Letter 
to Fleetwood Shepheard, Esq. The plays here suggested for 
criticism were Beaumont and Fletcher's " Roilo," "King and No 
King," and "Maid's Tragedy;" Shakespeare's "Othello" and 
"Julius Caesar;" and Ben Jonson's "Catiline." But Rymer 
brought his letter to an end when he had criticized the three 
plays by Beaumont and Fletcher, and summed up with this 
opinion of the noblest epoch of dramatic literature in the world's 
history : " I have thought our poetry of the last age as rude 
as our architecture ; one cause thereof might be, that Aristotle's 
treatise of poetry has been so little studied amongst us." Mr. 
Rymer reserved the discussion of the other plays, and said, 
" With the remaining tragedies I shall also send you some 
reflections on that 'Paradise Lost' of Milton's which some are 
pleas'd to call a poem, and assert lime against the slender 
sophistry wherewith he attacques it." Mr. Rymer called the 



700 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a d. 1672. 

poetry of times before the French influence came in " rude as 
our architecture." The new polite taste condemned also Gothic 
architecture, because it was not based on Greek or Roman 
models. St. Paul's Cathedral, at this time being rebuilt after 
the Fire of London, is our noblest result of the classical 
renaissance that in architecture began in the time of Charles I., 
and had Inigo Jones for its leader. Dryden's plays, in 1679, 
were CEdipus, with Nathaniel Lee (§ 27), and a reconstruction 
of Shakespeare's " Troilus and Cressida," both in blank verse, 
with Limberham, a comedy in prose. The book of Troilus 
cuid Cressida had not only a dedication, with incidental criti- 
cism, but also a " Preface to the Play," in which Dryden 
discussed at some length the grounds of criticism in tragedy. 
The critical discussions in the dedications and prefaces to 
Dryden's published plays greatly assisted the sale of his play- 
books, and, when printed by themselves, they show their 
strength as by far the best and most characteristic criticism 
upon forms of poetry produced during the reign of Charles II. 
In the preface to "Troilus and Cressida" Dryden no longer 
disdained a servile creeping after sense, but wrote, " 'Tis neither 
height of thought that is discommended, nor pathetic vehemence, 
nor any nobleness of expression in its pre per place ; but 'tis a 
false measure of all these, something which is like 'em and is 
not them : 'tis the Bristol stone which appears like a diamond" — 
(" Evitons ces faux brillans," Boileau had said)— "'tis an ex- 
travagant thought, instead of a sublime one ; 'tis roaring mad- 
ness, instead of vehemence ; and a sound of words instead of 
sense"— (" Tout doit tendre au bon sens," Boileau had said). 
Dryden felt the genius of Shakespeare, had a sense even of 
smallness in the wit of what he held to be his own more 
refined age ; and if there had been the strength of Dryden in 
many writers, our literature would have profited by the just 
demand for good sense in poetry as a reaction from the later 
Euphuism (ch. viii. § 25), without losing height of thought, 
pathetic vehemence, or nobleness of expression. But the times, 
and his relation to them, gave Dryden little opportunity of 
touching the ideal that lay only half recognised within him. In 
December, 1679, ne was waylaid and cudgelled by ruffians, 
employed, it was believed, by the Earl of Rochester, who wrongly 
supposed him to have had a hand in Lord Mulgrave's Essay on 
Satire, that contained sharp lines not only on Rochester, but 
also on the vices of the king. In 1679 Dryden's salaiy and 



TOa.d. 1678.] DRYDEN. WILLIAM WYCHEE LEY. 70I 

pension began to fall into arrears, and continued to do so during 
the next four years. In 1679 he produced a translation of the 
Epistles of Ovid, by various hands besides his own. In the 
spring or summer of 1681, Dryden produced a play addressed to 
the popular feeling of the day against the Roman Catholic 
priesthood, called The Spanish Friar; or, the Double Dis- 
covery. It has earned special praise for the dramatic skill with 
which it makes an underplot unite with the main action of the 
piece. This appeared as what Dryden called " a Protestant 
play addressed to a Protestant patron" a few months before his 
"Absalom and Achitophel," which was published in November. 

38. When Dryden said, in 1675, in the dedication of 
"Aurenge Zebe," that some of his contemporaries had outdone 
him in comedy, the men he would have named would doubtless 
have been Sir George Etherege and William Wycherley, who 
had been then only three years before the town. In later life 
he quoted, in an " Epistle to Congreve," Etherege his court- 
ship ; Southern's purity ; the satire, wit, and strength of manly 
Wycherley. Southern did not appear as a dramatist till 1682. 

"William Wycherley was born in 1640, at Clive, near 
Shrewsbury, where his father had some property. After his 
earliest schooling he was taught in France, and there became a 
Roman Catholic. At the Restoration he returned to England, 
became a fellow-commoner of Queen's College, Oxford, and was 
re-converted to Protestantism. He said afterwards that his first 
play, Love in a Wood j or, St. James's Park, was written 
at nineteen, when he had just left France ; and that he wrote 
The Gentleman Dancing- Master when he had been a year at 
Oxford. He was at sea with the Duke of York at the defeat of 
the Dutch off Lowestoft, in June, 1665. Wycherley's " Love in 
a Wood" -was produced in 1672, and, together with his good 
looks, it won him the favour of one of the king's mistresses, the 
Duchess of Cleveland. His other play, written at college, The 
Gentleman Dancing-Master, was produced in the following 
year, 1673. ^- IS next acted play was not the next that he 
wrote, for he had written The Plain Dealer just after his 
experience of the Dutch war, at the end of 1665, but kept it 
by him in doubt of the town's acceptance of its character of 
the Plain Dealer — Manly, " of an honest, surly, nice humour, 
supposed first, in the time of the Dutch war, to have procured 
the command of a ship out of honour, not interest, and choosing 
a sea-life only to avoid the world." " The Plain Dealer," there- 



702 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 167s 

fore, was reserved, and The Country Wife, written at the age of 
thirty-two, when his earlier plays began to appear on the stage, 
was produced with great success in 1675. Then came, in 1677, 
The Plain Dealer on the stage, and those were the four comedies 
of Wycheriey, all produced in the reign of Charles II. He lived 
till 171 5, but wrote no more plays. After the publication of this 
play, Wycheriey was in a bookseller's shop at Tunbridge Wells 
with a friend, Mr. Fairbeard, when a rich, handsome young 
widow, the Countess of Drogheda, came into the shop and 
asked for "The Plain Dealer." " Madam," said Mr. Fairbeard, 
since you are for the Plain Dealer, there he is for you," and 
pushed Wycheriey towards her. This introduction led to their 
marriage. The lady proved a fond and jealous wife. She died 
soon, leaving Wycheriey her fortune ; but his title to it was 
successfully disputed, he was ruined by law-suits, and spent the 
last years of the reign of Charles II. in a debtor's prison. 
James II., after witnessing a performance of " The Plain Dealer," 
rescued its author from prison by giving him a pens*cn of ^200 
a year and offering to pay his debts. But Wycheriey did not 
venture to name all his debts, and left enough unpaid to weigh 
him down in after life. 

Wycheriey was the first vigorous writer of what has been 
called our Prose Comedy of Manners. In the absence of all 
that poetry which lies in a perception of the deeper truths and 
harmonies of life, his plays resemble other comedies of the later 
Stuart drama. There was little of it even in the metrical heroic 
plays. But Wycherley's differ from other comedies of their 
time by blending with surface reflection ot the manners of 
an evil time a larger, healthier sense of the humours of men. 
caught from enjoyment of Moliere. Wycherley's best plays are 
founded upon Moliere — The Country Wife upon PEcole des 
Femmes, and The Plain Dealer on Le Misanthrope. They are 
not translations ; but in turns of plot and certain characters the 
direct and strong influence of Moliere is evident. Dryden and 
others borrowed from M oliere ; Wycheriey was, in a way, 
inspired by him. He had not Moliere's rare genius, and could 
not reproduce the masterly simplicity and ease of dialogue that 
is witty, and wise, too, in every turn, while yet so natural as to 
show no trace of a strain for effect ; that is nowhere fettered to a 
false conventionality, but so paints humours of life as to be 
good reading for ever, alike to the strong men and to girls and 
boys. Our English writers of the Prose Comedy of Manners 



toa.d. 1685.] WYCHERLEY. THOMAS SOUTHERN. 703 

cannot claim readers, like Moliere, from civilized Europe in all 
after time ; but, as compared with other English dramatists of 
their own 'time, they did widen the range of character-painting — 
witness the widow Blackacre and her law-suit in The Plain 
Dealer — and they did take pains to put substance of wit into 
their dialogue. Four dramatists are the chiefs of this school of 
prose comedy— Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar. 
Of these Wycherley came first, and wrote his four plays in the 
reign of Charles II. His last play was acted sixteen years 
before the first of Congreve's. Congreve's plays were all 
produced in the reign of William III., and those of Vanbrugh 
and Farquhar in the reigns of William and of Queen Anne. 

Thomas Southern, whom Dryden afterwards commended 
for his purity, was born in Dublin in 1660. He came to 
London in 1678, and at the age of eighteen entered the Middle 
Temple. He was but twenty-two when, in 1682, his tragedy of 
The Loyal Brother j or, the Persian Prince, was acted. The 
controversy over the succession of the king's brother then ran 
high, and Southern, taking the side of the court, meant his play, 
of which the plot was from a novel, " Tachmas, Prince of 
Persia," to be taken as a compliment to James, Duke of York. 
It was followed, in 1684, by a comedy, The Disappointment j 
or, the Mother in Fashion, which had a plot taken from the 
novel in "Don Quixote" of "The Curious Impertinent." 

Thomas Brown, a witty and coarse writer of trifles, whose 
name afterwards as Tom Brown became very familiar in society, 
began his career towards the close of Charles II.'s reign. He 
was born in 1663, the son of a farmer, at Shiffnal, Shropshire ; 
became a clever but discreditable student of Christchurch, 
Oxford ; acquired skill in French, Italian, and Spanish, as well 
as Latin and Greek; was obliged by his irregularities to leave 
the University, and was schoolmaster for a time at Kingston- 
on-Thames. Then he came to London, lazy, low-minded, 
dissolute, and clever, to live as he could by his wit. 

39. We now pass out of the reign of Charles II. with those 
writers who illustrate especially the course of events leading 
towards the Revolution. 

Sir William Temple, born in 1628, the son of Sir John 
Temple, Master of the Rolls in Ireland, studied under Cud- 
worth (§ 22), at Cambridge, in the days of civil war. After 
two years at Emmanuel College, he left without a degree, 
travelled, became master of French and Spanish, married, and 



J.O\ A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1663 

towards the close of the Commonwealth lived with his father in 
Ireland. In 1663 he came to London with his wife, and attached 
himself to the rising fortunes of Lord Arlington, who sent him 
during the Dutch war as an English agent, with promise of 
subsidy, to our ally the Bishop of Munster. He was then 
made a baronet, and appointed Resident at the viceregal court 
of Brussels. There he developed his skill in diplomacy. At the 
rime of the Peace of Breda, in July, 1667, which ended war with 
:he Dutch, the ambition of Louis XIV., his lust of conquest, 
and his impersonation of his own maxim — "The state is 
myself"' {LEtat if est moi) — caused France under his rule to take 
the place once occupied by Spain as a public enemy. After the 
death of Philip IV, of Spain, in 1665, Louis XIV. had claimed 
Brabant, Flanders, and all Spanish possessions in the Low 
Countries, by right of his queen, in accordance with a local 
custom, which placed daughters by a first wife above sons by 
a second, in questions of inheritance. In May, 1667, in pur- 
suance of this claim, he sent Turenne with an army into 
Flanders, captured towns, and at the end of August made a 
three months' truce. Sir William Temple then got leave to 
make an unofficial tour in Holland. When at the Hague he 
called on the Grand Pensionary, John de Witt, the active mind 
of Holland at that time, said that his only business was to see 
what was worth seeing in Holland, and added, " I should 
execute my design very imperfectly if I went away without 
seeing you." Then Sir William Temple talked naturally with 
De Witt over the relations between England and Holland, and 
heard simply expressed the wish for a general coalition to save 
Flanders. Temple urged on unwilling ministers at home 
accord with this. Charles hoped to rule England by help of 
the King of France. But public opinion was strong, although 
he had done what he could towards the suppression of it. 
Although the fall of Clarendon, at the close of 1667, was forced 
by popular antagonism to his principles, the court was glad to 
get rid of him as a grave and steady man. "He had/' says 
Evelyn, " enemies at court, especially the buffoons and ladies 
of pleasure, because he thwarted some of them and stood in 
their way." Pepys tells how Lady Castlemaine, whose aviary 
overlooked the Whitehall Gardens, rushed thither from her bed 
at noon, " And thither her woman brought her her night-gown, 
. and she stood blessing herself at the old man's going away ; 
.and several of the gallants of Whitehall — of which there were 



to a.d. 1670.] SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE. 70$ 

many staying to see the chancellor's return — did talk to her 
in her birdcage." George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, was 
then Chief Minister for a time, with Arlington as Secretary of 
State ; but the Parliament was still threatening, the foreign 
policy of the Government was being censured, and very "soon 
after the fall of Clarendon the new ministers resolved to bid 
for popularity by authorising Sir William Temple to treat with 
De Witt. Temple then acted the part of Plain Dealer in the 
highest sense of the word, and in five days secured the Triple 
Alliance of England, Holland, and Sweden, which could not 
have been obtained by the old diplomatic forms within five 
months. The result of this alliance was that Louis XIV., who 
had already sent his armies into Franche Comte, gave up that 
conquest and made peace. England thus won, for the first time 
in the reign of Charles II., respect in Europe; Englishmen of 
all parties at home were proud of the bloodless victory ; and 
Sir William Temple, as its author, rose to fame as a great 
diplomatist and patriotic statesman. He became Ambassador 
at the Hague, and was there when the king, with help of the 
Cabal Ministry, resumed the livery of his French master. 

40. Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury — 
Dryden's Achitophel — was born in 162 1, son of Sir John 
Cooper and Anne, heiress of Sir Anthony Ashley, of Wimborne 
St. Giles, Dorsetshire. By the death of his father he became 
Sir Anthony at ten years old, and inherited the estates of his 
father and of Sir Anthony Ashley, which were very large. He 
went to study at Oxford in 1636 ; in 1638 became student of law 
at Lincoln's Inn ; was member for Tewkesbury in 1640, did not 
sit in the Long Parliament, followed the king till 1643, an d was 
then strong on the side of the Parliament. He raised a force 
in Dorsetshire, stormed Wareham, and reduced the surrounding 
country. Though suspected of some Royalism, Sir Anthony 
Cooper was a member of Cromwell's first Parliament, was ap- 
pointed one of the Protector's Council of State, and often 
opposed his designs. In April, 1660, he was one of those ap- 
pointed to draw up an invitation to the king, and one of the 
commissioners sent over to Breda. Monk made much use of 
his counsel. When Charles came over, Sir Anthony was made 
Governor of the Isle of Wight, colonel of a regiment of horse, 
Lord- Lieutenant of Dorset, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a 
Privy Councillor. In 1661 he was made Baron Ashley, of 
Wimborne St. Giles, with acknowledgment that the Restoration 

T T 



706 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1661' 

was due to " his wisdom in counsels in concert with General 
Monk." As Chancellor of the Exchequer, serving under Lord 
Treasurer the Earl of Southampton, his relation and intimate 
friend, Lord Ashley, who had an intensely active mind in a 
small body, managed affairs in his own way ; but while Claren- 
don was in power he belonged to an opposition section of 
the Ministry. He resisted the Uniformity Bill, and other mea- 
sures against Dissenters ; opposed the French connection, the 
sale of Dunkirk, and the war with the Dutch. He spoke, says 
Clarendon, " with great sharpness of wit, and had a cadence in 
his words and pronunciation that drew attention." In May, 
1667, the Lord Treasurer died. Ashley remained Chancellor of 
the Exchequer, and was made one of the commissioners for exe- 
cuting the office of Lord Treasurer. This was Lord Ashley's 
position when he brought John Locke into his house. 

John Locke was born at Wrington, Somersetshire, on the 
29th of August, 1632. His father served in the Parliamentary 
Wars under Colonel Popham, by whose advice Locke was sent 
to Westminster School. In 165 1, he was elected student of 
Christchurch, Oxford, where he turned from the Aristotelian 
scholastic philosophy, read Bacon, and read also Descartes, 
through whom, by study of an opposing doctrine, he became 
more strongly animated with the spirit of Bacon's teaching. 
The new and growing interest in scientific studies caused Locke 
to find charm in experimental science. Having taken his degree 
in arts, he made physic his profession, and practised a little in 
Oxford. But Locke's health was delicate ; and in 1664 he 
went abroad as secretary to Sir William Swan, then sent as 
envoy to some German princes. After a year's absence, he re- 
turned to Oxford, and was there when Lord Ashley was sent 
from London to drink mineral waters at Acton for an abscess in 
the breast. Lord Ashley wrote to ask Dr. Thomas, a physician 
at Oxford, to have the waters ready against his coming there. 
Dr. Thomas, being called away, asked his friend, Mr. Locke, to 
procure them. He employed somebody who disappointed him, 
and had to call upon Lord Ashley to make apologies. Lord 
Ashley kept him to supper, asked him to dinner next day, be- 
came fascinated by his liberal and thoughtful conversation, and, 
in 1667, asked him to stay at his house in London ; he alto 
followed Locke's advice in opening the abscess on his breast, a 
sore, probably scrofulous, which never healed. Shaftesbury 
uiged upon Locke not to pursue medicine as a profession, beyond 



to a.d. 1 6 7 a] JOHN LOCKE. WILLIAM PENN. 70J 

using his skill among his friends, but to devote the powers of his 
mind to study of the great questions in politics. Locke did so, 
and was often consulted by a patron who was but an erratic 
follower of principles which Locke developed and maintained 
throughout his life with calm consistency. As one of those in- 
cluded in the grant of Carolina, Lord Ashley employed Locke to 
draw up a constitution for the new colony; he did so, and 
showe4 in it a strong regard for civil and religious liberty. In 
1668 Locke became one of the Fellows of the Royal Society. 
Soon afterwards he went abroad with the Earl and Countess of 
Northumberland ; but the earl died at Turin, in May, 1670. 
Locke returned to England, lived again with Lord Ashley, and 
was asked by him to undertake the education of his only son. 
About the same time he was present in Oxford at a lively 
discussion, where it seemed to him that the differences of 
opinion lay wholly in words. This thought first turned his 
mind in the direction of his Essay concerning Human Under- . 
standing. 

41. In 1670, while Locke was at Turin, there were the negotia- 
tions at Dover which led to the secret agreement of Charles II. 
and his new Cabinet, the Cabal Ministry — Sir Thomas Clif- 
ford, Lord Ashley, the Duke of Buckingham, Lord Arlington, 
and the Duke of Lauderdale — with Louis XIV. Charles agreed, 
for an annual subsidy of ,£120,000 during the war, to abandon 
his allies, join Louis in invading Holland, make a public profes- 
sion of the Roman Catholic religion, and encourage it as much 
as possible in his dominions. If this led to rebellion in Eng- 
land, Louis promised to help Charles against England with men 
and money. Sir William Temple was summoned to London. 
De Witt doubted the aspect of affairs. Sir William Temple 
said, " I can answer only for myself. If a new system be adopted, 
I will never have a part in it. If I return you will know more ; 
if not, you will guess more." Temple came home to be civilly 
slighted until June, 1671, when the secret treaty with France had 
been ratified, and open action was to follow. Temple was then 
formally dismissed from his ambassador's office, and retired into 
private life at Sheen, where he wrote an Essay on Government, 
and an Account of the United Provinces. 

In 1670 the Act of 1664 against Conventicles was renewed 
with increase of severity. Under this Act, William Penn had 
been imprisoned. He was born in 1644, the son of Admiral Sir 
William Penn, educated at Christchurch, Oxford ; and, having 

T T 2 



708 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1668 

turned Quaker, was twice turned out of doors by his father. 
Then he was tolerated, but not helped, at home, and no effort 
was made to release him when he was imprisoned for attendance 
at religious meetings. He began at the age of twenty- four (in 
1668) to preach and write. For his second paper, The Sandy 
Foundation, he was imprisoned seven months in the Tower, and 
he wrote in prison, at the age of twenty-five, his most popular 
book, No Cross no Crown. He obtained release by a vindica- 
tion called Innocency with her Open Face. In 1670 his father 
died, reconciled to him. Penn inherited his estate, then wrote, 
travelled, supported his religious faith, and in 1681, for his 
father's services and debts to him from the Crown, obtained a 
grant of New Netherlands, thenceforward called Pennsylvania. 
In 1682, having published his scheme in . / Brief Account of the 
Colony of Pennsylvania, he embarked, and, in 1683, founded 
Philadelphia. In 1684, the last year of Charles II., Penn re- 
visited England. 

England and France declared war against Holland in March, 
1672 ; and at the same time Charles obeyed that part of his 
secret instructions which bound him to aid the Catholics, by 
issuing, on his own royal authority, a Declaration of Indul- 
gence in Religion, suspending the execution of all penal laws 
against Nonconformists and recusants. It was this that re- 
leased John Bunyan from his long imprisonment in Bedford 
Jail (§ 20). 

John Locke urged on his patron, who, in April, 1672, was 
made Earl of Shaftesbury, the tyranny involved in this claim of 
a dispensing power, the sole right to loosen implying also the 
sole right to bind. In November, Shaftesbury succeeded Sir 
Orlando Bridgman as Lord Chancellor, and made John Locke 
Secretary of Presentations under him. In June, 1673, ne made 
him also secretary to a commission of the Board of Trade, over 
which Shaftesbury was president. Locke held the office in 
Chancery only while his friend was Chancellor. The secretary- 
ship, which was worth ^500 a year, he retained till the com- 
mission expired, in December, 1674. With little knowledge of 
law, and much disrespect for it, Shaftesbury sought, as Lord 
Chancellor, to decide honestly and promptly, in accordance with 
what seemed to him justice and good sense. But the lawyers 
taught him by incessant arguments upon notices of motion to 
discharge his orders. Dryden, in otherwise pitiless satire against 
Shaftesbury, inserted praise of him as a chancellor who strove, 



toa.d. 1684.] WILLIAM PENN. JOHN LOCKE. 709 

" Unbribed, unsought, the wretched to redress, 
Swift of dispatch, and easy of access." 

The House of Commons meanwhile had compelled the king to 
retract his Declaration of Indulgence, and passed a Test Act, 
declaring all persons incapable of public employment who did 
not take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, and receive the 
sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. 
The Duke of York, who was honest in profession of his faith, 
had to resign his post of Lord High Admiral. , Parliament was 
prorogued with a motion before it against the French alliance ; 
the Cabal Ministry broke up ; Shaftesbury, ceasing to be chan- 
cellor, in November, 1673, went into opposition; and there 
followed a long struggle between the King and the Commons- 
Charles met his Parliament of 1674 — the year of Milton's death 
— with a direct falsehood. He denied that there was any secret 
treaty with the King of France. The Commons refused more 
supplies for the disgraceful war, and Sir William Temple was 
drawn from his retirement to negotiate a separate peace with 
Holland. This done, he went back as Ambassador to the Hague, 
and William of Orange rose equal to the occasion in the fight 
with France. Then it was found that Cha'rles, in spite of the 
peace, had left troops with Monmouth to assist the French ; but 
Charles's minister, Danby, smoothed the way with the bribery 
of members of Parliament that Andrew Marvell satirized (§ 35). 
Persecution of the Nonconformists was a source of petty 
plunder. Baxter tells how he was "being newly risen from 
extremity of pain, suddenly surprised in my house by a poor 
violent informer and many constables and officers, who rushed 
in and apprehended me, and served on me one warrant to seize 
on my person for coming within five miles of a corporation, and 
five more warrants to distrain for an hundred and ninety pounds, 
for five sermons." In such days one of the king's mistresses had 
in a single year ,£136,668 out of the Secret Service money. 
In November, 1675, Charles prorogued Parliament for fifteen 
months, and was paid by the King of France five hundred 
thousand crowns for that personal service to himself. He took, 
also, a pension, on condition of dissolving any Parliament that 
offered to force on him a treaty which had not received the 
assent of Louis XIV. At the end of December. 1675, the 
licenses of coffee-houses were withdrawn, and they were shut 
up, because of the talk in them on the condition of the country. 
Among others was Will's Coffee-house, kept by William Irwin, 



7 JO A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1663 

at the house on the north side of Russell Street, at the end of 
Bow Street, which, through Dryden's use of it, had become the 
great resort of the wits of the time. 

42. After private letters and occasional printed pamphlets of 
news, Mercuries of the Civil War had been the first active 
beginnings of the newspaper. Marchniont Needham had 
attacked Charles I. in the " Mercurius Britannicus," was im- 
prisoned, pardoned, and set up a "Mercurius Pragmaticus" against 
the king's enemies. By the king's enemies Needham was im- 
prisoned, pardoned, and then wrote for ten years " Mercurius 
Politicus " against the Royalists. Charles II. pardoned him, and 
he died in 1678. Roger l'Estrange, youngest son of Sir 
Hammond l'Estrange, born in Norfolk, in 1616, and educated 
at Cambridge, had been a friend of Charles I., and narrowly 
escaped execution in the Civil Wars. In 1663 he published a 
pamphlet entitled, Considerations and Proposals in order to the 
Regulation of the Press; together with Diverse Instances of 
Treaso?tous and Seditious Pamphlets, proving the Necessity 
thereof This got him the post of Licenser, in succession to Sir 
John Birkenhead, and also "all the sole privilege of printing 
and publishing all narratives, advertisements, Mercuries, intel- 
ligencers, diurnals, and other books of public intelligence." He 
began business at the end of August, 1663, with The Public 
Intelligencer, and introduced it with this doctrine : " As to the 
point of printed intelligence, I do declare myself (as I hope I 
may in a matter left so absolutely indifferent, whether any or 
none) that supposing the press in order, the people in their 
right wits, and news or no news to be the question, a public 
Mercury should never have my vote ; because I think it makes 
the multitude too familiar with the actions and counsels of their 
superiors, too pragmatical and censorious, and gives them not 
only an itch, but a kind of colourable right and license to be 
meddling with the government." Still he would do what he 
might to " redeem the vulgar from their former mistakes and 
illusions." As for reports of debates in Parliament, " I have 
observed," says L'Estrange, "very ill effects many times from 
the ordinary written papers of Parliament news" — such as 
Andrew Marvell supplied regularly to his constituents (§ 35) — 
"by making the coffee-houses and all the popular clubs judges 
of those councils and deliberations which they have nothing to 
do withall." In November, 1665, when the plague in London 
had driven the Court to Oxford, appeared No. 1 of The Oxford 



to a.d. 16S0.] MARCHMONT NEEDHAM. ROGER L' ESTRANGE. "]l\ 

Gazette. When the Court returned to London, it appeared, on 
the 5th of February, 1666, as The London Gazette, under which 
name it still exists. It was placed at once under Sir Joseph 
Williamson, Under-Secretary of State (from whom Addison, now 
born, had his Christian name), and his deputy writer of it 
was, for the first five years, Charles Perrot, M.A., of Oriel. 
L'Estrange set up, in November, 1675, the first commercial 
journal, The City Mercury, and in 1679, an Observator, in 
defence of the king's party. In April, 1680, the first literary 
journal appeared, as a weekly or fortnightly catalogue of new 
books, the Mercurius Librarius. 

Roger l'Estrange was a busy man. He published, in 1678, 
an abstract of Senecds Morals, and in 1680 a translation of 
Tullfs Offices. James II. knighted him, and he published in 
1687, in the king's interest, A B?-ief History of the Times, chiefly 
about what was called the Popish Plot. 

43. We return to the time when Charles sought to- repress 
opinion by shutting coffee-houses. Parliament, that had been 
prorogued for fifteen months in 1675, met again on the 15th 
of February, 1677. When it met, Shaftesbury argued that it 
had been dissolved by long suspension. It was voted that he 
should beg the king's pardon on his knees at the bar. He re- 
fused, and was committed to the Tower. The Earl of Salisbury, 
Lord Wharton, and the Duke of Buckingham were committed 
also, but made submission in a few months. Shaftesbury held 
out for a year. In this year, 1677, William of Orange came to 
England, and on the 4th of November he was married to Mary, 
eldest daughter of James Duke of York. It was a marriage 
that Sir William Temple had been active in promoting. In 
October, 1678, Titus Oates, a man who had been in orders in 
the English Church, and who, in 1677, na d. pretended to go over 
to Rome, and so been admitted as a Jesuit, came back from 
among the Jesuits with his story of a Popish plot to kill King 
Charles, because he did not help Catholicism, and put at once 
on the throne his brother James, who was to produce such a 
return of England to the true faith as had not been known since 
the days of Mary. Oates made oath to his narrative before a 
zealous Protestant justice, Sir Edmundbury Godfrey. A fort- 
night afterwards Godfrey was found murdered in a ditch near 
Primrose Hill. Public faith in Titus Oates and fury against the 
Catholics now rose to a height. Roger North, youngest son of 
Dudley, Lord North, was then a young man of twenty-eight, a 



712 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a. d. 1678 

strong partisan of the Stuarts. He left behind him an " Examen, 
or Inquiry into the Credit and Veracity of a Pretended Compleat 
History of England." (By White Kennett, a Whig, who became, in 
17 1 8, Bishop of Peterborough.) This was not published till 174°? 
and his Lives of his Three Brothers were not published until 
1742-4. These books of Roger North's abound in anecdote of 
his own time. He tells, among other things, that at the funeral 
of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey "there was all this while upheld 
among the common people an artificial fright, so as almost every 
man fancied a Popish knife at his throat. And at the sermon, 
besides the preacher, two other thumping divines stood upright 
in the pulpit, one on each side of him, to guard him from being 
killed while he was preaching, by the Papists." Parliament for- 
mally declared its faith in the plot after Oates had been examined 
before a committee. Then came the rule of this infamous man as 
a public accuser. In the midst of it all came an exposure in Par- 
liament of some of the king's secret dealing with France. The 
minister suffered for the king, and Danby was impeached, but 
during its proceedings against him Parliament was dissolved. 
The new elections were against the Court. Before the next Par- 
liament met, the Duke of York bent to the storm and consented 
to go abroad, after providing with his brother that no claims of 
the Duke of Monmouth should be allowed against him. Mon- 
mouth, born at Rotterdam in 1649, was supposed to be the eldest 
of the king's natural sons. He was a Protestant and a favourite 
son. He had been made Duke of Monmouth in 1663, was " to 
take place of all dukes," and was about the same time married 
to the Countess of Buccleuch. It was said by many that his 
mother, Lucy Waters, had been married to the king, and if so, 
Monmouth was true heir. The king, before his brother James 
left England, made a solemn affirmation to his Council that he 
never was married to any woman but his wife, Queen Catherine, 
then living. The new Parliament proceeded with Danby's im- 
peachment ; and the king's difficulties were now so great that 
he looked for essential support to Sir William Temple, in 
whom the people had most faith, and who had never been in 
active opposition to the king. Three times during the late 
troubles Sir William had declined to support the king's cause as 
a Secretary of State. He was now summoned to London, and 
proposed a new Privy Council of thirty members, half of them 
great officers of State, the other half independent English 
gentlemen of property. In accordance with advice from such 



toa.d. 1679.] ROGER NORTH. SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE. 713 

a council, the king was to pledge himself to govern without any 
reserve of a secret committee. Charles agreed. The people 
were content. The new Council was formed in April, 1679, w^ith 
Shaftesbury for Lord President, placed there by the king, but 
not the less still leader of the Opposition. The new Council 
was a failure. Parliament had before it a Bill to exclude the 
Duke of York from the succession. The king, therefore, pro- 
rogued Parliament on the 26th of May, 1679, giving unwilling 
assent at the same time to its Habeas Corpus Act " for the 
better securing of the Liberty of the Subject. 1 ' The prorogued 
Parliament was dissolved before it met again. Again a new 
Parliament met, on the 7th of October, 1679. It was still pro- 
rogued from time to time. The heat of discussion over, the 
Exclusion Bill led to invention of party names. The Irish being 
supporters of the succession of the king's Roman Catholic 
brother, the opponents of the Exclusion Bill were called Bog- 
trotters ; then, says Roger North, " the word Tory was enter- 
tained, which signified the most despicable savages among the 
wild Irish." Their adversaries were called Whigs, that being 
Scottish for the acid whey that settles from sour cream, applied 
generally by Scottish Episcopalians to Presbyterians, and made 
familiar at that time by the insurrection of the Scottish Cove- 
nanters in 1679. I n J u ly> J 679, Charles was ill, and Monmouth 
near him. The Duke of York suddenly returned from Brussels 
to protect his rights. The rival candidates for the succession 
were then sent away, Monmouth to Flanders, James, as Lord 
High Commissioner, to Scotland. Shaftesbury, dismissed from 
the Presidency of the Council, promoted great popular demon- 
strations against Catholicism ; and on the 28th of November 
Monmouth suddenly returned from Flanders. The king de- 
prived him of his offices, and ordered him to quit the country. 
He remained. Parliament had been prorogued, as usual, and 
the people poured in petitions against further prorogation when 
it met. The king forbade petitioning against the known laws 
of the land. 

It was in this year, 1679, that John Oldham wrote his 
satires on the Jesuits. He was born in 1653, son of a Non- 
conformist minister at Shipton, Gloucestershire. Oldham went 
to St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, and returned home, after taking his 
B.A. degree, in 1674. He became usher in a school at Croydon. 
Verse written by him found its way to the Earls Rochester and 
Dorset and Sir Charles Sedley, who astonished the poor usher 



714 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1679 

by paying him a visit. He became tutor to two grandsons of 
Sir Edward Thurland, a judge living near Reigate, and then to 
the son of a Sir William Hickes, near London. This occupation 
over, he lived among the wits in London, was remembered as 
the poetical usher by Sedley and Dorset; was on affectionate 
terms with Dryden, and found a patron in the Earl of Kingston, 
with whom he was domesticated, at Holme Pierrepoint, when 
he died of small-pox, in December, 1683, aged thirty. His chief 
production was the set of four Satyrs upon the Jesuits, written 
in 1679, modelled variously on Persius, Horace, Buchanan's 
" Franciscan," (ch. vii. § 50), and the speech of Sylla's ghost at the 
opening of Ben Jonson's " Catiline." The vigour of his wit 
produced a bold piece of irony in an Ode against Virtue and its 
Counterpart, an ode in Virtue's praise, with many short satires 
and odes— one in high admiration of Ben Jonson — para- 
phrases, and translations. There is a ring of friendship in the 
opening of Dryden's lines upon young Oldham's death before 
time had added the full charm of an English style to the 
strength of wit in his verse : 

' Farewell ! too little and too lately known, 
Whom I began to think and call my own ; 
For sure our souls were near ally'd, and thine 
Cast in the same poetic mould with mine." 

On the 25th of June, 1680, the Earl of Shaftesbury, with 
others of the Lords and Commons, presented the Duke of York 
to the Grand Jury of Westminster as a Popish recusant. The 
Chief Justice averted the consequence of that by discharging the 
jury. Parliament met on the 21st of October, after seven pro- 
rogations. On the 2nd of November the Exclusion Bill was 
again brought in. Monmouth, called commonly the Protestant 
Duke, who had made in August a triumphal progress in the West 
of England, was the desired successor. The Exclusion Bill, 
passed by the Commons on the 15th of November, was carried 
by Lord Russell to the peers, and delivered with a mighty 
shout from two hundred members of the House of Commons, 
who went with it. It was rejected by the Lords. The Commons 
resolved to grant no supply until the Duke of York had been 
excluded from the succession. Parliament was dissolved on 
the 1 8th of January, 1681. King Charles made a treaty with 
Louis XIV., and held to the Catholic succession, for ^50,000 a 
quarter — payment to begin at the end of June, 168 1. On the 
21st of March the next Parliament met at Oxford. Charles was 



toa.d. 1683.] JOHN OLDHAM. JOHN DRYDEN. 71$ 

firm ; at the end of a week he smuggled his robes with him into 
a sedan chair, and suddenly dissolved that Parliament also. 
He summoned no other during his reign. Having got rid of 
Parliament, and incidentally struck off the list of his privy 
councillors Sir William Temple — who now withdrew from 
public life — the king resolved to proceed boldly, and strike 
down the Earl of Shaftesbury. He was sent to the Tower on 
the 2nd of July, upon the testimony of two Irish witnesses, who 
swore that he had suborned them to bear false witness against 
the Queen, the Duke of York, and other personages. He was 
to be indicted for subornation and treason before a London 
grand jury, and if the grand jury did not ignore the bill of 
indictment, he would be tried by his peers in the Court of the 
High Steward, and condemned to death by judges of the king's 
selection. 

44. That was the state of affairs when John Dryden sup- 
ported the king's cause with a political pamphlet in verse, his 
satire of Absalom and Achitophel. Its aim was to assist in 
turning a current of opinion against Shaftesbury ; to secure, as 
far as pamphlet could, the finding of a true bill against him. 
The satire appeared anonymously, on the 17th of November, 
1681. The accident of a second poem has caused this to be 
known as the first part of " Absalom and Achitophel," but it is 
a complete work. Monmouth as Absalom and Shaftesbury as 
Achitophel had occurred before in the paper war ; and the use 
of such allegory was an appeal to the religious feeling of a 
people among whom those most likely to follow Shaftesbury 
were those most likely to be persuaded by a Scripture parallel. 
Charles, therefore, was David ; Cromwell, Saul ; the Duke of 
Buckingham figured as Zimri ; Titus Oates, as Corah ; the 
Roman Catholics were Jebusites ; the Dissenters Levites, and 
so forth. The argument of the poem was to this effect. The 
outcry over the asserted Popish plot gave heat to faction, and 
of this Shaftesbury took advantage. He reasoned thus and 
thus, to persuade Monmouth to rebellion ; Monmouth, answer- 
ing thus and thus, yielded to the persuasion. Who were the 
lesser associates in this rebellion, the sprouting heads of the 
hydra? Here followed sketches from life of other leaders of 
the opposition, and among them George Villiers, Duke of 
Buckingham, as Zimri. Monmouth appealed thus and thus to 
the people. The rebellion grew. What friends had King 
Charles ? Here followed sketches from life of some of the chief 



7l6 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [ad. 1681. 

friends of the king. Next came counsel of the king's friends; 
and then the poem ended with the king's own purpose, expressed 
in David's speech. " I have been," he said, " forgiving till they 
slight my clemency. 'Tis time to show I am not good by force." 

" Oh, that my power to saving were confined ! 
Why am I forced, like Heaven, against my mind 
To make examples of another kind ? 
Must I at length the sword of justice draw? 
Oh, curst effects of necessary law ! 
How ill my fear they by my mercy scan ! 
Beware the fury of a patient man. 
Law they require : let law then show her face. 

****** 
He said : the Almighty, nodding, gave consent, 
And peals of thunder shook the firmament. 
Henceforth a series of new time began, 
The mighty years in long procession ran ; 
Once more the godlike David was restored, 
And willing nations knew their lawful lord." 

The success of the satire as a poem was all it deserved to be. 
At once vigorous and highly finished, its characters of the chief 
men on either side, its lines and couplets, neatly fitted to 
express much that the king's party had to say, were quoted 
and parodied, praised and abused. Two dozen lines repaid 
Buckingham's rehearsal (§ 1 7) fifty-fold, if Dryden thought at 
all — as probably he did not — of a mere jest of the stage, when 
dealing with a vital question that seemed to have brought the 
nation once more to the verge of civil war, and writing what 
might help to send the chief opponent of Charles to the scaffold. 
The literary triumph was great, but that was all. The 
prophecy of the closing lines was not fulfilled. The poem was 
published on the 17th of November. On the 24th the indict- 
ment was presented to the grand jury at the Old Bailey, and 
returned ignored. There were great public rejoicings, and a 
medal was struck to commemorate the triumph. 

45. Of the Whig replies to " Absalom and Achitophel," one, 
Absalom Senior j or, Absalom and Achitophel Transfirosed, was 
by Elkanah Settle. Another, Azaria a7id Hushai, was by 
Samuel Pordage, son of the Rev. John Pordage, of Bradfield, 
in Berkshire, deprived of his living in 1654, on a charge of 
conversation with evil spirits. Pordage was a member* of 
Lincoln's Inn, and had published in 1660, with notes, The 
Troades, from Seneca, and a volume of poems. He was the 
author, also, of two tragedies, Herod and Mariamne, in 1673, 



a.d. i68i.] ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL. ~\7 

and the Siege of Babylon, in 1678, and of a romance called 
E liana. Samuel Pordage replied to Dryden's satire with a 
temperance rare in the controversies of that time. Unlike 
other opponents, he gave Dryden credit for his genius ; and the 
only lines in the reply that have any resemblance to the usual 
coarseness of abuse are those which comment on the opening 
lines of Dryden's poem, which were meanly complaisant to 
the king's vices. Good Mr. Pordage, writing, like Dryden, 
without a name upon his title-page, said in his preface : — " I 
shall not go about either to excuse or justifie the publishing of 
this poem, for that would be much more an harder task than 
the writing of it. But, however, I shall say, in the words of 
the author of the incomparable ' Absalom and Achitophel/ 
that I am sure the design is honest. If wit and fool be the 
consequence of Whig and Tory, no doubt but knave and ass 
may be epithets plentifully bestowed upon me by the one party, 
whilst the other may grant me more favourable ones than 
perhaps I do deserve. But as very few are judges of wit, so, I 
think, much fewer of honesty; since interest and faction on 
either side prejudices and blinds the judgment, and the violence 
of passion makes neither discernible in an adversary. I know 
not whether my poem has a genius to force its way against 
prejudice. Opinion sways much in the world, and he that has 
once gained it writes securely. I speak not this anyways to 
lessen the merits of an author whose wit has deservedly gained 
the bays. . . . The ancients say that everything hath two 
handles. I have laid hold of that opposite to the author of 
'Absalom.' As to truth, who has the better hold let the 
world judge ; and it is no new thing for the same persons to 
be ill. or well represented by several parties." Absalom was 
a rebel to his father ; the author of this piece prefers to 
represent Monmouth through Azaria, who was a good son. 
Shaftesbury in this poem, therefore, is Hushai. The king is 
good Amazia, who, 

" Tho' he God did love, 
Had not cast out Baal's priests, and cut down every grove. 

Former rulers had maintained strict laws against idolatry. 
Cromwell being Zabad, Charles in exile had been Amazia, who 

" Over Jordan fled, 
Till God had struck the tyrant Zabad dead ; 
When all his subjects, who his fate did moan, 
With joyful hearts restored him to his throne ; 



7l8 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE [a.d. 1681 

Who then his father's murtherers destroy'd, 
And a long, happy, peaceful reign enjoy'd, 
Belov'd of all, for merciful was he, 
Like God, in the superlative degree." 

But the Chemarims (Jesuits) and Hell had hatched a plot — 

" For the good Amazia being gone, 
They had designed a Baalite for the throne. 
Of all their hopes and plots, here lay the store : 
For what encouragement could they have more, 
When they beheld the king's own brother fall, 
From his religion and to worship Baal." 

Then Titus Oates revealed the plot. 

'* A Levite who had Baalite turn'd, and bin 
One of the order of the Chemarim, 

Libni, I think, they call the Levite s name. 

But the faithful Hushai boldly opposed the king's brother, 
Eliakim — 

" To whom the king ev'n to excess was kind, 
And tho' he had a son, for him the crown design'd." 

The friends of Baal now encouraged jealousy of Azaria. 

" If with wise Hushai they the prince did see, 
They call'd their meeting a conspiracy, 
And cry, that he was going to rebell : 
Him Absalom they name, Hushai Achitophel." 

Among the friends of Eliakim, Dryden is satirised as " Shimei, 
the poet-laureate of that age." 

" Sweet was the muse that did his wit inspire, 
Had he not let his hackney muse to hire. 
But variously his knowing muse could sing, 
Could Doeg praise, and could blaspheme the king : 
The bad make good, good bad, and bad make worse, 
Bless in heroicks, and in satyrs curse. 
Shimei to Zabad's praise could tune his muse, 
And princely Azaria could abuse. 
Zimri, we know, he had no cause to praise, 
Because he dub'd him with the name of Bayes." 

The closing speech of David Samuel Pordage matched with a 
closing speech of Amazia, wherein he restored peace, and 
secured his throne by assenting to the wishes of his people. 

In the second edition of Dryden's " Absalom and Achitophel," 
which appeared in December, 1681, the lines were inserted which 
praised Shaftesbury's conduct as Chancellor, and also the lines 
concerning Monmouth : 



TGA.D x68a.] SETTLE. PORDAGE. SHADWELL. J\9 

" But, oh ! that yet he would repent and live ! 
How easy 'tis for parents to forgive ! 
With how few tears a pardon might be won 
From Nature, pleading for a darling son !" 

46. The medal struck to commemorate the rejection of the 
bill against Shaftesbury was the subject of Dryden's next piece 
in this series, The Medal : a Satire against Sedition. — By tJie 
Author of "Absalom and Achitophel." It was published early 
in March, 1682, with a prefatory " Epistle to the Whigs." It 
was invective against Shaftesbury, blended with expression of 
Dryden's faith in the unity maintained by holding firmly to a 
fixed succession, and believing the inherent right of kings. " If 
true succession from our isle should fail," the various religious 
sects, political parties, even individual men, would strive together. 

" Thus inborn broils the factions would engage, 
Or wars of exiled heirs, or foreign rage, 
Till halting vengeance overtook our age, 
And our wild labours, wearied into rest. 
Reclined us on a rightful monarch's breast." 

Again the only temperate reply was that of Samuel Pordage. 
Dryden had dwelt on Shaftesbury, whose image was upon the 
obverse of the medal. On the reverse side was the Tower, and 
Pordage took this for his text in The Medal Reversed : a Satyre 
against Persecution. — By the Author of "Azaria and ffushaz." 
To complete the parallel, this opened with an introductory epistle 
to the Tories. Dryden was still recognised as " Our Prince of 
Poets," and there was nothing harder said of him than that he 
was on the side of the strong with Cromwell, and is so again 
with Charles. He found on one side of the medal Sedition 
under a statesman's gown. Reverse the medal, and upon the 
other side there is an image of the Tower, badge of as bad a 
hag, Persecution : 

" Let then his satyr with Sedition fight, 
And ours the whilst shall Persecution bite ; 
Two hags they are, who parties seem to make : 
'Tis time for satyrs them to undertake. 
See her true badg, a prison or the Tower ; 
For Persecution ever sides with Power." 

Very different in its character was Shadwell's answer, The 
Medal of John Bayes : a Satyr against Folly and Knavery. 
This also had its introductory epistle to the Tories, but not 
dealing at all with the great controversy before the nation, it 
was a savage personal attack on Drycen. As for the verses, in 



720 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 168a 

some parts unutterably coarse, let their closing triplet indicate 
their tone : 

" Pied thing ! half wit ! half fool ! and for a knave 
Few men than this a better mixture have : 
But thou canst add to that, coward and slave." 

47. This brutal attack provoked a delicate revenge. In 
October, 16S2, appeared MacFlecknoe. — By the Author of 
" Absalom and Achitophel" This was a mock heroic in 
rhymed couplets, setting forth how that aged prince, Richard 
Flecknoe, who 

"In prose and verse was owned without dispute 
Through all the realms of nonsense absolute," 

chose in his last days Shadweil for successor. 

" Shadweil alone of all my sons is he 
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity. 
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, 
But Shadweil never deviates into sense." 

The coronation of Shadweil was in the Nursery at Barbican, a 
theatre established in 1662 for the training of children to the 
stage ; and there he swore " Ne'er to have peace with wit nor 
truce with sense." There he received the sceptre, and was 
crowned with poppies, and " on his left hand twelve reverend 
owls did fly." Then, in prophetic mood, Flecknoe blessed and 
counselled his successor, till he was, after the manner of Sir 
Formal Trifle, in Shadwell's "Vertuoso," let down through a 
trap-door while yet declaiming. 

" Sinking he left his drugget robe behind, 
Borne upwards by a subterranean wind. 
The mantle fell to the young prophet's part 
With double portion of his father's art." 

Richard Flecknoe had been dead four years when this 
poem was written. He was an Irishman, and had been a 
Roman Catholic priest before the Restoration. His first writings 
were religious : Hierothalamium j or, The Heavenly? Nuptials 
with a Pious Soul, in 1 626 ; The Affections of a Pious Soul 
(1640) ; then came Miscellanea j or, Poems of all Sorts (1653) ; 
A Relation of Ten Years' Travels in Etirope, Asia, Africa, 
and America (1654); Love's Dominion: a Dra?natic Piece 
(1654) ; The Diarium, or Journal divided in Twelve Jornadas, 
in Burlesque Rhyme or Drolling Verse (165 1); Enigmaticall 
Characters, all taken to the Life, from several Persons, Humours, 
and Dispositions (1658) ; The Marriage of Oceanus and Bri- 



a.d. i68 2 .] MAC FLECKNOE. NAHUMTATE. fZl 

tannia (1659); Heroick Poems (1660); Love's Kingdom: a 
Pastoral Tragi-Comedy, with a Short Treatise of the English 
Stage (1664); Erminia: a Tragi-Co?nedy (1665); The Damoiselles 
a, la Mode ; a Comedy (1667) ; Sir William Davenanfs Voyage 
to the other World: a Poetical Fiction (1668) ; Epigra?ns of all 
Sorts (1669) ; Euterpe Revived j or, Epigrams made at Several 
Times in the Years 1672, 1673, and 1674, 071 Persons of great 
Honour and Quality, most of them now living : in Three Books 
(1675) '■> A Treatise of the Sports of Wit (1675). The catalogue 
describes the man. 

48. In November, 1682, appeared the Second Part of Absalom 
and Achitophel, to which Dryden contributed only 200 lines 
(11. 310 to 509), containing a few character sketches, among 
which by far the most prominent are Elkanah Settle as Doeg, 
and Shadwell as Og. The second title of Settle's "Absalom 
Senior, or Absalom and Achitophel transprosed " — a feeble echo 
from Marvell— was here satirised, together with these opening 
lines of his poem — 

" In gloomy times, when priestcraft bore the sway, 
And made heaven's gate a lock to their own key,' 9, 

which were thus treated by Dryden — 

" Instinct he follows, and no fartner knov/s, 
For to write verse with him is to transprose \ 
'Twere pity treason at his door to lay, 
Who makes heaven's gate a lock to its own key." 

A fairly whimsical misunderstanding of a clumsy sentence. 
Settle, poor fellow, meant that as the Roman Catholic priests 
had a key to heaven's gate which did not fit its lock, they 
made for the gate a new lock that would fit their key. Among 
other characters sketched or alluded to, Dryden, in this contri- 
bution to Tate's poem, passed lightly over Pordage in one line : 
"As lame Mephibosheth, the wizard's son." 

Nahum Tate, the author of the rest of the Second Part of 
"Absalom and Achitophel" (though it had, no doubt, touches 
from Dryden's hand), was born in Dublin, in 1652, the son of 
Dr. Faithful Tate, and educated at Trinity College there. He 
came to London, published in 1677 a volume of Poems, and 
between that date and 1682 had produced the tragedies of 
Brutus of Alba and The Loyal General; Richard II. ; or, the 
Sicilian Usurper; an altered version of Shakespeare's King 
Lear; and an application of " Coriolanus " to court politics of 
the day, as The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth; or, The Fall 

U U 



722 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 168a. ' 

of ' Coriolanus. Tate wrote three other plays before the Revo- 
lution. It was not till 1696 that he produced, with Dr. Nicholas 
Brady (b. 1659, d. 1726), also an Irishman, and then chaplain to 
William III., a New Vej'sion of the Psalms of David, and in 
1707 one more tragedy of his was acted, Injured Love j or, The 
Cruel Husband. 

49. In November, 1682, another poem by Dryden appeared, 
("A Layman's Religion") Religio Laid, in the style of Horace's 
Epistles, being a letter written originally to a young man, Henry 
Dickenson, who had translated Father Simon's ;< Critical History 
of the Old Testament." This expression of Dryden's mind upon 
religion, in 1682, should be impartially compared with that in 
"The Hind and Panther," written five years later, when he 
became a Roman Catholic. "Religio Laici"was addressed to 
the translator of a Roman Catholic book on the Old Testament, 
which is described by Dryden as a " matchless author's work." 
In the preface and in the poem Dryden modestly dissented from 
the preface to the Athanasian Creed, which excluded the heathen 
from salvation. He took his place in the preface between the 
Roman Catholics as Papists and the Nonconformists, believing 
that there was continuous endeavour to restore the pope's 
authority over the King of England. His argument was solely 
against the pope's claim to dispense with the obedience of sub- 
jects to a heretic king. But that was also an article of the faith 
Dryden afterwards adopted. When he came to speak of the 
Nonconformists, he dwelt, in his preface to the Religio Laid, on 
the evil caused by the wresting of texts since the Bible had been 
translated. " How many heresies the first translation of Tyndal 
produced in a few years, let my Lord Herbert's ' History of 
Henry VIII.' inform you," and so forth. He quoted from 
Maimbourg, a Roman Catholic, that wherever Calvinism was 
planted, " rebellion, misery, and civil war attended it." And 
presently he said, " 'Tis to be noted, by the way, that the 
doctrines of king-killing and deposing, which have been taken 
up only by the worst party of the Papists, the most frontless 
flatterers of the pope's authority, have been espoused, defended, 
and are still maintained by the whole body of Nonconformists 
and Republicans." In the poem so introduced, Dryden argued 
that Reason is but the dim light of moon and stars, which is lost 
when the sun rises : 

" So pale grows Reason at Religion's sight, 
So dies and so dissolves in supernatural light.' 



ad. 1682.] DRYDEN'S " RELIGIO LAICI." 723 

He argued that before revelation the best men had but im- 
perfect notions of the highest good, that Deism had un- 
consciously borrowed from revelation that sense of the One 
God to be worshipped by praise and prayer, and of a future 
state, which it believed Reason to have discovered. He passed 
to the scheme of redemption expressed in the Bible, and, from 
objections of the Deist that " no supernatural worship can be 
true," ard that millions have never heard the name of Christ, he 
took occasion to express his faith that 

" Those who followed Reason's dictates right, 
Lived up and lifted high their natural light, 
With Socrates may see their Maker's face, 
While thousand rubric-makers want a place." 

He argued that no Church could be an omniscient interpreter of 
Scripture, and that the Scriptures themselves might be cor- 
rupted, but 

" Though not everywhere 
Free from corruption, or entire or clear, 
Are uncorrupt, sufficient, clear, entire 
In all things which our needful faith require." 

He argued that it was for the learned to sift and discuss the 
doctrines drawn out of the Bible, but 

" The unlettered Christian who believes in gross 
Plods on to heaven, and ne'er is at a loss : 
For the strait gate would be made straiter yet 
Were none admitted there but men of wit." 

If the Bible had been handed down from the past by the church 
of the Roman Catholics, 

" The welcome news is in the letter found ; 
The carrier's not commissioned to expound." 

Once the clergy had traded with it on the ignorance of the 
people; now the ignorance of the people had made it the 
common prey : it was misused with great zeal and little thought. 

" So all we make of Heaven's discovered will 
Is not to have it or to use it ill. 
The danger's much the same, on several shelves 
If others wreck us or we wreck ourselves." 

What remained, then, but the middle way between those shoals ? 

" In doubtful questions 'tis the safest way 
To 1 arn what unsuspected ancients say ; 
For 'tis not likely we should higher soar 
In search of heaven than all the Church before : 



724 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1681 

Nor can we be deceived unless we see 
J"he Scripture and the fathers disagree. 

And after hearing what the Church can say. 
If still our reason runs another way, 
That private reason 'tis more just to curb 
Than by disputes the public peace disturb. 
For points obscure are of small use to learn: 
But common quiet is mankind's concern." 

So the poem ended with the desire for peace by resting on 
authority, and Dryden's " Religio Laid," instead of being an 
antagonist work, is a natural prelude to " The Hind and Panther." 
Under the tumult of the time the religious mind of Dryden was 
steadily on its way to the form of Catholicism in which he died. 

50. In February, 1682, when Southern's first play, "The 
Loyal Brother " (§ 38), was acted, Dryden wrote prologue and 
epilogue to it. It was the beginning of a friendship. Dryden 
raised the price of his prologue on this occasion. " The players," 
he said, "have had my goods too cheap." In December of the 
same year, 1682, he produced his tragedy of The Duke of Guise 
written with Lee (§ 27). It was designed to apply the story of 
the French League to the English opposition of that day. With 
the same allusion he made a Trafislation of Maimbourg y s 
History of the League, and published it in 1684. In 1683 he 
had contributed a Preface and a Life to a new translation of 
Plutarch by several hands. 

51. In July, 1683, upon false accusation of complicity in the 
Rye House Plot, Lord William Russell was executed in Lincoln's 
Inn Fields, and, on the 7th of December, Algernon Sidney 
upon Tower Hill. Algernon Sidney, second son of Robert, 
second Earl of Leicester, and brother to Waller's " Sacharissa " 
(ch. viii. § 42), had shown throughout his career lively hostility 
to. tyranny. He had been out of England in the earlier years of 
Charles II.'s reign, but in T667 came home, at his father's 
death, and was detained by a Chancery suit. He was an 
Independent and Republican. For that he died, convicted of 
treason, says Evelyn, "on the single witness of that monster of 
a man, Lord Howard of Escrick, and some sheets of paper 
taken in Mr. Sidney's study, pretended to be written by him, 
but not fully proved." He left behind him a Discourse Co?i- 
cerning Government, first published in 1698. 

52. Dryden suggested and edited, in T684, a volume of 
Miscellany Poems.— Containing a New Translation of VirgilPs 
Eclogues, Ovid's Love Elegies, Odes of Horace and other 



to a. d. 1 68s.] ALGERNON SIDNEY. DRYDEN. LOCKE. J2$ 

Authors j with several Original Poems, by the most Eminent 
Hands. This revival of the old Elizabethan plan of gathering 
into one volume papers of verse from various hands was suc- 
cessful. The volume of 1684 was the first of a new series of 
such Miscellanies. In this volume itself the chief original poems 
were reprints—" MacFlecknoe," "Absalom and Achitophel," and 
" The Medal." The translations were by Dryden, Sedley, Lord 
Roscommon, the late Earl of Rochester, Otway, Rymer, Tate, 
Sir Carr Scrope, George Stepney, Thomas Creech, Richard 
Duke, Mr. Adams, Mr. Chetwood, Mr. Stafford, and Mr. Cooper. 

George Stepney (b. 1663, died 1707), wrote pleasant 
occasional verse. He was educated at Westminster School and 
Trinity College, Cambridge, and owed his political employment 
after the Revolution to the warm friendship of a fellow-student, 
Charles Montague, afterwards Lord Halifax. 

Thomas Creech, born in 1659, near Sherborne, Dorset, 
studied at Wadham College, Oxford, and got a fellowship for 
his translation of Lucre 'this, published in 1682. In 1684, the 
year of the first volume of Miscellany Poems, Creech published 
a verse translation of the Odes, Satires, and Epistles of Horace, 
which did not sustain his credit, though he applied the satires 
to his own times. The end of his life was that, in 1701, Wadham 
College presented him to the rectory of Welwyn, and he hanged 
himself in his study before going to reside there. Bichard 
Duke, also a clergyman, was a friend of Otway's, and tutor to 
the Duke of Richmond. 

In 1685, Dryderi published, still with Tonson, Sylvaj or, 
The Second Part of Political Miscellanies. It contained trans- 
lations by himself from the " yEneid," and from Lucretius, and 
from Theocritus and Horace, with short pieces, original and 
translated by himself and others, including a Latin poem by 
his eldest son Charles, on Lord Arlington's gardens. Charles 
Dryden was hardly nineteen, and lately entered at Trinity 
College, Cambridge. Dryden's second son was at Westminster 
School, the third and youngest at the Charterhouse. 

53. John Locke (§ 40, 41) had graduated as M.B. at Cam- 
bridge, and gone to Montpellier, where there was a great medical 
school, and also a southern climate, which his health required, 
for he was threatened with consumption. He was at work upon 
his Essay at Montpellier, but when, in 1679, his patron Shaftes- 
bury became president of Sir William Temple's newly-devised 
Council, he sent for Locke, who returned to England, and was 



726 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. i68s 

by his friend's side in the ensuing time of peril. After his escape 
from the scaffold in 1682, Shaftesbury went to Holland, and 
died there in 1683. Locke remained in Holland. In November, 
1684, by a special order from Charles II., he was deprived of his 
studentship at Christchurch. But Charles II. died on the 6th 
of February, 1685. 

JAMES II 

54. John Dryden, who had been rehearsing at court an 
opera of Albion and Albanius, in honour of King Charles's 
triumph over opposition, paid laureate's homage to the deceased 
king with his imperial mourning song, Threnodia Augustalis, 
published in March. This ode heralds the rule of James II. as 
that of a warlike prince. He is to be a martial Ancus after 
Numa's peaceful reign. But James II. warred only on his 
people. He began by going openly to mass, and staying prose- 
cutions for religion which then pressed only on the Roman 
Catholics who would not take the oath of supremacy, and on the 
Quakers, who would not take any oath at all. Some thousands 
of Roman Catholics and fourteen hundred Quakers were set 
free. The new king called, by a special letter to Scotland, for 
new penal laws against the Covenanters. It was made death to 
preach in-doors or out at a conventicle, and death to attend one 
in the open air. Bichard Baxter (§ 21) was tried before 
Judge Jeffreys for seditious libel in complaint of the wrongs of 
Dissenters, in his Paraphrase on the New Testament, published 
in 1685. " Leave thee to thyself," said James's judge to the old 
man, whose friends thronged the court about him, " and I see 
thou wilt go on as thou hast begun ; but, by the grace of God, I'll 
look after thee. I know thou hast a mighty party, and I see a 
jgreat many of the brotherhood in corners waiting to see what 
will become of the mighty don, and a doctor of the party at 
your elbow ; but, by the grace of Almighty God, I will crush you 
alL" Baxter, unable to pay a fine of five hundred marks, was 
for the next eighteen months in prison. On the 14th of June 
the Duke of Monmouth landed from Holland, at Lyme, in Dorset- 
shire, with eighty-three followers. Next day he had 1,000 foot 
and 150 horse. Among those who hurried to his standard was 
Daniel De Foe, then about twenty-four years old. 

55. Daniel De Foe, born in 1661, was the son of James 
Foe, a well-to-do butcher, in the parish of St. Giles's, Cripple- 
gate. His father, a Dissenter, sent him to the school kept at 



a.d. 1685.] BAXTER. DANIEL BE FOE. 727 

Newington Green by Charles Morton, a good scholar, who 
included English among school studies, and afterwards, when 
driven to America by persecution, became Vice-President of 
Harvard College. After a full training with Mr. Morton, Daniel 
Foe began the world in Freeman's Court, Cornhill, as an agent 
between manufacturers and retailers in the hosiery trade. His 
strong interest in public events had been shown already in the 
reign of Charles II., by a tract, Presbytery Roughdrawjt, pub- 
lished in 1683. After the accession of James II. he was one of 
those citizens of London who, when they heard Monmouth had 
landed, rode away to join him. He was with Monmouth at Scdg- 
moor. Monmouth was executed on the 15th of July, 1685. Then 
followed the barbarous progress of Judge Jeffreys through the 
scenes of the rebellion in the West, after which he was made 
Lord Chancellor. In October of the same year Louis XIV. 
signed the decree known as the Revocation of the Edict of 
Nantes. That edict, subscribed by Henry IV. in 1598, secured 
freedom of worship and equal rights to the French Protestants. 
They were now prohibited exercise of their religion in France, 
their places of worship were to be levelled, their ministers were 
exiled, but the congregations were forbidden to leave the 
country with their ministers, on pain of confiscation and con- 
demnation to the galleys. They must conform, and thenceforth 
have their children baptised as Roman Catholics. The decree 
was carried out with cruelty, but could not stop the emigration. 
Many came to England, bringing their industries with them. 
Evelyn at this time noted in his diary a harangue of the 
Bishop of Valence, who said that this victory over heresy "was 
but what was wished in England ; and that God seemed to raise 
the French king to this power and magnanimous action, that 
he might be in capacity to assist in doing the same here." The 
English Parliament met in November. The Commons pro- 
tested feebly, the Lords more stoutly, against the king's violation 
of the Test Act as avowed in his opening speech. " Let no 
man," said James, il take exception that there are some officers 
in the army not qualified according to the late tests for their 
employments. The gentlemen, I must tell you, are most of 
them well known to me, and ... I think them now fit to be 
employed under me." Parliament was prorogued on the 20th of 
November, and no supplies had been voted ; but at the outset 
of his reign James had secured to himself a vote for life of the 
chief imposts. Parliament was kept in abeyance, twice pro- 



728 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1685 

rogued in 1686, twice in 1687, and dissolved in July of that year. 
In 1686 James devised a plan for legalizing by collusion his 
claim of a right to dispense with the Test Act, which excluded 
Roman Catholics from civil and military offices. He had 
appointed a Roman Catholic, Sir Edward Hales, Governor of 
Dover Castle and colonel of a regiment. Having dismissed four 
judges and his Solicitor-General, who protested against his 
course, and secured to himself a servile court, he caused Sir 
Edward's servant to proceed against his master for not having 
taken the Sacrament as required by the Test Act. The defence 
was His Majesty's dispensing power, and this was allowed by a 
judgment which virtually abolished the Test Act ; for, said the 
court, the king " could pardon all offences against the law, and 
forgive the penalties, and why could he not dispense with them ?" 
Warrants were next issued authorising members of the Church 
of Rome to hold benefices in the Church of England. The 
English clergy were forbidden to preach upon any point of con- 
troversy with the Church of Rome. James licensed a king's 
printer for printing missals, lives of saints, and Roman Catholic 
tracts, and set up an Ecclesiastical Commission, with Jeffreys 
for president. At the end of 1686 he appointed a Roman 
Catholic to the deanery of Christchurch. In February, 1687, 
he required the University of Cambridge to confer the degree 
of M.A. on a Benedictine monk. The oaths being refused, the 
degree was refused. Vice-Chancellor and Senate were sum- 
moned before the Ecclesiastical Commission, and the Vice- 
Chancellor was suspended from his revenue as Master of Mag- 
dalene College. In April, 1687, James issued a Declaration for 
Liberty of Conscience in England. By the exercise of the 
royal prerogative, all penal laws against Nonconformists were 
suspended ; oaths and tests were abrogated. Baxter was thus 
released from prison. Presbyterians, Independents, Quakers, 
were all free to worship as they would. Catholicism was also 
free from impediment ; and there was the king ready to give to its 
professors the chief places in the Church and the great Univer- 
sities. Many Dissenters did not see the drift of the king's 
liberality, or care to remember that the liberality, if wise and 
good, was in a form that set the English Parliament aside, and 
made the king absolute source of law. 

Daniel Foe, after the battle of Marston Moor, had left Eng- 
land. He had been to Spain and Portugal as a trader, but 
when the cruel search for Monmouth's followers had long been 



toa.d. 1687.] DEFOE. NEWTON. DRYDEN. 729 

over he returned, having picked up abroad the fancy for a " De" 
before his name, and now his voice was heard again in three 
pamphlets. One was A Tract against the Proclamation for the 
Repeal of the Penal Laws, then came A Pamphlet against the 
Addresses to King James, and yet again A Tract upon the Dis- 
pensing Power. These, all published in 1687, were De Foe's 
writings in the reign of James II. 

56. It was in this year of troubles, 1687, that Isaac 
Newton published the great work which includes his demon- 
stration of the theory of Gravitation (§ 30), commonly known as 
" Newton's Principia." 

57. John Dry den obtained the licence for his Hind and 
Panther, a defence of the Roman Catholic religion, only a week 
after the issue of the Declaration of Indulgence. It was being 
read and talked of when the king, who had in case of need an 
army encamped on Hounslow Heath, received on the 3rd of 
July a Papal nuncio with great pomp at Windsor, and next day 
a proclamation in the London Gazette dissolved the prorogued 
Parliament. The publication of The Hind a?id Panther was 
deliberately timed to aid King James in his scheme of a 
Catholic reaction. It dealt as distinctly as " Absalom and 
Achitophel" did in its day with the essential question of the 
hour; but the point of view was honestly Dryden's. James 
was not liberal to Dryden. In the renewal of his offices of 
laureate and historiographer, the annual butt of canary had 
been subtracted from his pay, and the renewal of the pension 
of ^100, that lapsed at the death cf Charles, was neglected for 
twelve months after the new king's accession. There was no 
bribe, direct or indirect ; and Dryden was the reverse of a 
time-server in staying by King James when nearly all his 
friends were leaving him, and prudently trimming then- 
sails to meet the inevitable change of wind. But Dryden 
had his own convictions, and was true to them. He said 
in his preface to The Hind and Panther, " Some of the 
Dissenters, in their addresses to His Majesty, have said ' that 
he has restored God to His empire over conscience.' 1 confess 
I dare not stretch the figure to so great a boldness ; but I 
may safely say that conscience is the royalty and prerogative 
of every private man." He had said as much in the " Religio 
Laid," and the spirit of chirity in that poem remained 
unaltered in " The Hind and Panther." This argument for 
Catholicism is in three parts, and is the longest of Dryden's poems» 



73° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1687. 

The milk-white Hind is the Church of Rome ; the Panther is 
the Church of England, " fairest creature of the spotted kind." 

"A milk-white hind, immortal and unchanged, 
Fed on the lawns, and in the forest ranged ; 
Without unspotted, innocent within, 
She feared no danger, for she knew no sin." 

The other beasts had no good-will to her; and Independent, 
Presbyterian, Quaker, Freethinker, Anabaptist, Arian, are 
figured under bear, wolf, hare, ape, boar, fox. Then Dryden 
argues on with little heed to any fable, merely hindered by his 
clumsy animal machinery where his desire is for direct argu- 
ment. When he speaks of the persecutions attendant on the 
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, he says : 

" Of all the tyrannies on human kind 
The worst is that which persecutes the mind. 
Let us but weigh at what offence we strike ; 
"Pis but because we cannot think ali.-e. 
In punishing of this we overthrow 
The laws of nations and of nature too." 

One evening the beasts came down to the common watering- 
place, and the Hind stood timidly aside, till, with an awful roar, 
the lion (James II.) bade her fear no more. 

" Encouraged thus, she brought her younglings nigh, 
Watching the motions of her patron's eye, 
And drank a sober draught ; the rest, amazed, 
Stood mutely still, and on the stranger gazed; 
Surveyed her part by part, and sought to find 
The ten-horned monster in the harmless hind, 
Such as the wolf and panther had designed." 

On nearer view they admired her ; and when the rest of the 
herd had gone to their heaths and woods, the Panther 

" Made a mannerly excuse to stay, 
Proffering the hind to wait her half the way ; 
That, since the sky was clear, an hour of talk 
Wight help her to beguile the tedious walk. 

After some common talk, what rumours ran, 
The lady of the spotted muff began." 

Then the two beasts talked theology, the Hind stating the case 
for Catholicism, and the Panther stating the objections to be 
met, until the Hind had reached her lonely cell, and 



" She thought good manner bound her to invite 
The stranger dame to be her guest that night." 

The Panther assented, and the Hind wished she would dwell 



. a.d. i68 7 -] DRYDEN'S "HIND AND PANTHER." 73I 

with her, not for a night, but always. Then the talk went on 
.after the Hind's hospitalities, and Dryden laboured to enliven it 
with a couple of tedious bird fables ; one told by the Panther of 
swallows and martins, and one by the Hind of pigeons and a 
buzzard, after which the two beasts went to bed. 

" The dame withdrew, and wishing to h-er guest 
The peace of heaven, betook herself to rest 
Ten thousand angels on her slumbers wait, 
With glorious visions of her future state." 

58. While the town was reading this curious pamphlet, one 
of the best lay arguments for Catholicism, and, as a poem, full 
of good lines, but very clumsy in its structure as a whole, 
there suddenly appeared Mr. Bayes's old friends, Smith and 
Johnson, hearing Mr. Bayes express his delight at this his new 
achievement, in The Hind and the Panther Transversa to 
the Story of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse. This 
caricature, in the manner of "The Rehearsal," was as lively as the 
piece it imitated. Mr. Bayes was now proud not of his play, 
but of his fable. "An apt contrivance, indeed," says Johnson. 
"What, do you make a fable of your religion ? " Bayes : "Ay, 
I'gad, and without morals, too ; for I tread in no man's steps ; 
and to show you how far I can outdo anything that ever was 
writ in this kind, I have taken Horace's design, but, I'gad, have 
so outdone him, you shall be ashamed for your old friend. You 
remember in him the Story of the Country Mouse and the City 
Mouse ; what a plain, simple thing it is, it has no more life 
and spirit in it, I'gad, than a hobby-horse ; and his mice talk so 
meanly, such common stuff, so like mere mice, that I wonder 
it has pleased the world so long. But now will I undeceive 
mankind, and teach 'em to heighten and elevate a fable. I'll 
bring you in the very same mice disputing the depth of 
philosophy, searching into the fundamentals of religion, 
quoting texts, fathers, councils, and all that ; I'gad, as you 
shall see, either of 'em could easily make an ass of a country 
vicar. Now, whereas Horace keeps to the dry, naked story, I 
have more copiousness than to do that, I'gad. Here, I draw 
you general characters, and describe all the beasts of the 
creation ; there, I launch out into long digressions, and leave 
my mice for twenty pages together ; then I fall into raptures, 
and make the finest soliloquies, as would ravish you. Won't 
this do, think you ?" Johnson: "Faith, sir, I don't well conceive 
you; all this about two mice ?" Bayes: "Ay, why not? Is it 



73 2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. \kt> 1687 

not great and heroical ? But come, you'll understand it better 
when you hear it ; and pray be as severe as you can ; Fgad, I 
defy all criticks. Thus it begins : 

" ' A milk-white mouse, immortal and unchang'd, 
Fed on soft cheese, and o'er the dairy rang'd ; 
•Without, unspotted ; innocent within, 
So fear'd no danger, for she knew no ginn.' " 

This new jest upon Dryden was by two young men who became 
afterwards famous, Charles Montague and Matthew Prior. 

Charles Montague, born in April, 1661, was the fourth 
son of the Hon. George Montague, a younger son of the first 
Earl of Manchester. He was sent at fourteen to Westminster 
School, where he formed so intimate a friendship with George 
Stepney (§52) that he avoided a scholarship at Oxford, and got 
leave from his friends to join Stepney at Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge. At the death of Charles II., Montague contributed to 
the volume of condolences and congratulations for the new 
king that was put together according to custom. His poem, 
" On the Death of His Most Sacred Majesty King Charles IL," 
pleased Lord Dorset and Sir Charles Sedley so well that they 
invited Montague to town. The piece was a clever but un- 
measured panegyric, opening with this bold couplet : 

" Farewell, great Charles, monarch of blest renown, 
The best good man that ever nll'd a throne." 

Dorset and Sedley were on the popular side, in opposition to 
the king's designs, made more alarming by his setting up of 
a standing army for aid in suppressing possible resistance to 
them. At their suggestion, Montague joined Prior in reply to 
Dryden's " Hind and Panther." 

Matthew Prior, born in 1664, lost his father when young, 
and came into the care of his uncle, Samuel Prior, who kept 
the " Rummer " Tavern, near Charing Cross. It was a house 
frequented by nobility and gentry ; so it chanced that the 
Earl of Dorset found in it young Prior, who had been taught 
at Westminster School, reading Horace for his amusement. 
He talked to him, saw him to be clever, and paid the cost 
of sending him to St. John's College, Cambridge. Prior was 
then eighteen. He took his B.A. degree in 1686, returned 
to London, and took his place among the young wits of the 
Whig party by the brightness of the satire upon Dryden's 
u Hind and Panther." He made friends also by the good 



toa.d. 1688.] CHARLES MONTAGUE. PRIOR. KEN. 733 

quality of a poem on the Deity, written according to a practice 
of his college to send every year some poems upon sacred 
subjects to the Earl of Exeter in return for a benefaction by one 
of his ancestors. 

59. On the 27th of April, 1688, James issued a repetition of 
his Declaration of Indulgence. By an Order in Council, on the 
4th of May, he ordered it to be read in churches and chapels 
throughout the kingdom on two successive Sundays by ministers 
of all persuasions, the first reading to be in London on the 20th 
of May, and in the country on the 3rd of June. On the 18th 
of May a protest was signed on behalf of a great body of the 
clergy, by William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, and 
six bishops— Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells; Francis 
Turner, Bishop of Ely ; Thomas White, Bishop of Peter- 
borough; John Lake, Bishop of Chichester; William Lloyd, 
Bishop of St. Asaph ; and Sir Jonathan Trelawny, Bishop of 
Bristol — who declared their loyalty, but pointed out that the 
Declaration was " founded upon such a dispensing power as hath 
been often declared illegal in Parliament." Of these "seven lamps 
of the Church," Thomas Ken has a place in literature. He was 
born in 1637, the son of an attorney. His mother died when he 
was four years old, and his home was then at the haberdasher's 
shop in Fleet Street kept by Izaak Walton; for his eldest sister, 
who took charge of him, was Izaak Walton's second wife. Ken 
was seven when Izaak Walton retired from business; and his 
home was then in Walton's cottage by the banks of the Dove, 
in Staffordshire. George Moriey, Bishop of Winchester, was 
Izaak Walton's son-in-law; and Thomas Ken was sent, at 
thirteen, to Winchester College. In 1656 he went to Oxford, 
and joined a musical society formed there, for, like his sister, 
Mrs. Walton, Ken had a delightful voice, and he played on 
the lute, viol, a'nd organ. As a student also, Ken began an 
epic poem on Edmund, the East Anglian king martyred by 
the Danes. He became M.A. in 1663, and chaplain to Lord 
Maynard, with the rectory of Easton Parva, just outside Lord 
Maynard's park, in Essex. Then he became domestic chaplain 
to George Moriey, Bishop of Winchester, in whose household 
Izaak Walton and his family were already domesticated. Then 
he obtained a fellowship of Winchester College, and lived in the 
Wykehamist house. The Bishop of Winchester gave him, in 
1667, the living of Brightstone, in the Isle of Wight ; and it was 
in the Isle of Wight, as Rector of Brightstone, that Ken wrote his 



734 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1688 

Morning and Evening Hymns, using them himself, and singing 
them to his lute when he rose and when he went to rest. In 
1669 the Bishop of Winchester gave Ken other promotion, and 
he left the Isle of Wight. In 1675 ne visited Rome with his 
nephew, young Izaak Walton. In 1681 he published his Manual 
of Prayers for the Scholars of Winchester College. In 1683, 
Ken went as chaplain-in-chief of the fleet sent to Tangier, and 
found, when he came home in April, that his brother-in-law, 
Izaak Walton, had died in December, 1683, aged ninety-one. 

It had been in 1670 that Walton published in one volume 
the Lives — written from time to time — of Hooker, Sanderson, 
Wotton, Donne, and Herbert ; and in 1676 that Charles 
Cotton (b. 1630, d. 1687), a translator of Corneille's " Les 
Horaces" and Montaigne's Essays, and author of a Travestie 
of Virgil, added the "Second Part of the Complete Angler: 
being Instructions how to Angle for Trout or Grayling in a 
Clear Stream." 

In October, 1684, Ken was at the deathbed of his friend 
George Morley, whose writings had been collected in 1683 
as " Several Treatises written upon Several Occasions, by the 
Right Reverend Father in God, George, Lord Bishop of Winton, 
both before and since the King's Restauration : wherein his 
judgment is fully made known concerning the Church of Rome, 
and most of those Doctrines which are controverted betwixt 
her and the Church of England." Thomas Ken then became 
chaplain to Charles II., and was made Bishop of Bath and 
Wells not many days before the king's death. Ken published 
a Manual of Prayer, Seraphical Meditations, and a poem 
called Hymnotheo ; or, the Penitent, but his fame rests on the 
Morning and Evening Hymns, and on his place among the 
Seven Bishops. 

60. By some means the petition of the bishops was printed 
and hawked about London. When the appointed Sunday came 
the Declaration was read only in four London churches. It was 
read by not more than 200 of the clergy in all England. On the 
8th of June the seven bishops were committed to the Tower for 
.seditious libel, but enlarged on recognizances before their trial. 
They were tried and acquitted. The shouts of popular rejoicing 
were echoed by the soldiers in the camp at Hounslow. On the 
10th of June, two days after the bishops had been sent to the 
Tower, a son was born to James and his queen. This event 
might ensure a Roman Catholic succession to the throne, and 



toa.d. x68g.] THE REVOLUTION. 735 

gave, therefore, the finishing blow to the king's cause. The 
passions of the time produced also a common false impression 
that the child was an imposture. But John Dryden, as 
laureate, hailed this event with Britannia Rediviva : a Poem on 
the Birth of the Prince. Of course there are in this poem of 
panegyric for the parents and hope for the child indications that 
Dryden knew as well as other men the dangers of the time : 

" Nor yet conclude all fiery trials past, 
For Heaven will exercise us to the last. 



By living well let us secure his days ; 
Moderate in hopes and humble in our ways. 
No force the free-born spirit can constrain, 
But charity arid great examples gain. 
Forgiveness is our thanks for such a day ; 
'Tis god-like God in his own coin to pay.'' 

On the 30th of June, the day of the acquittal of the seven 
bishops, a messenger was sent to invite William of Orange to 
enter England at the head of troops. On the 5th of November 
William's fleet entered Torbay, and William landed at Brixham. 
James found himself deserted. On the 19th of December the 
Prince of Orange held a court at St. James's. On the 13th of 
February, 1689, William and Mary became king and queen of 
England. Conditions and limitations of royal authority em- 
bodied in the Declaration of Rights and Liberties of the English 
People were joined to the offer of the throne. It was accepted 
presently with those limitations, and they were afterwards em- 
bodied in the Bill of Rights. 



CHAPTER XL 

UNDER WILLIAM III. AND ANNE. 

I. In the course of English Literature after the Revolution, the 
old contest about the limit of authority (ch. iii. § 10) became less 
and less prominent. For a time the same parties continued the 
same battle ; the upholders of supreme authority sought to 
reconquer ground that had been won by their antagonists. 
There were years even in which many doubted whether we had 
seen the last of civil war. But the limitation of the monarchy 
was maintained. The machinery of government was brought 
by degrees into good working order, and slow changes tended 



736 A FIFST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d.. 1689. 

constantly to the removal of undue restraints upon each life 
within the body of the people. Meanwhile, also, there was a 
slow rise in the average power of the unit in the population. 
We shall find, therefore, in the literature now to be described a 
gradual abatement of that strife of thought through which we 
won our liberties, and an increasing sense of the true use of 
freedom. A land is free when there is nothing to restrain and 
much to aid the full development of each one mind in it. 

Not many years after the Revolution we shall begin to find 
encroachment upon the French influence over our literature, by 
writers who do not address the polite patron, but find readers 
enough in the main body of their countrymen. As the natural 
mind of the people acted upon the Elizabethan dramatists who 
had England fairly represented in the playhouse audience, we 
shall find it also using healthy influence upon those writers of 
the eighteenth and nineteenth century who did not follow the 
doctrine expressed in the Poctique of La Mesnadiere, that 
literature is only for kings, lords, and fine ladies, scholars « 
and philosophers. As the many-headed monster learns to read, 
we come into the last of the Four Periods into which our lite- 
rature falls (ch. iv. § 10), the Period of Popular Influe?ice. This 
we shall find encroaching more and more on the French in- 
fluence during many years of its decline. There will be, indeed, 
another form of French influence upon our literature, not of polite 
French on polite English, but of nation upon nation. Our 
political settlement of 1689, following that of the Dutch, in- 
fluenced opinion in other countries. It was a starting-point of 
thought which in France, under conditions unlike ours, advanced 
during the next hundred years to the Revolution of 1789. Out 
of intense feeling and quick wit of the French came bold sug- 
gestion of sodal systems that were to solve all problems and go 
far beyond any results attained by our dull habit of accom- 
modating ourselves to the possible. We should have been 
worth little as a people if our neighbours had not stirred us by 
their noble ardour to achieve, if it might be, a perfect recon- 
struction of society, based on a complete reconsideration of the 
rights and* duties of the individual in relation to himself, his 
family, his country, and his Maker if he had one. That spirit 
of inquiry which we have seen gathering strength since Eliza- 
beth's time, we shall find active still; bold in its testing of 
accepted facts and search after new truth in all the realms 
of knowledge. In some directions we shall find it quickened 



a.d. 1689] PERIOD OF POPULAR INFLUENCE. 737 

and emboldened by this new influence of France. We shal] 
find also the reaction against despotism connected throughout 
Europe with the rise of a strong spirit of nationality, strong 
in England, aiding the reaction against petty classicism and 
Latin-English, and bringing us, as a Teutonic race, to fellow- 
feeling with the kindred literature of the Germans at a time 
when that was vigorously representing the new impulse of 
thought. During all their contests against despotism, we have 
felt with our neighbours, but, without need of another revolution 
for ourselves, have plodded on, and have not been misguided by 
that quiet religious sense of duty which does keep us, with all 
our individual stupidities, from first to last as a nation, steady 
upon a road that cannot lead to ruin. We have now to trace in 
our literature the mind of England passing by natural sequence 
to a form of endeavour in our own times as distinctly marked 
as that of any one age in its earlier life ; the form of endeavour 
towards which all past struggle tended, and which works towards 
results that five hundred years hence may be not half attained. 

2. John Bunyan and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, 
who differed only a few months in age, both died in 1688. 
Ralph Cudworth also died within the year before the accession 
of William and Mary. Edmund Waller, Henry More, and 
Sir William Petty had passed away within the last two years. 
Aphra Behn, Sir George Etherege, and Sydenham, the phy- 
sician, died within the first year of the reign. The great 
living writers were John Dryden, who was in the first year of this 
reign fifty-eight years old ; John Locke, fifty-seven ; and Isaac 
Newton, forty-seven. The oldest living writer was William 
Prynne, eighty-nine, and he lived to be ninety-nine. John 
Wallis, the mathematician, and Sir Roger TEstrange were 
seventy-three, and both lived through the reign ; so did John 
Evelyn, who, at the beginning of the reign of William and 
Mary was sixty-nine, and Samuel Pepys, who was fifty-seven. 
Sir William Temple and Robert Boyle were sixty-one ; John 
Howe and John Tillotson were fifty-nine. Robert JSouth and 
Edward Stillingfleet were fifty-four ; Gilbert Burnet, forty-six ; 
William Sherlock about the same, and William Penn a year 
younger. The Earl of Dorset was fifty-two ; Thomas Rymer 
was about fifty ; the Earl of Mulgrave forty, and John Dennis, 
with fame to come as a critic, thirty-two. Of the dramatists, 
past and future, William Wycherley was forty-nine ; John 
Vanbrugh, twenty-three ; William Congreve, nineteen ; and 

V V 



738 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1689. 

George Farquhar, eleven. Thomas Shadwell was forty-nine ; 
Elkanah Settle, forty-one ; John Crowne, over forty ; Sir 
Charles Sedley, about forty ; Thomas Southern, thirty ; Colley 
Cibber, eighteen : Nicholas Rovve, fifteen. Jeremy Collier was 
thirty-nine ; Richard Blackmore, thirty-six. Daniel Defoe and 
Charles Montague were twenty-eight ; Francis Atterbury and 
Richard Bentley were twenty-seven ; Matthew Prior was 
twenty-five ; Samuel Garth, about twenty-five ; George Gran- 
ville, Lord Lansdowne, twenty-two : and among the young 
men and boys, with all their work before them, were Richard 
Steele and Joseph Addison, seventeen ; Isaac Watts, fifteen ; 
John Arbuthnot, fourteen ; Henry St. John, eleven ; Thomas 
Parnell, nine ; Edward Young, five ; Allan Ramsay, four ; Pope 
and Gay, babies. 

3. When the first Earl of Shaftesbury died, in 1683, 
John Locke (ch. x. § 53) remained in Holland. James II. 
demanded him of the States, on false suspicion of his having 
been concerned in Monmouth's invasion, and he was in con- 
cealment till the close of 1686. In 1687 he was in safe harbour 
at Amsterdam, where his chief friends were the leaders of the 
Arminian or Remonstrant school, which had its head-quarters 
there. Arminius himself (ch. viii. § 18) had once been pastor at 
Amsterdam ; his successor, Simon Bisschop, born at Amsterdam 
in 1583, was, under the name of Episcopius, the man who first 
expressed, though not systematically, the doctrines of the 
Arminians or Remonstrants in various theological writings. 
When the persecution of the Remonstrants slackened, after the 
death, in 1625, of Stadtholder Maurice, Episcopius, who had 
been expatriated by the Synod of Dordrecht, settled at Amster- 
dam, opened there the Oratory of the Remonstrants, and took 
the chair of Theology in their seminary. Episcopius died in 
1643 ; his successor was Etienne Courcelles, who collected his 
works in two volumes, published at Amsterdam in 1650 and 
1663. The successor of Courcelles was Locke's Dutch friend, 
Philip van Limborch, nephew of Episcopius, whose life he 
wrote. Limborch was born at Amsterdam, and was within a year 
of the same age as Locke. In 1668 he had become pastor of 
the Remonstrants' church, and next year also Professor of 
Theology at the Remonstrants' seminary. He held those 
offices until his death, in 17 12 ; and Locke, at Amsterdam, was a 
liember of his congregation. There was also a philosophical 
society over which Limborch presided, and of which Locke and 



A.n. 1689] JOHN LOCKE. 739 

Jean Leclerc were the most important members. The principles 
of Toleration maintained by Limborch were propagated by 
Leclerc. Limborch also wrote. His " Theologia Christiana," 
published in 1686, was the first complete system of Arminian 
theology ; and in 1692 he published a " History of the Inquisi- 
tion," which set forth the odiousness of its tyranny. Locke's 
strong friendship for Limborch was that of a fellow-combatant, 
and his first letter, On Toleration, published in Latin, at 
Gouda, in 1689 — Epistola de Tolerantia — was dedicated " Ad 
clarissimum virum T.A.R.P., T.O., L., A., scripta a P.A., P.O.; 
J.L., A." — the letters meaning that the piece was addressed to 
the illustrious Professor of Theology among the Remonstrants, 
Hater of Tyranny, Limborch of Amsterdam (Theologiae Apud 
Remonstrantes Professorem, Tyrannidis Osorem, Limburgum, 
Amstelodamensem) ; and written by the Friend of Peace, 
Hater of Persecution, John Locke, Englishman (Pacis Amico, 
Persecutionis Osore, Johanne Lockio, Anglo). 

Locke's other friend, Jean Leclerc, born at Geneva, was a 
great-nephew of Courcelles, a man of about thirty, who had 
been turned by the writings of Episcopius from the Calvinism 
in which he had been bred ; had made a stir in his church at 
the age of twenty-two by publishing theological letters, under 
the name of " Liberius a Sancto Amore;" and, after movements 
which included a short residence in London, settled at Amster- 
dam, where he was Professor of Philosophy, Belles Lettres, and 
Hebrew in the Remonstrants' college. He had an active mind, 
wrote much, and well. A few years before his death, in 1736, he 
lost his reason, continued to talk, write, and correct proofs, with 
the steadiness of a sane scholar, but without any sense or order 
in his thoughts. The papers over which he seemed to himself 
to be living as of old were burnt by his printer as they were 
received. In his early manhood, when he was among Locke's 
friends at Amsterdam, Leclerc was editing his ■' Bibliotheque 
Universelle," which extended to twenty-six volumes. Locke's 
Essay Concerning Human Understandi7ig was finished among 
these friends at Amsterdam in 1687 ; and an outline of it, trans- 
lated into French by Leclerc, appeared in the " Bibliotheque 
Universelle" for January, 1688. Other extracts from it after- 
wards appeared in the same journal. Locke's New Method of 
making Common-place Books was translated into English in 
1697, from Leclerc's "Bibliotheque" for 1685. 

The English Revolution having been accomplished, John 

v v 2 



740 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1689. 

Locke came over to England in February, 1689, in the fleet 
that convoyed the Princess of Orange. He was made a Com- 
missioner of Appeals, with a salary of ^200 a year ; and declined 
other preferment, including offer of the post of envoy to some 
court where the air might suit his inferior health. But he 
found a pleasant home at Oates, in Essex, with Sir Francis 
and Lady Masham. Lady Masham was Cud worth's only child 
(ch. x. § 22), and had been trained by her father to scholarship 
and liberal thought ; she and her husband were, therefore, in 
strong intellectual sympathy with Locke, and established a 
room as his own in their country house at Oates. In 1691, 
Locke published Some Considerations on the Lowering of 
Interest and Raising the Value of Money. The practical 
tendency of his writings caused him to be made, in 1695, a Com- 
missioner of Trade and Plantations ; and he surprised merchants 
by showing them how a philosopher might have wider and 
clearer views of business than they had themselves. In 1700 
he resigned his seat at the Board of Trade, and spent the rest 
of his life at Oates, in study of the Scriptures. He died there, 
on the 28th of October, 1704, aged seventy-three. . In Locke's 
personal character there was the simplicity of genius. Living a 
pure life, with its whole labour given to the highest interests of 
men, Locke was naturally grave, but his was the gravity of 
unaffected thoughtfulness, which qualified him but the more for 
innocent enjoyment. He spoke and wrote plain English, gave 
himself no airs of artificial dignity, would laugh at those who 
laboured to look wise, and quote the maxim of Rochefoucauld, 
that gravity is a mystery of the body contrived to conceal 
faults of the mind. 

4. Locke's most important writings came together with the 
new order of things in England, and expressed the spirit of the 
English Revolution. He dealt first with Religious Liberty, in 
Three Lette?s concerning Toleration. The first was in Latin, 
addressed, as we have seen, to Limborch, and printed at Gouda, 
in 1689, translated in the same year into Dutch and French, 
and then into English, by William Popple. Its argument is that 
toleration is the chief characteristic mark of the true Church. 
Antiquity, orthodoxy, and reformed discipline may be marks dwelt 
upon by men striving for power over one another ; but charity, 
meekness, and goodwill to men are marks of the true Christian. 
Christianity is no matter of pomp and dominion ; its power is 
over men's lives, to war against their lusts and vices, teach 



A.D. 1689.] LOCKE'S LETTERS ON TOLERATION. 74 1 

them charity, and inspire them with a faith working Dy love. If 
persecution be a zeal for men's souls, why does it leave lusts of 
the flesh unattacked, and only compel men to profess what they 
do not believe in points of doctrine? It is the duty, Locke 
argued, of the civil magistrate to secure to every citizen the just 
possession of the things belonging to this life — his life itself, his 
liberty, health, and safe possession of his goods. It is not the 
duty of the civil magistrate to dictate religion to the people- 
God never gave such authority, and man cannot delegate to 
another the command over his soul. The power of the magis- 
trate consists only in outward force, which cannot produce in- 
ward persuasion. He may argue, indeed, and so may other 
men ; but in this he only is master who convinces. Nor if 
men's minds were changed would they be probably nearer 
heaven for adopting the opinions of the court. The Church only 
is concerned with souls of men, and a church Locke held to be 
" a voluntary society of men joining themselves together of their 
own accord, in order to the public worshipping of God in such 
manner as they judge acceptable to Him and effectual to the 
salvation of their souls." Each member must worship in 
accordance with his sense of truth ; a man cannot inherit con- 
victions as he inherits house and land. The Church being, 
therefore, a society of men who join together for the worship 
they believe will bring them nearest to their God, its laws, said 
Locke, must be of its own making ; they cannot be imposed 
from without. Those who attach importance to the episcopal 
rule established by a long series of succession, are right in 
maintaining for themselves what they judge necessary, "pro- 
vided I may have liberty at the same time to join myself to that 
society in which I am persuaded those things are to be found 
which are necessary to the salvation of my soul." The Gospel 
frequently declares that the disciples of Christ should suffer 
persecution, but nowhere that the Church of Christ should per- 
secute ; and to those who cried for the Church as the Ephesian 
silversmith cried for Diana, Locke argued that it might be 
advantageous to themselves " to require those things in order to 
ecclesiastical communion which Christ does not require in order 
to life eternal;" but he added, "how that can be called the 
Church of Christ which is established upon laws that are not 
His, and which excludes such persons from its communion as 
He will one day receive into the kingdom of. heaven, I under- 
stand not." The end of a religious society, he said, is the public 



742 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1689 

worship of God, and by means thereof, the acquisition of eternal 
life. All discipline should therefore tend to that end, and the 
church has no control over the outward goods of its members. 
Force belongs wholly to the civil magistrate ; the arms of a 
church are admonitions, exhortations, and advices. The utmost 
force of ecclesiastical power is to cut off a member from the 
society which he dishonours, and which refuses any longer to 
associate with him. After he has thus been cut off from his 
church, all its relation with him and, of course, all power over 
him is at an end. A church is free to decline fellowship with 
an obstinate offender against its laws, but this must be without 
rough usage or civil injury of any kind. " No private person has 
a right in any manner to prejudice another person in his civil 
enjoyments because he is of another church or religion." His 
civil rights are his as a man, Christian or Pagan. We are bound 
to be just ; " nay, we must not content ourselves with the narrow 
measure of bare justice— charity, bounty, and liberality must be 
added to it. This the Gospel enjoins, this reason directs, and 
this that natural fellowship we are born into requires of us." What 
is true of private persons is equally true of particular churches, 
"which stand as it were in the same relation to each other as 
private persons among themselves ; nor has any one of them 
any manner of jurisdiction over any other — no, not even when 
the civil magistrate (as it sometimes happens) comes to be of this 
or the other communion. For the civil government can give no 
new right to the church, nor the church to the civil government. 
So that whether the magistrate join himself to any church or 
separate from it, the church remains always as it was before — 
a free and voluntary society. It neither acquires the power of 
the sword by the magistrate's coming to it, nor does it lose the 
right of instruction and excommunication by his going from it. 
But in all churches the magistrate can forbid that to be done 
which is not lawful to be done anywhere, because it injures some 
member of the commonwealth in that which it is the business 
of the civil government to protect — his life or estate." And a 
church, Locke argued, that was against the civil rights of the 
community has no right to be tolerated by the magistrate. If it 
teach that no faith is to be kept with those who differ from it 
in religious doctrine, that kings excommunicated by it forfeit 
their crowns and kingdoms, that dominion is founded in grace — 
meaning that civil supremacy is vested in those who belong to 
their own religious society — "what," said Locke, "do all those 



to a.d. 1690.] LOCKE ON RELIGION AND GOVERNMENT. 743 

and the like doctrines signify but that they may and are ready 
upon any occasion to seize the government and possess them- 
selves of the estates and fortunes of their fellow-subjects ; and 
that they only ask leave to be tolerated by the magistrate so 
long until they find themselves strong enough to effect it." 
These are, in Locke's words, the chief principles discussed and 
maintained in his three letters concerning Toleration. In the 
first letter he set them forth, and met by anticipation some of 
the chief objections likely to be urged against them. Locke's 
second letter, published in 1690, and third, a work of some 
length, in 1692, both signed " Philanthropus," were replies to 
the objections actually raised by theologians of Queen's College, 
Oxford, in three letters, of which the first was entitled, The 
Argument of the Letter concerning Toleration briefly Considered 
and Answered. 

5. Locke's argument for religious liberty, in 1689, was followed 
by his argument also for civil liberty. In 1689 and 1690 he 
published Two Treatises of Government j one opposed to the 
arguments of Sir Robert Filmer (ch. viii. § 67) in his Patriarcha, 
which had appeared in 1680, and was applauded by upholders 
of the absolute supremacy of kings ; the other an essay con- 
cerning the true original, extent, and end of civil government. 
They were described by him as the beginning and end of a 
discourse concerning government, and he hoped " sufficient to 
establish the throne of our great restorer, our present King 
William ; to make good his title, in the consent of the people, 
which being the only one of all lawful governments, he has 
more fully and clearly than any prince in Christendom ; and to 
justify to the world the people of England, whose love of their 
just and natural rights, with their resolution to preserve them, 
saved the nation when it was on the very brink of slavery and 
ruin." He should not, he said, have replied to Sir Robert " were 
there not men amongst us who, by crying up his books and 
espousing his doctrine, save me from the reproach of writing 
against a dead adversary." Sir Robert based his plea for abso- 
lute monarchy upon the argument that men are not naturally 
free. They are born in subjection to their parents, and imperial 
authority is based on patriarchal. Absolute lordship was vested 
in Adam, inherited from him by the patriarchs. A son, a sub- 
ject, and a servant or slave, were one and the same thing at first. 
It was God's ordinance that the supremacy should be unlimited 
in Adam, and as large as all the acts of his will ; and as in him 



744 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1690. 

so in all others that have supreme power. Locke, in reply to 
this, undertook to show : 1. That Adam had not, either by right 
of fatherhood, or by positive donation from God, any such autho- 
rity over his children or dominion over the world as was pre- 
tended. 2. That if he had, his heirs yet had no right to it. 3. 
That if his heirs had, there being no law of nature nor positive 
law of God that determines which is the right heir in all cases 
that may arise, the right of succession, and, consequently, of 
bearing rule, could not have been certainly determined. 4. That 
even if that had been determined, yet the knowledge of which is 
the eldest line of Adam's posterity has been so long since utterly 
lost, that in the races of mankind and families of the world, 
there remains not to one above another the least pretence to be 
the oldest house, and to have right of inheritance. Wherefore 
it is impossible that the rulers now on earth should make any 
benefit or derive the least shadow of authority from that which 
Sir Robert Filmer and his followers held to be the founda- 
tion of all power, Adam's private dominion and paternal juris- 
diction. Having disposed of this argument for absolutism in 
the first treatise, in the second Locke set forth what he believed 
to be the real basis of civil government. " Political power," he 
said, " is the right of making laws with penalties of death, and, 
consequently, all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving 
of property, and of employing the force of the community in 
the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the common- 
wealth, from foreign injury, and all this only for the publick 
good." Men, he said, are by nature subject only to the laws of 
nature, born equal and free. Hooker's recognition of this 
(ch. vii. § 90) caused Locke from time to time to quote him, 
and always as " the judicious Hooker." The influence of this 
treatise has caused Locke's " judicious Hooker " to become as 
much a commonplace of speech as Chaucer's " moral Gower'» 
(ch. iv. § 24). But the state of liberty is not a state of licence. 
Reason is one of the laws of nature, and it teaches that if men 
are all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in 
his life, health, liberty, or possessions. Next to the preservation 
of himself, the natural law wills that each shall aid in the preser- 
vation of the rest of mankind ; and into every man's hand is put 
the execution of such natural law on those who molest their 
neighbours, as far as reason allows that power may be used 
to prevent recurrence of offence or secure reparation for the 
injury. In this state of nature, Locke argued, all men are, until 



A.D. 1690.] LOCKE'S TREA TISES OF GOVERNMENT. 745 

by their own consents they make themselves members of some 
political society. The state of war is not, in Locke's system, 
the state of nature, but that which tends to destroy its first con- 
ditions. Thus, he who attempts to get another man into his 
absolute power, does thereby put himself in a state of war with 
him. To avoid this state of war is one great reason of men's 
putting themselves into society and quitting the state of nature. 
A man, not having the power of his own life, cannot by com- 
pact enslave himself to any one ; nobody can give more power 
than he has himself. Slavery is nothing but the state of war 
continued between a lawful conqueror and a captive. Though 
the earth and its goods are common to all men, each man has a 
property in his person, and the labour of his body is his own. 
An apple gathered upon common ground belongs to him who 
has given labour to the gathering. If the water in the stream 
belongs to all, that in the pitcher is the property of him who 
drew it out. In this part of his treatise Locke is the first to 
point distinctly, as Hobbes had pointed more indistinctly, to 
labour as the source of wealth. But God gave the earth to 
man's use. When its natural fruits were the chief wealth, none 
had property in more than he could use — as much land as he 
could labour on, as much fruit as he could consume in his family 
distribute to others, or store for a future need. He had no right 
in reason to claim land that he could not cultivate, or gather 
fruit only to let it rot. But the invention of money, as a sign of 
value in itself not subject to decay, made it possible to accumu- 
late the wealth derived from labour, and establish large proper- 
ties, to which the first right was given by labour, and which 
grew by the heaping up of durable things; for the bounds of 
just property are exceeded not by the mere largeness of posses- 
sion, but by the perishing of anything in it uselessly. Paternal 
power is the right and duty of guiding children till they reach 
maturity, because they are not as soon as born under the law of 
reason, and this has no analogy with the social compact. A 
civil society is formed when any number of men agree to form 
a government that shall maintain and execute laws for avoidance 
of those evils which lie in the state of nature, where every man 
is judge in his own case. Absolute monarchy, said Locke, is 
no form of civil government at all ; for the end of civil society 
is to avoid the inconveniences of a state of nature, and that is 
not done by setting up a man who shall be always judge in his 
own case, and therefore himself in the state of nature in respect 



74-6 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1690. 

of those under his dominion. For his subjects are exposed to 
all that can be suffered at the hands of one " who being in the 
unrestrained state of nature, is yet corrupted with flattery, and 
armed with power." Political societies, then, are formed by the 
consent of the majority, chiefly for protection of the property of 
those who are so united. Each society needs an established 
law, an impartial judge, and power to support and execute his 
sentence. Thus arise the Legislative and Executive powers of a 
state. The commonwealth may be ruled by the majority as a 
democracy ; by a few select men as an oligarchy ; or by one as 
a monarchy, hereditary or elective ; or by any form compounded 
of these, as shall seem best to the community. The supreme 
power is the Legislative, bounded by the law of God and nature, 
bound, therefore, to maintain equal justice, to seek only the 
good of the people, whom it may not tax without their own 
consent, because then Government itself would deprive them 
of that which it exists for the purpose of defending. The Legis- 
lative is restrained also from transfer of the power of making 
laws to anybody else, or placing it anywhere but where the 
people placed it. Legislation need not be continuous, and is 
best put into the hands of divers persons, who then separate and 
become subject to the laws they have made. But Execution of 
the Laws must be continuous. Its power is always in being, and 
thus the Legislative and Executive power come often to be sepa- 
rated. Another power, the Federative, is that which represents 
the whole society as one in its relation to the rest of mankind ; 
and an injury done to one member of the body engages the 
whole in the reparation of it. These two powers, the Executive, 
which administers laws of the society within itself, and the 
Federative, which manages the security and interest of the 
public without, though really distinct in themselves, are almost 
always united. Throughout, while the supreme power is with 
the Legislative, it holds this as a trust from the people, which can 
remove or alter the Legislative if it be found unfaithful to the 
trust reposed in it. If the Executive break trust by use of force 
upon the Legislative, it puts itself into a state of war with the 
people. The use of force without authority always puts him that 
uses it into a state of war, as the aggressor, and renders him 
liable to be treated accordingly. The power surrendered by 
each individual to the society cannot revert to him while he re- 
mains a member of it. So, also, when the society has placed the 
Legislative in any assembly of men, to continue in them and 



A.D. 1690.] ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING. 747 

their successors, with direction and authority for providing such 
successors, the Legislative can never revert to the people whilst 
that government lasts, unless they have set limits to its dura- 
tion, or by the miscarriages of those in authority the supreme 
power is forfeited through breach of trust. 

With such argument as this, John Locke gave philosophical 
expression to the principles established practically by the 
English Revolution. 

6. Locke's Essay co7icerning Human Understanding, in Four 
Books, was first published complete in 1690. Its object was to 
lead men out of the way of vain contention by showing, through 
an inquiry into the nature of the human understanding, what are 
the bounds beyond which argument is vain. In his First Book 
he followed into a new field Bacon's principles, and maintained 
that man has no innate ideas, but is created with a receptive 
mind and reason, whereby he draws knowledge from the universe 
without. " The goodness of God," Locke said, " hath not been 
wanting to men without such original impressions of knowledg, 
or ideas stamp'd on the mind ; since He hath furnish'd man with 
those faculties, which will serve for the sufficient discovery of 
all things requisite to the end of such a being. And I doubt 
not but to show that a man, by the right use of his natural 
abilities, may, without any innate principles, attain the knowledg 
of a God, and other things that concern him. God having 
endu'd man with those faculties of knowing which he hath, was 
no more oblig'dby His goodness to implant those innate notions 
in his mind, than that having given him reason, hands, and 
materials, He should build him bridges or houses." " No innate 
sense of God himself is necessary," said Locke, " for the visible 
marks of extraordinary wisdom and power appear so plainly in 
all the works of the creation, that a rational creature who will 
but seriously reflect on them, cannot miss the discovery of a 
Deity." Thus it seemed stranger to him that men should want 
the notion of God than that they should be without any notion 
of numbers or of fire. In his Second Book, Locke traced the origin 
of our ideas from the world about us by sensation or reflection, 
and argued that our most complex thoughts are formed by various 
combinations of simple ideas derived from the world about us, 
suggested to the mind only by sensation and reflection, and the 
sole materials of all our knowledge. " It is not," said Locke, 
" in the power of the most exalted wit or enlarged understanding, 
by a quickness or vanity of thought, to invent or frame one new 



74§ A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1690. 

simple idea in the mind, not taken in by the ways aforemen- 
tioned ; nor can any force of the understanding destroy those 
that are there." Locke then discussed in detail the forms of 
simple idea derived from sensation and reflection, the action of 
the mind upon them in perception, retention, discernment, 
naming, abstraction ; and its manner of making complex ideas 
out of simple ones. He discussed the source and character of 
man's ideas of space, duration, number, and infinity, of pleasure 
and pain, the passions, his idea of power and of liberty, with 
argument upon the nature of free will. He explained by his own 
method the causes of obscurity in some ideas, and pointed out 
how, by the association of ideas, men are made unreasonable 
who have been trained from childhood to associate with certain 
words collections of ideas that do not properly belong to them. 
A musician used to any tune, when he hears part of it will have 
the ideas of its several notes following one another in his under- 
standing without any act of his own. So whole societies of men 
are impeded in the fair pursuit of truth. " Some independent 
ideas, of no alliance to one another, are by education, custom, 
and the constant din of their party, so coupled in their minds, 
that they always appear there together ; and they can no more 
separate them in their thoughts than if they were but one idea, 
and they operate as if they were so. This gives sense to jargon, 
demonstration to absurdities, and consistency to nonsense, and 
is the foundation of the greatest, I had almost said of all, the 
errors in the world ; or if it does not reach so far, it is at least 
the most dangerous one, since so far as it obtains, it hinders 
men from seeing and examining." The Third Book was a distinct 
essay upon words as signs of ideas, and enforced the importance 
of assuring that, as far as possible, they shall be made to repre- 
sent clearly the same impressions in the minds of those who 
use them, and of those to whom they are addressed. Thus two 
men might argue without end upon the question whether a bat 
be a bird, if they had no clear and equal notion of the collection 
of simple ideas forming the complex idea of a bat, whereby 
they could ascertain whether it contained- all the simple ideas 
to which, combined together, they both give the name of bird. 
The Fourth Book of the Essay applied the whole argument to 
a consideration of the bounds of knowledge and opinion. 
Knowledge can extend no farther than we have ideas, and is 
the perception of the connection and agreement or disagreement 
and repugnancy of any of our ideas. Narrow as the bounds 



a.d. 1690.] THOUGHTS CONCERNING EDUCATION. 749 

may seem, our knowledge does not reach to them. Knowledge 
comes by the way of reason in comparing clear and distinct 
ideas definitely named. Knowledge is to be had only of visible 
and certain truth ; where this fails we must use judgment, and 
regulate our degree of assent by reasoning upon the grounds of 
probability ; the foundation of error lying here in wrong measures 
of probability, as it may lie also in wrong judgment upon matters 
of knowledge. The witness of God, who cannot err, makes an 
assured revelation highest certainty. Assurance that the testi- 
mony is indeed from God establishes " faith ; which as absolutely 
determines our minds, and as perfectly excludes all wavering as 
our knowledg it self; and we may as well doubt of our own being, 
as we can whether any revelation from God be true." What is 
deducible from human experience God enabled us by reason to 
discover. What lies beyond our experience may be the subject 
of a^revelation, which is above reason, but not against it. Locke 
ended with a threefold division of the objects of human know- 
ledge — i, Study of nature, in the largest sense a man's contem- 
plation of things themselves for the discovery of truth ; 2, Prac- 
tical applications, a man's contemplation of the things in his own 
power for the attainment of his ends ; and, 3, Man's contempla- 
tion of the signs (chiefly words) that the mind makes use of, 
both in the one and the other, and the right ordering of them 
for its clearer information. " All which three," said Locke, " viz., 
Things, as they are in themselves knowable; Actions, as they 
depend on us in order to happiness ; and the right use of Signs 
in order to knowledg, being toto ccclo different, they seem'd to me 
to be the three great provinces of the intellectual world, wholly 
separate and distinct one from another." In this Essay, and 
in his two letters to Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, in the 
course of the controversy raised over it, the simple piety of 
Locke is very manifest. The reason of Locke caused him to 
maintain (Book IV., ch. x.) " that we more certainly know that 
there is a God than that there is anything else without us." 

Locke had finished, in March, 1690, Some Thoughts 
concerning Education, published in 1693, a treatise wisely 
designed to bring experience and reason to aid in right training 
of the bodies and minds of children. It is very practical, 
beginning with the education that may form a healthy body, 
passing then to a consideration of the right methods of in- 
fluencing and guiding the mind, the relation of parents to the 
children, who "must not be hinder'd from being children, or 



75° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1690 

from playing, or doing as children, but from doing ill ;" relation 
of teachers to the young, development of character, subjects 
and methods of formal study, and the ordering of travel. The 
influence of Locke's treatise on education was direct and whole- 
some ; and to this day, among sensible customs and traditional 
opinions that help to the well-being of an English home, there 
are generally some that may be traced back to the time when 
Locke's Treatise on Education was a new book with a living 
power over many of its readers. 

In 1695 Locke published a book on The Reasonableness 
of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures, the result of 
his endeavour to turn aside from contending systems of 
theology and betake himself to the sole reading of the Scripture 
for the understanding of the Christian religion. Out of the 
same spirit came his study of St. Paul in A Paraphrase and 
Notes 071 the Epistles of St. Paul to the Galatia?is, Corinthians, 
Romans, Ephesians. To which is prefixed, Art Essay for the 
Understanding of St. PauPs Epistles, by consulting St. Paul 
himself. This was published in 1705, the year after his death, 
for John Locke died early in Queen Anne's reign, in 1704. In 
1706 appeared some posthumous works of his, the chief being 
an essay Of the Conduct of the Understanding, the self-edu- 
cation of the man in learning to make right use of his mind, 
which has its natural place between the Essay concerning 
Human Understanding and Locke's Thoughts on the Educa- 
tion of Children. 

7. John Dryden (ch. x. § 60) remaining loyal to King 
James II., and to his adopted faith, was unable to obey the Act 
which required oaths of allegiance and supremacy to be taken 
by all holders of office before August 1, 1689. Dryden, there- 
fore, suffered in his way, with the non-juring clergy, and lost his 
offices of poet-laureate and historiographer. Lord Dorset, 
who had aided the Revolution, and was now Lord Chamberlain, 
was liberal in private generosity to Dryden in this time of his 
need ; but his vacation of the laureateship was inevitable, and, 
as a stout Whig, his old antagonist, Thonias Snadwell, was 
presented to William by Dorset himself as Dryden's successor. 
There was not another Dryden on the Whig side, and it 
must have been a source of grim content to Dryden when he 
saw that, all things considered, there really was not a man 
who had a better claim to be King William's laureate than 
MacFlecknoe. Wycherley (ch. x. § 38) was a better dramatist^ 



to A.D. 1696.] LOCKE. DRY DEN. DRAMATISTS. LAUREATES. 7$I 

but in their own time they were paired. The Earl of Rochester 
wrote of them : 

" None seem to touch upon true comedy 
But hasty Shad well and slow Wycherley ; " 

and said also of Shadwell, " If he had burnt all he wrote and 
printed all he spoke, he would have had more wit and humour 
than any other poet." Gerard Langbaine — son of a learned 
father of like name, who edited Longinus, and became keeper 
of the archives and Provost of Queen's College, Oxford — Gerard 
Langbaine, the younger, born at Oxford, in 1656, took lively 
interest in the stage. He became senior bedel of the University, 
and died in 1692. He wrote an appendix to a catalogue of 
graduates, a new catalogue of English plays, and published at 
Oxford, in 1691, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets j 
or, some Observations and Remarks on the Lives and Writings 
of all those that have published either Cojnedies, Tragedies, 
Tragi- Comedies, Pastorals, Masques, Interludes, Farces, or 
Operas, in the English Tongue. Langbaine spoke in this book 
of Wycherley as one whom he was proud to call his friend, and 
" a gentleman whom I may boldly reckon among poets of the 
first rank, no man that I know, except the excellent Jonson, 
having outdone him in comedy." Of Shadwell, Langbaine 
said, " I own I like his comedies better than Mr. Dryden's, as 
having more variety of characters, and those drawn from the 
life. . . . That Mr. Shadwell has preferred Ben Jonson for 
his model I am very certain of ; and those who will read the 
preface to The Htimorists may be sufficiently satisfied what a 
value he has for that great man ; but how far he has succeeded 
in his design I shall leave to the reader's examination." Of 
Shad well's play of The Virtuoso, printed in 1676, Langbaine 
said that the University of Oxford had applauded it, "and, 
as no man ever undertook to discover the frailties of such 
pretenders to this kind of knowledge before Mr. Shadwell, so 
none since Mr. Jonson's time ever drew so many different 
characters of humour, and with such success." Shadwell had 
written fourteen plays, and Wycherley his four. Shadwell did 
not wear his laurels long ; he died in December, 1692. 
jSTarnim Tate (ch. x. § 48) succeeded him as laureate, and 
Nicholas Brady preached his funeral sermon. Tate, there- 
fore, was laureate when the first edition of Tate and Brady's 
New Version of the Psalms appeared, in 1696, after the printing 
of some specimens in previous years. Tate, who was a friend 



752 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1690. 

of Dryden, and had been chief writer of the second part of 
"Absalom and Achitophel," remained laureate during the rest 
of Dryden's life, and throughout Queen Anne's reign. 

John Dryden, obliged to return to the stage as a source 
of income, produced in 1690 his tragedy of Don Sebastian in 
blank verse, with a little prose, and in the same year a comedy, 
Amphitryon, following Moliere, with music by Henry Purcell, 
an excellent musician, and one of the organists of the Chapel 
Royal, who died of consumption in 1695, at tne a & e °f thirty- 
seven. Purcell also supplied the music for Dryden's King 
Arthurs or, the British Worthy, written in 1685, and produced as 
a dramatic opera in 1691. With a quiet touch of good-humoured 
satire, Dryden said in the preface to this attempt at what he called 
" the fairy way of writing :" " Not to offend the present times, 
nor a government which has hitherto protected me, I have been 
obliged so much to alter the first design and take away so many 
beauties from the writing, that it is now no more what it was 
formerly than the present ship of the Royal Sovereign, after so 
often taking down and altering, to the vessel it was at the first 
building ;" and to deserved praise of the genius of Purcell, he 
added, " In reason my art on this occasion ought to be subser- 
vient to his." In May, 1692, Dryden produced his tragedy of 
Cleomenes s or, the Spartan Hero, finished for him by his friend 
Thomas Southern. Southern's best plays, both -tragedies, 
were produced in the reign of William III. ; The Fatal Mar- 
riage, in 1694, and Oroonoko, founded on Mrs. Behn's novel 
(ch. x. § 28), in 1696. The play added new strength to the 
protest of the novel against slavery. Southern was an amiable 
man and a good economist. By his commissions in the army, 
which he entered early in James II.'s reign, his good business 
management as a dramatist, and careful investment of his 
money, he became rich, and lived to be a well-to-do, white- 
haired old gentleman, who died at the age of eighty- six in the 
year 1746. He was the introducer of the author's second and 
third night, which raised his profit from the players, and he was 
not above active soliciting, which brought in money from 
bountiful patrons of the theatre to whom he sold his tickets. 
He contrived even to make a bookseller pay ^150 for the right 
of publishing one of his plays. When Dryden once asked him 
how much he made by a play, he owned, to Dryden's great 
astonishment, that by his last play he had made £700. Dryden 
himself had been often content to earn a hundred. In 1694 



toa.d. 1693.] JOHN DRY DEN. JOSEPH ADDISON. 753 

Dryden produced his best play, Love Triumphant, a tragi- 
comedy, which was a failure. In its prologue and epilogue he 
took leave of the stage, for he had now resolved to devote himself 
to a translation of Virgil. While writing these later plays, 
Dryden had received, in 1692, a fee of five hundred guineas for a 
poem— Eleonora— in memory of the Countess of Abingdon, 
and had written a Life of Poly bins to precede a translation by 
Sir Henry Shere, with a preliminary Essay on Satire, a trans- 
lation of The Satires of Juvenal and Persius, translating himself 
Satires 1, 3, 6, 10, and 16 of Juvenal, and all Persius. He edited 
also, for Tonson, in 1693, a third volume of Miscellanies (ch. x. 
§ 52), Examen Poeticum : being the Third Part of Miscellany 
Poems. Containing Va?'iety of New Translations of the Ancient 
Poets; together with many Original Poems by the Most Eminent 
Hands. This was a substantial volume, with an appendix of 
seventy-eight pages, separately paged, containing a translation 
by Tate of a famous poem by Fracastorius, upon a subject that 
all readers might not wish to find included in the volume. It 
opened with Dryden's translation of the First Book of " Ovid's 
Metamorphoses/' included verse by Con greve and Prior, much 
verse by Thomas Yaldec, of Magdalene College, Oxford, then 
aged twenty-two, and a fellow-student of Addison's ; a trans- 
lation of Virgil's first Georgic, dedicated to Dryden by Henry 
Sacheverell, another of Addison's college friends ; and the 
first published writing of Joseph Addison himself, To 
Mr. Dryden : by Mr. Jo. Addison j dated from Magdalene 
College, Oxford, June 2, 1693. Addison, aged twenty-one, here 
exalted Dryden as a translator from the Latin poets. "Thy 
copy," he said — 

" Thy copy casts a fairer light on all, 
And still outshines the bright original." 

Dryden's old publisher, Henry Herringman, had by twenty years 
of industry made fortune enough to retire upon ; and had for 
some time been living, says his tombstone, "handsomely and 
hospitably," at Carshalton, where he and his wife Alice, after fifty- 
eight years of wedded life, died, within six weeks and two days 
of each other, in 1703. Jacob Tonson had begun business as a 
bookseller in 1678, with a capital of only ,£100, cheerfulness, 
honesty, and industry. Herringman had already set up his 
house at Carshalton, and withdrawn much personal attention 
from his business. Young Tonson, aged twenty-three, short, 
stout, and pushing, had his way to make, and sought the good- 

w w 



754 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 168S 

will of the poets. Otway and Tate came to him, and with help 
of a partner in the venture, he raised £20 to pay Dryden for the 
copy of his play of Troilus and Cressida, with which he began 
business relations with the great poet in 1679. Jacob Tonson, 
thenceforth Dryden's publisher, had produced the Miscellanies, 
wished to make them annual, and in the next year, 1694, 
appeared the fourth and last of Dryden's series, as The Annual 
Miscellany : for the Yea?' 1 694. Being the Fourth Part of Mis- 
cellany Poems ; Containing Great Variety of New Translations 
and Original Copies, by the Most Eminent Hands. Again there 
was a good deal from Yalden, through whom probably Addison 
obtained his introduction to the Miscellany, and there was now 
more from young Addison. The volume, much thinner than 
its predecessor, opened with the " Third Book of Virgil's 
Georgicks, Englished by Mr. Dryden," and that was immediately 
followed by A Translation of all Virgil's 4th Ceorgick, except 
the Story of Aristeus. By Mr. Jo. Addison, of Magdalene 
College, Oxo)i. On other pages were, from the same hand, A 
Song for St. Cecilia's Day, at Oxford, and the Story of Salmacis, 
from the Fourth Book of "Ovid's Metamorphoses;" and the 
book closed with An Account of the Greatest English Poets, To 
Mr. PI. S., Apr. 3d., 1694. By Mr. Joseph Addison. " H. S." 
stood for Henry Sacheverell. 

8. Joseph Addison was born on May-day, 1672, in his 
father's parsonage, at Milston, Wiltshire, and was named Joseph, 
after Joseph Williamson (ch. x. § 42), the patron who had given 
that small living. Addison was son and grandson to a clergy- 
man. His mother was a clergyman's daughter, and one of his 
uncles became Bishop of Bristol. Addison's father, Lancelot, 
was the son of a poor Westmoreland clergyman, who had begun 
the world at the Restoration as chaplain to the garrison at 
Dunkirk, and then held for eight years as poor a position at 
Tangier. When he lost that office, the small living of Milston, 
given to him by Mr. Joseph, afterwards Sir Joseph, Williamson, 
enabled Lancelot Addison to marry ; and he had been made one 
of the king's chaplains when his son Joseph appeared as the 
firstborn of a family that came to consist of three sons and 
three daughters. Joseph Addison's father had also turned to 
account his experiences in Tangier, and earned credit by a little 
book, on Wat Barba?yj or, a Short Narrative of the Revolutions 
of the Kingdoms of Fez and Morocco. With a7i Account of 
the Present Ctistoms, Sacred, Civil, a?id Domestic, published in 



toa.d. 1694.] JOSEPH ADDISON. RICHARD STEELE. 755 

1671, and dedicated as "An Unfeigned Testimony of my Respect 
and Affection " to the patron after whom the son presently 
born was named. Lancelot Addison published also a Life of 
Mahomet, and an account of the Jews. About 1677 the Rev. 
Lancelot Addison became Archdeacon of Salisbury, and his 
son Joseph then went to a school at Salisbury, In 16S3, 
Lancelot Addison became Dean of Lichfield ; and Joseph, aged 
eleven, then went to school at Lichfield until 1685, when he was 
sent, a dean's son, as a private pupil to the Charterhouse. 
There he found, among the boys on the foundation, one of his 
own age, Richard Steele, who had been sent to the school a few 
months earlier, in 1684. Between Addison and Steele, as boys 
at the Charterhouse, an enduring friendship was established. 

Richard Steele was not two months older than Addison. 
He was baptized on the 12th of March, 1672 (old style, 1671, see 
note on p. 106), as the son of Richard Steele, an attorney in 
Dublin. His father died when he was not quite five years old, 
and he was in his thirteenth year when, on the nomination of 
the first Duke of Ormond, he was received as a foundation boy 
at the Charterhouse. Steele went home at holiday time with 
his friend Addison to the Lichfield Deanery, where he was on 
brotherly terms with the children of the household, and where 
the father gave his blessing to the friendship between his son 
Joseph and Richard Steele. Addison was only about two 
years at the Charterhouse. He went to Oxford in 1687. Steele 
did not leave the Charterhouse for Oxford until March, 1689, the 
year in which Addison, who had entered Queen's College, was 
elected a Demy of Magdalene. Steele went to Christchurch ; 
and thus, at the beginning of the reign of William and Mary, 
their schoolboy friendship was being renewed by Steele and 
Addison as students at Oxford. Addison's lines in the " Mis- 
cellany" for 1694, which addressed to Henry Sacheverell, at his 
request, 

" A short account of all the Muse-possest 
That down from Chaucer's days to Dryden's times 
Have spent their noble rage in Brittish rhimes," 

were the work of a young man with a bent for criticism, 
though not yet a critic. He echoed opinions of the French 
school, and followed the polite taste of the day. Of Chaucer 
he said that he was " a merry bard," 

,J But age has rusted what the poet writ, 
Worn out his language, and obscur d his wit : 

\V W 2 



756 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. iC88 

In vain he jests in his unpolish'd strain, 

And tries to make his readers laugh in vain. I 

Old Spencer next, warm'd with poetick rage ) 

In antick tales amus'd a barb'rous age ; f 

But now the mystick tale, that pleas'd of yore, \ 
Can charm an understanding age no more ; 
The long-spun allegories fulsom grow, 
While the dull moral lies too plain below." 

Shakespeare was simply left out of Addison's list. His next 
heroes were Cowley and Sprat— Great Cowley, whose " fault is 
only wit in its excess." 

" Blest man ! who's spotless life and charming lays / 
Employ'd the tuneful prelate in thy praise : 
Blest man ! who now shall be for ever known, 
In Sprat's successful labours and thy own. 
But Milton next, with high and haughty stalks 
Unfetter'd in majestick numbers walks. 
***** 

Whate'er his pen describes I more than see, 
Whilst ev'ry verse, array'd in majesty, 
Bold and sublime, my whole attention draws, 
And seems above the critic's nicer laws." 

A genuine admiration of Milton, who did not appeal in vain 
to young Addison's religious feeling, is the most interesting 
feature of these lines, which went on from Milton to Waller, 
Roscommon, Denham, Dryden, Congreve, Montague, and 
Dorset, in the manner of one who was being educated in " an 
understanding age," trained by polite France in a shallow self- 
sufficiency. This " understanding age," however, was not quite 
ignorant of Spenser. There had appeared, in 1687, Spenser 
Redivivus: containing the First Book of the Fairy Qiceen, His 
Essential Design present d, but his Obsolete Language and 
Manner of Verse totally laid aside. Delivered in Heroick 
Numbers, by a Person of Quality. All the old music, with its 
sweet variety of number, was fled. There were no more sonnets ; 
they took flight out of our literature at the coming in of the 
French influence. Narrative was to be after the manner of 
France, in rhymed couplets ; our old " riding rhyme," so called 
because it was the rhyme that described the Canterbury pil- 
grims, was now dubbed " heroic verse," and the predominance 
of this metre had now become one characteristic of the outward 
form of English poetry. 

Richard Steele wrote his earliest published verse a few 
months after the appearance of Addison's Account of the Poets. 
But Steele's interest was above all things in life itself, and then 



toa.d. 1694.] STEELE. ADDISON. KEN. SHERLOCK. 757 

in literature as the expression of it. He showed his interest in 
men by writing a comedy at college, and was content to burn it 
when a fellow-student thought it bad. His first printed verse 
was on the death of Queen Mary, by small-pox, in the Christmas 
week of 1694; and Steele used more than once one of its 
opening lines, expressing his sense of the earnest under-tone 
of life — " Pleasure itself has something that's severe." Since 
the throne was not vacant, Parliament still sat, and for the first 
time a procession of the two Houses of Lords and Commons 
joined in the funeral pomp of an English sovereign. Steele's 
poem, of about 150 lines, was called The Procession. 

9. When Mary and her husband had been proclaimed King 
and Queen of England, Mary sent to ask William Sancroft, 
Archbishop of Canterbury, for his blessing, and had for answer, 
" Tell the princess to ask her father's ; without that I doubt 
mine would not be heard in heaven." He would not transfer 
to William the oaths he had sworn to James, and was suspended 
on the 1st of August, 1689, but not deprived till 1690, when four 
more of the seven bishops whom King James had sent to the 
Tower — namely, Turner, White, Locke, and Ken — besides Lloyd 
of Norwich and Frampton of Gloucester, were deprived as 
Non-jurors. About four hundred clergymen and members of 
the Universities suffered with them, and many who took the 
oaths had no sympathy with the Revolution. Thomas Keil 
(ch. x. § 59), when deprived, at the age of fifty-three, had ,£700 
and his books, and was presently housed by an old college 
friend, Thomas Thynne, Lord Weymouth, in a suite of rooms in 
his mansion of Longleate, in Wiltshire. Lord Weymouth took 
Ken's £700, and paid him an annuity of ^80 a year. From 
Longleate he paid occasional visits to friends, went abroad at 
first on his old white horse, and, when that was worn out, on 
foot, preaching, and collecting subscriptions for distressed Non- 
jurors and their families. At Longleate House he died, in 
March, 171.1. 

Among the non-jurors was William Sherlock, a divine 
then high in repute, born in 164.1, educated at Eton and Peter- 
house, Cambridge; in 1669 Rector of St. George's, Botolph Lane, 
and Prebendary of St. Paul's; then Master of the Temple, an 
active preacher and writer against the Roman Catholics. At 
the time of his deprivation, Sherlock published, in 1689, the 
most popular of his books, Practical Discourse coticerning 
Death. His deprivation was soon followed by his acceptance 



753 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1688 

of the established authority in 1691, when he was restored to 
his office of Master of the Temple, and made Dean of St. 
Paul's. In 1692 appeared his Practical Discourse concerning 
Future Judgment; and he was involved in a long and bitter 
controversy with Bofoert South, a learned, zealous, and good- 
natured divine, upon the Trinity. Sherlock died in 1707 ; 
South, who had conformed to all Governments of his time, died 
in 17 16, aged eighty-three. The amiable John Tillotson, 
who took in 1691 the archbishopric of which Sancroft had been 
deprived, lived only until 1694, and his funeral sermon was 
preached by Gilbert Burnet, who had been regarded by the 
Stuarts as an enemy since 1682, when he showed his sympathy 
with Lord William Russell during his trial and before his 
execution. Burnet was abroad, and much with the Prince and 
Princess of Orange during the reign of James II. He came 
over with William as his chaplain. In 1690 he was made 
Bishop of Salisbury. He had published, in 1686, at Amsterdam, 
So/ne Lette?s containing a7i Account of what seejned Most 
Remarkable in Switzerland, Italy, &c. They are five letters 
addressed to the Hon. Robert Boyle. The information in them 
is compactly given, and their tone is very strongly Protestant. 
Burnet published, in 1692, A Life of William Bedell, D.D., 
Lord Bishop of Kihnore, in Ireland, with his Letters, and A 
Discourse of the Pastoral Care. William Penn (ch. x. § 41) 
published, in 1694, A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of 
the People called Quakers, and an Account of his Travels in 
Holland and Germany in 167 7, for the Service of the Gospel of 
Christ, by way of Journal. Fox (ch. ix. § 16) and Barclay (ch. 
x. § 21) had been Penn's companions on that journey. The 
Journal of George Fox, who died in 1690, was published 
in 1694. 

10. John Strype, born at Stepney in 1643, was educated 
at St. Paul's School and Jesus College, Cambridge. In 1669 
he was presented to the living of Theydon Boys, which he re- 
signed for that of Low Leyton, in Essex. He lived to the age of 
ninety- four, and was incumbent of Low Leyton for sixty years. 
He was an accurate student of Church history and biography, 
and began, in 1694, with a folio of Memorials of Archbishop 
Cranmer. In 1698 appeared his Life of Sir Thomas Smith 
(ch. vii. § 24), and in 1701 his Life and Actions of John Aylmer, 
Bishop of London (ch. vii. § 32). 

Humphrey Prideaux was born in 1648, at Padstow, in 



toa.d. 1700.] CHURCH. LAW. JOHN EVELYN. 759 

Cornwall; was educated at Westminster School and Christ- 
church, Oxford. In 1676 he wrote an account of the Arundel 
Marbles. Then he obtained the living of St. Clement's, Oxford, 
and in 1681 a prebend at Norwich. In 1697 he published a 
Life of Mahomet, and in 1702 Avas made Dean of Norwich. 

11. Sir George Mackenzie, of Rosehaugh, who died in 
1691, aged fifty-five, was a good friend to English writers of his 
time, and himself a good writer. He was born at Dundee, of a 
known family, in 1636, studied Civil Law at Bourges, in 1659 
began life as an advocate, and next year published Aretinej or, 
The Serious Romance. Then he became justice depute, after- 
wards was knighted. In 1667 his Moral Gallantry established 
moral duties as the principles of honour. He was one of the 
men most active in establishing the Advocates' Library, founded 
at Edinburgh in 1682, and had a high literary and social repu- 
tation when he died, in the reign of William and Mary. 

12. John Evelyn (ch. ix. § 18) was appointed one of the 
Commissioners of Greenwich Hospital when William III., after 
the death of Mary, actively carried out her wish to found a 
home for old sailors, and made this hospital, of which Evelyn 
became treasurer, the noblest monument to her memory. When 
the Czar Peter came to England, in 1698, he lived at Sayes 
Court, to be near the Deptford Dockyard. In 1699, John 
Evelyn succeeded to the paternal estate, by the death of his 
elder brother; and in May, 1700, he left Sayes Court for Wotton. 
Evelyn's famous garden at Sayes Court was described in the 
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Among his 
numerous writings were " The French Gardiner : Instructing 
how to Cultivate all Sorts of Fruit Trees and Herbs for the 
Garden" (1658); " Fumifugium j or, the Aer and Smoak of 
London Dissipated" (1661) ; " Sculptura; or, the History and 
Art of Chalcography and Engraving in Copper" (1662); 
" Kalendarium Ho7 r tensej or, the Gardiner's Almanac" (1664) ; 
" Sylva" (1664), a Treatise on Forest Trees, the first book 
printed for the Royal Society, and the book with which his name 
is most associated ; " Terra" (1675), also printed for the Royal 
Society; "Navigation and Commerce', their History and Pro- 
gress " (1672), this being an introduction to the History of the 
Dutch War, written at the request of Charles II.; Public Em- 
ployment and an Active Life p?~ef erred to Solitude and all its 
Appanages (1667), an answer to one of Sir George Mackenzie's 
books, which was a " Moral Essay preferring Solitude to Public 



7^0 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1688 

Employment." Under William III., Evelyn produced, in 1690, 
a satire on the frippery of ladies, Mundus Muliebrisj or, the 
Ladies' Dressing Room Unlock 'd, and her Toilette Spread, hi 
Burlesque. Together with the Fop Dictionary, CompiV d for the 
Use of the Fair Sex. In 1697, Evelyn published Numismata : a 
Discourse of Medals; with a digression concerning Physiognomy; 
and in 1699, Acetaria: a Discourse of Salle ts. 

13. John Ray was the chief botanist of the time. He was 
a blacksmith's son, born in 1628 at Black Notley, near Brain- 
tree, Essex. He was sent from Braintree School to Cambridge, 
where he obtained a fellowship of Trinity; in 1651 was Greek 
Lecturer of his college, and afterwards Mathematical Reader. 
In 1660 he published a Latin Catalogue of Plants growing 
about Cambridge, and then made a botanical tour through 
Great Britain. His Latin Catalogue of the Plants of England 
a?td the Adjacent Isles first appeared in 1670. Ray took orders 
at the Restoration, but refused subscription, and resigned. In 
1663 he spent three years with a pupil, Mr. F. Willoughby, on 
the Continent, and published an account of his travels in 1673, 
as Observations made in a Journey through Part of the Low 
Countries, Germany, Italy, and France, with a Catalogue of 
Plants not Natives of England. Ray married, in 1673, a lady 
twenty-four years younger than himself; educated the children 
of his friend Mr. Willoughby, who had died in 1672 ; and finally, 
in 1679, he settled in his native place, and lived there till his 
death, in 1705. Among his chief books was A Colleciio?i of 
English Proverbs, with Short Annotations, first published in 
1670; and in the reign of William III. he produced, in 1691, 
The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Creation; in 1692, 
Miscellaneotis Discourses concemi7ig the Dissolutio?i and 
Changes of the World; in 1693, Three Physico-Theological 
Discourses concerning Chaos, the Deluge, and the Dissolution of 
the World; and in 1700, A Pe?suasive to a Holy Life. Ray 
was one of Nature's naturalists — wise, modest, and unassuming 
— with the sense of God that comes of a full study and enjoy- 
ment of His works. The mathematical works of John Wallis 
— Ope?'a Mathematica et Miscellanea — were published in three 
folios between 1693 and 1699. Wallis died in 1703, aged eighty- 
eight. Ray's Physico- Theological Discourses belong to a course 
of scientific speculation on the Cosmos, which formed part of 
the new energy of scientific research, and received impulse in 
1 68 1 from the " Sacred Theory of the Earth" {Telluris Theoria 



toa.d. 1715.] STUDY OF NATURE. WILLIAM CONGREVE. 76 1 

Sacra), by Thomas Burnet, who, in 1685, was made Master 
of the Charterhouse. Thomas Burnet discussed the natural 
history of our planet, in its origin, its changes, and its con- 
summation, and the four books contain — (1) The Theory of the 
Deluge by Dissolution of the Outer Crust of the Earth, its 
Subsidence in the Great Abyss, and the Forming of the Earth 
as it now Exists ; (2) Of the First Created Earth and Paradise ; 
(3) Of the Conflagration of the World ; and (4) Of the New 
Heaven and the New Earth. This new attempt made by a 
Doctor of Divinity to blend large scientific generalization with 
study of Scripture, more imaginative than scientific, stirred 
many fancies, and was much read and discussed. But under 
William III., Thomas Burnet's speculations in his Archceo- 
logitz Philosophies Lib'ri Duo drew on him strong theological 
censure ; and he was called an infidel by many because 
he read the Fall of Adam as an allegory. This not only 
destroyed his chance of high promotion in the Church, but 
caused him to be removed from the office of Clerk of the Closet 
to the king, and he died at a good old age, in 17 15, still Master 
of the Charterhouse. William "Whiston, who was thirty 
years or more younger than Thomas Burnet, was chaplain to a 
bishop when, in 1696, he published^ New Theory of the Earth, 
from its Original to the Consiumnation of all Things. This 
fed the new appetite for cosmical theories with fresh speculation. 
In Burnet's system, fire, in Whiston's, water, played chief part 
as the great agent of change. In 1698 Whiston became Vicar 
of Lowestoft, and in 1700 he lectured at Cambridge, as deputy 
to Newton, whom he succeeded in the Lucasian Professorship. 
Whiston lived till the middle of the eighteenth century. In 
Queen Anne's reign his search for a primitive Christianity 
affected his theology, and brought on him loss of his means 
of life in the Church and University. He taught science ; lived, 
as a poor man, a long and blameless life, until his death, in 
1752; and in his writings blended love of nature with the love 
of God. 

14. William Congreve, thirty-two years younger than 
William Wycherley, wrote all his plays in the reign of 
William III. His first play, The Old Bachelor, appeared in 
1693, sixteen years after Wycherley's last play, "The Plain 
Dealer." Congreve was of a Staffordshire family, and born in 
1672. He was educated at Kilkenny and at Trinity College, 
Dublin; entered the Middle Temple; in 1693, at the age of 



762 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 



1603 



twenty-one, produced a novel, Incognita j or, Love and Duty 
Reconciled, and at Drury Lane his play of The Old Bachelor^ 
which he professed to have written several years before (< to 
amuse himself in a slow recovery from sickness." The suc- 
cess of the play was great, and it caused Charles Montague, then 
a Lord of the Treasury, to make Congreve a commissioner 
for licensing hackney coaches. In the following year, 1694, 
Congreve produced, with much less success, The Double Dealer. 
The two theatres at Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn had joined 
their forces about 1682, and there was then only one great 
theatre, that at Drury Lane, with Thomas Betterton the greatest 
of its actors. Irritated by the patentees at Drury Lane, Bet- 
terton, then a veteran actor, sixty years old, seceded. He carried 
other good players with him, as well as the new dramatist, and 
obtained a patent for a new theatre, which opened in Lincoln's 
Inn Fields, in 1695, with William Congreve's comedy of Love for 
Love. This had a brilliant success, and the company gave 
Congreve a share in the new house, on condition of his writing 
them a play a year if his health allowed. His next play ap- 
peared in 1697. It was his only tragedy, The Mourning Bride, 
the most successful of his pieces. In the same year John 
Vanbrugh. (b. 1666, d. 17 16) produced at Drury Lane his 
first play, The Relapse j and the first play of George Par- 
quhar (b. 1678, d. 1707), Love and a Bottle, was acted in 
the following year, 1698. Vanbrugh. was of a family that had 
lived near Ghent before the persecutions by the Duke of Alva. 
His grandfather came to England, and his father acquired 
wealth as a sugar-baker. After a liberal education, finished in 
France, John Vanbrugh was for a time in the army, and in 1695 
he was nominated by John Evelyn as secretary to the Com- 
mission for endowing Greenwich Hospital. His Relapse was 
followed by The Provoked Wife, produced in 1698 at Lincoln's 
Inn Fields. George Farquhar, the son of a poor clergyman, 
was born at Londonderry. He left Trinity College, Dublin, to 
turn actor for a short time on the Dublin stage, came young 
to London, and got a commission in a regiment under Lord 
Orrery's command in Ireland. Young Captain Farquhar was 
but twenty when his first play, Love and a Bottle, won success. 
Congreve's plays were the wittiest produced by writers of the 
new comedy of manners, but their keenness and fine polish 
were least relieved by any sense of right. Vanbrugh's style was 
less artificial and his plots were simpler, but his ready wit and 



toa.d. 1700.] CONGREVE. VANBRUGH. FARQUHAR. 763 

coarse strength were as far as Congreve's finer work from touch- 
ing the essentials of life. Farquhar had a generosity of character 
that humanized the persons of his drama with many traces of 
good feeling. Vanbrugh's " Relapse " was a sequel to Love's 
Last Shift; or, The Fool in Fashion, produced in 1696 by 
Colley Cibber (b. 1671, d. 1747), the son of Caius Gabriel 
Cibber, a sculptor from Holstein, sculptor of the bas-relief 
on the Monument by which the fire of London was com- 
memorated. After education at Grantham Free School, Colley 
Cibber took to the stage within a year after the Revolution ; first 
giving his services as an actor for the privilege of seeing plays, 
then rising to twenty shillings a week, and marrying upon that, 
with ,£20 a year from his father. His first play, Love's Last Shift, 
had not advanced him as an actor ; but when Vanbrugh, in 
1697, made his own first play a sequel to Cibber's, he secured 
Cibber as actor of its leading part, Sir Novelty Fashion, newly 
created Lord Foppington. 

15. In March, 1698, Jeremy Collier (b. 1650, d. 1726) 
published A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of 
the English Stage : Together with the Sense of Antiquity upon 
the Argument. It spoke clearly and sharply the minds of 
many, passed through several editions within the year, and 
raised a controversy in which the wits were worsted. Jeremy 
Collier, a divine educated at Cambridge, who had been Rector 
of Ampton, Suffolk, and then Lecturer at Gray's Inn, was one 
of the Non-jurors at the Revolution, and had been imprisoned 
in Newgate for maintaining the cause of James II. He had 
earned credit by writing Essays upon Several Subjects — Pride, 
Clothes, Duelling, General Kindness, Fame, Music, &c. — when 
he made his plain-spoken but intemperate attack on the im- 
modesty and profaneness of the stage of his own time, with 
evidence drawn from Dryden, and from the last new plays of 
Congreve and Vanbrugh. Vanbrugh's Provoked Wife ap- 
peared at Lincoln's Inn Fields early in 1698. Later in the 
year, he produced at Drury Lane, without success, the moral 
JEsop, from the French of Boursault, with a second part wholly 
his own. In 1700, Congreve's wittiest comedy, the Way oj the 
\V07dd, was produced, without success, at Drury Lane ; and 
Farquhar produced there, with success, his Constant Couple, 
which he followed up next year with its sequel, Sir Harjy 
Wildair. 

16. John Dryden published, in July, 1697, his Translation 



764 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1695 

of Virgil, the subscription and Jacob Tonson's payment giving 
him about ,£1,200 for the work. In September, 1697, he wrote 
Alexande7's Feast, that " Ode for St. Cecilia's day" which was at 
once received as the best poem of its kind. It was written at 
request of the stewards of the Musical Meeting which had for 
some years celebrated St. Cecilia's day, and it was first set to 
music by Jeremiah Clarke, one of the stewards of the festival. 
Early in 1698 Dryden prepared a new edition of Virgil, and 
was beginning to translate the " Iliad." In March, 1700, in fulfil- 
ment of a contract to give Tonson 10,000 verses for 250 guineas, 
appeared Dryden's Fables. These were modernized versions 
from Chaucer of "The Knight's Tale," "The Nun's Priest's Tale" 
(with the Fox a Puritan), and " The Wife of Bath's Tale," " The 
Flower and the Leaf," and " The Character of a Good Parson," 
adapted to Bishop Ken ; versions from Bocaccio of " Sigismonda 
and Guiscardo," "Theodore and Honoria," and "Cymon and 
Iphigenia," with much translation from Ovid, and Dryden's 
version of the First Book of the " Iliad." Referring, in his pre- 
face, to attacks upon the immorality of his plays, Dryden spoke 
severely of the impertinences of Sir Richard Blackmore ; but 
of Jeremy Collier he wrote, " I shall say the less, because in 
many things he has taxed me justly ; and I have pleaded guilty 
to all thoughts and expressions of mine which can be truly 
argued of obscenity, profaneness, or immorality, and retract 
them. If he be my enemy, let him triumph ; if he be my 
friend, as I have given him no personal occasion to be other- 
wise, he will be glad of my repentance. It becomes me not to 
draw my pen in the defence of a bad cause, when I have so 
often drawn it for a good one." But of Collier's style Dryden 
added, " I will not say, ' The zeal of God's house has eaten him 
up;' but I am sure it has devoured some part of his good 
manners and civility." Dryden, afflicted with painful disease, 
was working to keep house, when his eldest son, Charles, who 
was at Rome, chamberlain of the household of Innocent XII., 
was obliged in 1698 to return to England invalided. Dryden, 
labouring to meet the new expense thus caused, wrote to 
Tonson, " If it please God that I die of over-study, I cannot 
spend my life better than in preserving his." Early in 1700, 
when Vanbrugh revised Fletcher's comedy of "The Pilgrims" 
for Drury Lane, the profits of the third night were secured for his 
son, Charles, by Dryden's addition to the piece of a Prologue 
and Epilogue, and a Secular Masque on the Close of the Seven- 



toa.d. 1700.] JEREMY COLLIER. DRYDEN, BLACKMORE. 765 

teenth Century. Twenty days after the writing of the Prologue 
and Epilogue, Dryden died, on the 1st of May, 1700. 

17. Sir Richard Blackmore (b. about 1650, d. 1729) was 
educated at Westminster School, and Edmund Hall, Oxford, 
where he took the degree of M.A. in 1676; graduated in 
medicine at Padua, and became a prosperous physician in 
Cheapside. In 1695 ^ e published Prince Arthur, an epic 
poem in ten books. In his preface Blackmore attacked the 
abuse of wit upon the stage, said that in its other departments 
the poetry of the day had become impure ; and that for this 
reason, among others, he had, in the intervals of business, written 
•' Prince Arthur." " I was willing," he said, " to make one effort 
towards the rescuing of the Muses out of the hands of those 
ravishers, and to restore them to their sweet and chaste mansions, 
and to engage them in an employment suitable to their dignity." 
He then prosed upon epic poetry, of which, he said, the pur- 
pose was "to give men right and just conceptions of religion and 
virtue;" and told his public that he had endeavoured to form 
himself on Virgil's model, substituting Christian for pagan 
machinery — that is to say, he used Lucifer, Raphael, Uriel, &c, 
instead of heathen deities. His Arthur sailed to the Saxon 
coast; devils and angels affected the weather; but at last he 
and his people landed on Hoel's shore of Albion, where 

t " Rich wine of Burgundy and choice champagne 
Relieve the toil they suffered on the main ; 
But what more cheered them than their meats and wine 
Was wise instruction and discourse divine 
From godlike Arthur's mouth." 

The Fury Persecution stirred Hoel; but an angel sent him to 
Arthur, from whom he heard a sermon. In Book III., Hoel 
asked for more, and Arthur preached him another sermon. In 
Book IV., Lucius, at a supper of Hoel's, being asked to tell 
Prince Arthur's story, began in Virgilian style, 

" How sad a task do your commands impose, 
Which must renew insufferable woes." 

Finally, an Ethelina and a kingdom awaited the result of single 
combat between Prince Arthur and King Tollo, and the poem 
closed thus : 

"So by Prince Arthur's arms King Tollo slain 
Fell down, and lay extended on the plain." 

Blackmore became a butt of the wits whom he attacked. He 



766 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1695 

was a common-place man with an amiable faith in himself, and 
without intellect to distinguish between good and bad in poetry. 
His religious purpose was sincere, and it gave dignity to his 
work in the eyes even of Locke and Addison. Blackmore's 
King Arthur, in twelve books, appeared in 1697, the year in 
which he was knighted and made one of the physicians to King 
William. In 1700 appeared Blackmore's Paraphrase on the 
Book of Job, the Songs of Moses, Deborah, and David, and on 
Four Select Psalms, some Chapters of Isaiah, and the Third 
Chapter of Habakkuk; and in the same year he defied his 
satirists, and continued his attack upon immoral verse with a 
Satire on Wit. 

18. Samuel Garth, born of a good Yorkshire family about 
1660, became M.D. of Cambridge in 1691, and Fellow of the 
London College of Physicians in 1693. He was a very kindly 
man, who throve both as wit and as physician, and he acquired 
fame by a mock heroic poem, The Dispensary, first published in 
1699. The College of Physicians had, in 1687, required all its 
fellows and licentiates to give gratuitous advice to the poor. 
The high price of medicine was still an obstacle to charity ; and 
after a long battle within the profession, the physicians raised, in 
1696, a subscription among themselves for the establishment of 
a Dispensary within the college, at which only the first cost of 
medicines would be charged to the poor for making up gratuitous 
prescriptions. The squabble raised over this scheme, chiefly 
between physicians and apothecaries, Garth, who was one of 
its promoters, celebrated in his clever mock-heroic poem. It 
was suggested to him, as he admitted, by Boileau's mock-heroic, 
Le Luti'in, first published in 1674, which had for its theme a hot 
dispute between the treasurer and precentor of the Sainte 
Chapelle at Paris over the treasurer's wish to change the position 
of a pulpit. Garth, a good Whig, was knighted on the accession 
of George I., and made one of the physicians in ordinary to the 
king. He wrote other verse, and died in 1719. 

19. John Pomfret, who died in 1703, aged thirty-six, was 
Rector of Maiden, and son of the Rector of Luton, both in Bed- 
fordshire. His Poems appeared in 1699, the chief of them a 
smooth picture of happy life, The Choice, first published as " by 
a Person of Quality." As one part of " The Choice " was " I'd 
have no Wife," it was promptly replied to with The Virtuous 
Wife j a Poem. William Walsh (b. 1663, d. 1708), whom 
Dryden. and afterwards Pope, honoured as friend and critic, 



toa.d. 1700.] GARTH. POMFRET. WITS AND CRITICS. 76 J 

was the son of a gentleman of Worcestershire. He wrote 
verse, liked poets, was a man of fashion, and sat for his 
own county in several Parliaments. He published, in 1691, 
a prose Dialogue concerning Women, being a Defence of the Sex, 
written to Eugenia. William King (b. 1663, d. 171 2) was 
born in London to a good estate, graduated at Oxford, became 
D.C.L. in 1692, and an advocate at Doctors' Commons. He 
acquired under William III. and Queen Anne the reputa- 
tion of a witty poet, who idly wasted high abilities and good 
aids to advancement in the world. In 1699 he published a 
Joimiey to London, as a jest upon Dr. Martin Lister's Jow'ney 
to Paris. In 1700 he satirised Sir Hans Sloane, then President 
of the Royal Society, in two dialogues called The Transactioner. 
At the end of William's reign, Dr. King obtained good appoint- 
ments in Ireland. Thoinas Brown (b. 1663, d. 1704), a 
Shropshire man, after an Oxford training, became a school- 
master at Kingston-on-Thames, and left his vocation for that of 
a licentious wit in London. He wrote satires, two plays, dia- 
logues, essays, declamations, letters from the dead to the living, 
translations, &c. George Granville (b. 1667, d. 1735), second 
son of Bernard Granville and nephew to the first Earl of Bath, 
went early to Cambridge, wrote verse as an undergraduate, 
was at the Revolution a young man of twenty-one, loyal to the 
cause of King James. Under William III. he lived in retirement 
and wrote plays — The She Gallants (1696) ; a revision of Shakes- 
peare's "Merchant of Venice," as The few of Venice (1698), with 
Shylock turned into a comic character ; and Heroic Love, a 
tragedy upon "Agamemnon and Chryseis." George Granville 
was made Lord Lansdownej Baron Bideford, in 171 1, when the 
Tories came into power. John Oldmixon (b. 1673, d. 
1724), of a Somersetshire family, who became a violent Whig 
writer and a narrow-minded literary critic, was little more than 
a boy at the date of the Revolution. In 1698 he published a 
translation of Tasso's Amyntas, and in 1700 produced The 
Grove; or, Love's Paradise, an opera. John Dennis (b. 
1657, d. 1733), son of a London saddler, after education at 
Harrow and at Caius College, Cambridge, travelled in France 
and Italy, and began his career as a writer in the reign of 
William III., with The Passion of By b lis in 1692, and in the 
same year " The Lmpartial Critickj or, some Observations on 
Mr. Rymer's late Book, entitled a Short View of Tragedy." 
In 1693 Dennis published "Miscellanies in Verse and Prose." 



768 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1695 

In 1695 he published a poem, The Court of Death, on the death 
of Queen Mary; and in 1696, Letters on Milton and Congreve, 
and Letters upon Several Occasions, Written by and between 
Mr. Wycherley, Mr. Dryden, Mr. Moyle, Mr. Congreve, and 
Mr. Dennis, also adverse " Remarks ' ; on Blackmore's "Prince 
Arthur." In 1697 he published Miscellaneous Poems; in 1698 
The Usefuhiess of the Stage to the Happiness of Mankind, to 
Governme7it, and to Religion, occasioned by a late Book written 
by Jeremy Collier, M.A.j in 1701 a little treatise on the Advance- 
ment and Reformation of Modern Poetry j and in 1702 an Essay 
on the Navy, a tract against Sacheverell's party, Priestcraft 
dangerous to Religion and Government, a volume of collected 
Works, and, on the death of William III., a poem sacred to his 
memory, The Monument. There was a vein of good sense and 
liberality of thought in Dennis's writing; and he was a good 
critic to the extent of his moderate ability. He produced plays 
also, poor ones: A Plot and No Plot, in 1697 ; Rinaldo and 
Armida, in 1699 ; in 1702,/phigenia, and The Comical Gallant; 
or, the A mows of Sir John Falstaff, with an Essay on Taste in 
Poetry. Thus Dennis's literary industry had earned him a 
foremost position among critics by the time of Queen Anne's 
accession. He was then forty-five years old. 

20. Matthew Prior, joint author with Charles Montague 
of The Town and Coimtry Mouse (ch. x. § 58), obtained in 1690, 
through the influence of the Earl of Dorset and Mr. Fleetwood 
Shephard, the appointment of Secretary to the Embassy at the 
Congress held at the Hague, and opened by King William in 
January, 1691. In September, 1688, Louis XIV., instigated 
by his minister Louvois, declared causeless war against the 
Emperor, claimed permanent sovereignty of France on the left 
bank of the Rhine, and sent an army over the Rhine to live 
upon and devastate the country. This left the way more open 
for the establishment of William III. as King of England. In 
November William's fleet arrived at Torbay. England and 
Holland became allied under one chief. Louis presently was 
condemning to flames Ladenburg, Heidelberg, Mannheim, 
Speyer, Worms, Oppenheim, Frankenthal, Bingen, and many 
helpless villages, driving a hundred thousand people from their 
homes. By June, 1690, the Grand Alliance was complete which 
banded the German Empire, Holland, Spain, and England 
against Louis XIV. To raise war money, Louis struck to the 
heart of commerce and agriculture, ground his people with taxa- 



toa.d. 1702.] MATTHEW PRIOR. JOSEPH ADDISON. 769 

tion, sent to the melting-pot works of art fifty times more 
precious than the metal in which they were executed, sold 
revived offices of royal barber, periwig-maker, and the like. 
" Every time," said his finance minister, Pontchartrain, "your 
Majesty creates an office, God creates a fool to purchase it." 
While in France, as Voltaire said, the people were " perishing 
to the sound of Te Deums," the war between Louis and the 
Grand Alliance lasted till the Peace of Ryswick, in 1697. After 
the resolve of the Conference at the Hague, which ended in 
March, 1691, not to make peace until all grievances were 
redressed, in April Louis took Mons ; at the beginning of 1692 
he had in army and navy more than half a million in arms, and, 
with some hope of a counter revolution, was planning invasion 
of England. This attempt cost France, at the beginning of 
June, the disaster of La Hogue. At the end of June, 1692, after 
a memorable siege, the French completed the capture of Namur 
and its forts. Boileau then celebrated the glory of Louis XIV. 
in a Pindaric ode, which served the purpose also of a shot 
at Perrault in the Battle of the Ancients and the Moderns. 
Matthew Prior afterwards returned Boileau's fire with a 
laughing comment upon his ode, which he followed stanza for 
stanza, in An English Ballad on the Taking of Namur by the 
King of Great Britain, 1695 ; for in that year there was 
another siege of Namur. and, on the 31st of August, William III. 
took the citadel by open assault in daytime, and in presence of 
Villeroi's army of a hundred thousand that would not risk 
battle. 

21. Joseph Addison (§ 8), aged twenty-three, addressed to 
King William from Oxford a paper of verses on the capture of 
Namur. They united evidence of ability with declaration of 
Whig principles, and were sent through Sir John Somers, a 
lawyer and patron of letters, who had been counsel for the seven 
bishops, under James II. Somers was William's first Solicitor- 
General, had become Lord Keeper, and was made in 1695 Lord 
Chancellor and a peer. Addison, then destined for the Church, 
sought, as was usual, to advance his fortunes by the way of 
patronage ; and it was not without effect that, in lines sent with 
the poem, he credited Somers with " immortal strains ;" spoke 
of Britain advanced "by Somers' counsels, and by Nassau's 
sword ;" and sought the Lord Keeper's good word — " For next to 
what you write is what ycu praise." Thus Addison secured one 
patron. He had already, in 1694, aimed a shaft of compliment, 

X X 



77° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1697 

in his Account of the Poets, at the noble Montague "for wit,.for 
for humour, and for judgment famed." In 1697 he addressed to 
Montague, who was a good Latin scholar, and then Chancellor 
of the Exchequer, some patriotic Latin verses on the Peace of 
Ryswick {Pax Guglielmi Auspiciis Europa Reddita, 1697). 
Thus he completed the capture of another patron. At the 
negotiations for the Peace of Ryswick, Matthew Prior was 
again employed as Secretary of Embassy. Charles Montague 
(ch. x. § 58), himself brought into public life by the good offices 
of the Earl of Dorset, had, after the publication of the Town 
and Cowitry Mouse, been one of those who invited William of 
Orange to England. Under the new king, the Earl of Dorset 
was Lord Chamberlain of the Household, and procured Mon- 
tague a pension of ^500 a year from the Privy Purse. In a year 
or two Charles Montague's ability had made him prominent 
in the House of Commons. The Earl of Dorset then secured 
his appointment to a vacant office of Commissioner of the Trea- 
sury, by virtue of which he became a Privy Councillor, and had 
such good opportunity of showing his value to the Government 
that he was rewarded, in 1694, with the office of Chancellor and 
Under-Treasurer of the Exchequer. Then it was that Addison 
praised the noble Montague. 

" For wit, for humour, and for judgment fam'd ; 
To Dorset he directs his artful muse, 
In numbers such as Dorset's self might use." 

Montague and Somers, who were fast friends, now urged 
on King William the policy of calling in and re-coining the 
clipped silver money. This was opposed by Robert Harley and 
others, on the plea of inconvenience in war time ; but more 
strongly supported, as necessary to maintain the credit of 
England abroad, and save the wasting of supplies voted for the 
army, by a rate of exchange heavily against us. Montague 
carried not only that measure, but went on also to provide 
security for the public debt by a sinking fund; saved from ruin 
the Bank of England, which had just been established by the 
energy of William Paterson — it only began business January 
1 st, 1695 — and in other ways Charles Montague economised and 
increased the resources of England. William made him First 
Commissioner of the Treasury ; then, during his own absence, 
in 1698, and again in 1699, one of the Lords Justices of England; 
and in 1700 raised him to the peerage, as Baron Halifax. 

Joseph Addison was induced by Somers and Montague to 



to a.d. 1702.] CHARLES MONTAGUE. ADDISON. STEELE. 771 

give up thoughts of taking priests' orders, and accept a pension 
of ,£300 a year while travelling to prepare himself for diplomatic 
life. Before starting, Addison brought out at Oxford, in 1699, 
dedicated to Montague, a second volume of Musce A7iglican<z, 
Latin poems by members of the University. The first volume 
appeared in 1692. Eight Latin poems of his own were in 
Addison's collection ; one of them on MacJmice Gesticulantes 
{Anglice, a Puppet Show), another on the "Bowling Green." In 
the summer of 1699, Addison left Oxford for Paris, stayed some 
weeks there, then lived for a year at Blois to learn French, 
and, among other studies, work at Latin authors, with especial 
reference to Latin geography, before he passed on into Italy. 
When he returned to Paris from Blois, Addison was introduced 
to Boileau, of whom he wrote to a correspondent, " He is old, 
and a little deaf, but talks incomparably well in his own calling. 
He heartily hates an ill poet, and throws himself into a passion 
when he talks of any one that has not a high respect for Homer 
and Virgil." In December, 1700, Addison left Marseilles for 
Genoa, in company with Mr. Edward Wortley Montague. He 
spent a year in Italy, and was at Geneva by December, 1701, 
after what he called " a very troublesome journey over the Alps. 
My head is still giddy with mountains and precipices ; and you 
can't imagine how much I am pleased with the sight of a plain." 
It was during this troublesome journey that Addison addressed 
to Charles Montague, then become Lord Halifax, his metrical 
Letter from Italy, with its patriotic apostrophe to liberty and 
British thunder. King Louis, he wrote, strives in vain 

" To conquer or divide, 
Whom Nassau's arms defend and counsels guide." 

Addison, aged thirty, was waiting at Geneva for a coming 
appointment as secretary for King William with the army in 
Italy under Prince Eugene, when he received news of the king's 
death on the 8th of March, 1702. With the life of the sovereign 
Addison's pension dropped ; his friends were out of office. 

22. Richard Steele (§ 8) did not seek advancement in 
life by the way of patronage. Enthusiasm for the Revolution 
caused him to quit Oxford, and enlist as a private in the Duke 
of Ormond's regiment of Coldstream Guards. He said lightly 
afterwards that when he mounted a war-horse, with a great 
sword in his hand, and planted himself behind King William 
III. against Louis XIV., he lost the succession to a very good 

X X 2 



772 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1695 

estate in the county of Wexford, in Ireland, from the same 
humour which he has preserved ever since, of preferring the 
state of his mind to that of his fortune. Lord Cutts, the colonel 
of the regiment, who was writer of verse as well as soldier, dis- 
tinguished Steele, made him his secretary, got him an ensign's 
commission, and afterwards the rank of captain in Lord Lucas's 
regiment of Fusiliers. While ensign in the Guards, Steele wrote 
The Christian Hero, as he afterwards said, "with a design princi- 
pally to fix upon his mind a strong impression of virtue and 
religion, in opposition to a stronger propensity to unwarrantable 
pleasures." It was in four parts : — (1) Of the Heroism of the 
Ancient World; (2) of the Bible Story as a Link between Man 
and his Creator; (3) of the Life a Christian should lead, as set 
forth by St. Paul; (4) of the Common Motives of Human Action, 
best used and improved when blended with Religion. There 
was a closing eulogy of William III., as a great captain, and, 
still better, " a sincere and honest man." The Christian Hero, 
dedicated to Lord Cutts, was published in 1701, and was so well 
received that by 171 1 it was in a fifth edition. Steele's next 
work was a comedy, The Funeral j or, Grief a la Mode, first 
acted in 1702. It was — with satire against undertakers and 
dishonesties of law — a comedy of a lord whose death was but a 
lethargy, from which he recovered in the presence of a trusty 
servant, who, for good reasons, persuaded him to wait awhile, 
and watch unobserved what went on in the house of mourning. 
The wit of the comedy was free from profanity ; it was em- 
phatically moral in its tone, and Steele's warmth of patriotic 
feeling also found expression in it. 

23. Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, November 30, 
1667. His grandfather, a Herefordshire vicar, married an aunt 
of Dryden's, and left six sons, of whom two were Godwin and 
Jonathan. Jonathan, who married a Miss Abigail Erick, of 
Leicester, had one daughter, and then died a few months before 
the birth of his one son. His income had been from law 
agencies, and he left little to his widow, who returned to 
Leicester about two years after her husband's death, leaving the 
two children in charge of their uncle, Godwin. By him young 
Jonathan was sent to school at Kilkenny, and then to Trinity 
College, Dublin, where he failed when he first went up for his 
B. A. degree, and obtained it afterwards " by special grace," a 
phrase implying, at Trinity College, Dublin, special disgrace. 
In the year of the Revolution, Swift's uncle, Godwin, failed in 



to a.d. 1702.] JONATHAN SWIFT. BOYLE AND BENTLEY 773 

intellect, lost speech and memory, and was unable to do more for 
his nephew. Jonathan Swift went therefore to his mother, at 
Leicester, and by her advice presented himself to Sir William 
Temple (ch. x. § 39), whose wife was distantly related to her. 
Sir William became young Swift's friend, enabled him to study 
at Oxfrrd, where he was admitted at once to the degree obtained 
at Dubln, and where he graduated as M.A. He then lived with 
Sir William, at Moor Park, near Farnham, in Surrey. After 
about two years with Sir William, Swift had a long and serious 
illness. It left him subject to fits of giddiness, first symptoms 
of the disease of brain that modified his character, and towards 
the close of life destroyed his reason. He went for change of 
air to Ireland, and then returned to Sir William, who had left 
Moor Park for Sheen. 

About this time Sir William was taking lively interest in an 
argument over the Epistles ascribed to Phalaris, who was Tyrant 
of Agrigentum, B.C. 565. Richard Bentley, born in 1662, 
the son of a small farmer near Wakefield, in Yorkshire, had 
become a foremost scholar, and was king's librarian when, in 
1695, the Hon. Charles Boyle, then an undergraduate of 
Christchurch, Oxford, second son of Roger Boyle, and nephew 
to Robert Boyle, made a pettish reference to him in the preface 
to an edition of the Epistles of Phalaris. William Wotton, 
in 1694, had published Reflections upon Ancient and Modern 
Learning. To a second edition of that book Bentley added, in 
1697, an attack on the authenticity of the letters ascribed to 
Phalaris. Charles Boyle being no great scholar, other Christ- 
church men, chief of them Francis Atterbury (b. 1662, d. 
1732) answered Bentley in his name, and published, in 1698, 
Dr. Bentley 's Dissertations on the Epistles of Phalaris, and the 
Fables of ALsop Examined. Then followed a famous battle of 
books. Sir W. Temple took interest in the quarrel ; and Swift 
began to write his " Battle of the Books." In 1699 Bentley 
published an enlarged Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris, 
and won his battle. 

At Sheen, King William sometimes paid unceremonious 
visits to Sir William Temple. In one conversation, the king 
offered to make young Swift a captain of horse. But Swift 
took orders, and went to Ireland, where Lord Capel, on Sir 
W. Temple's recommendation, gave him a prebend worth 
£,100 a year, which he gave up to return to Sheen. Sir 
William would use interest to get him something better, and 



774 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1697 

Swift's heart was touched by the wit and kindness of Hester 
Johnson, daughter of Sir William's steward. Sir William died 
in 1700, leaving ,£1,000 to Hester Johnson, and a legacy also to 
Swift, who was made his literary executor. Swift dedicated 
Sir W. Temple's works to the king, and went to Ireland as 
secretary to the Earl of Berkeley, who had been appointed one 
of the two Lords Justices of Ireland. His office of secretary 
Swift did not long hold, but he obtained from Lord Berkeley the 
livings of Laracor and Rathbeggan, together worth about ^260 a 
year. He went at once to Laracor, and invited Hester Johnson 
with a female friend, named Dingley, to make her home in the 
same village. She did so ; and while Swift had the society of 
the woman he loved, he took care that they should never be 
alone together. He was violently angry when his sister married, 
about this time. He would not marry himself; and when at last 
he did go through a private ceremony of marriage with Hester 
Johnson, whom he called " Stella," marriage was only a form. 
Their relations with each other remained as before, and they 
lived on opposite banks of the Liffey. Uncharitable reasons 
have been given for this. One reason, that Swift could hardly 
proclaim to the world, was sufficient. The seeds of insanity were 
in him ; that terrible disease can be inherited. He died as his 
Uncle Godwin died. Might not Swift feel that he and his sister 
had no right to marry ? And, for himself, if he thought so he 
was surely right, whatever unsoundness of judgment he may 
have shown in the way he took, nevertheless, to satisfy his best 
affections. 

Swift's first publication was at the close of William's reign. 
When Tory reaction then caused the House of Commons to 
impeach John, Lord Somers, Charles Montague, Earl of 
Halifax, the Earl of Orford, and the Earl of Portland, Swift 
published, in 1701, with covert reference to the political situa- 
tion, A Discourse of the Contests and Dissensions between the 
Nobles and Commons in Athens and Rome. In this pamphlet 
Lord Somers figured as Aristides, Halifax as Pericles. The 
Earl of Orford was Themistocles, and the Earl of Portland 
Phocion. 

24. Daniel Defoe (ch. x. § 55) in those last days aided King 
William with his doggrel poem of the True-born Englishman. 
Defoe, under William III., had married — he married twice in 
his life. His family had been ruined by a venture ; and, to 
escape the prison threatened by one rigid creditor, he withdrew 



to a.d. 1702.] JONATHAN SWIFT. DANIEL DEFOE. 77$ 

for two years to Bristol. There he wrote his Essay on Projects, 
which was published two or three years afterwards, in 1697. 
It suggested many things — improvement in roads, reforms in 
banking, a savings' bank for the poor, insurance offices, an 
academy like that of France, a military college, abolition of 
the press-gang, and a college for the higher education of women. 
" A woman," said Defoe, " well-bred and well-taught, furnished 
with the additional accomplishments of knowledge and be- 
haviour, is a creature without comparison. Her society is 
the emblem of sublimer enjoyments ; she is all softness and 
sweetness, love, wit, and delight." One project, also, was for 
improvement of the law of debtor and creditor. When he had 
compounded with his creditors, and thus secured for himself 
liberty to work, he returned to London, and worked on till he 
had paid voluntarily beyond the composition the last penny of 
his debts. His patriotic suggestions of projects for raising 
war-money caused Defoe to be employed from 1694 to 1699 
as accountant to the Commissioners of the Glass Duty. 

To the cry raised by the Opposition that King William was no 
true-born Englishman, especially represented by the bad poem 
ot one Tutchin, called The Foreigners, Defoe replied, in 1701, 
with his satire on The True-born E?iglishman, rhymes of which 
80,000 copies were sold in the streets. Among their home- 
truths are vigorous assertions of the claims of the people 
against persecution in the Church or despotism in the State. 
In these he finds as dangerous a thing 

" A ruling priesthood, as a priest-rid king ; 
And of all plagues with which mankind are curst, 
Ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst." 

While of the kings false to their trust he says : 

" When kings the sword of justice first lay down, 
They are no kings, though they possess the crown. 
Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things, 
The good of subjects is the end of kings." 

Then came to the throne Queen Anne (170? — 1714), and hard 
words hailed on the Dissenters. A substantial blow was aimed 
in a bill that was to disqualify them from all civil employments. 
It passed the Commons, but failed with the Lords. Sacheverell, 
preaching at Oxford, had denounced him as no true son of the 
Church who did not raise against Dissent " the bloody flag and 
banner of defiance." But, in 1702, Defoe spoke boldly on behalf 
of liberty of conscience, in his pamphlet called The Shortest Way 



776 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1702 

with the Dissenters. He wrote, as in all his controversial 
pieces, to maintain a principle and not a party. He began his 
satire with a quotation from Roger l'Estrange's Fables. A 
cock at roost in a stable, having dropped from his perch, and 
finding himself in much danger among restless heels, had a fair 
proposal to make to the horses — that we shall all of us keep our 
legs quiet. This fable Defoe applied to the Dissenters, who 
were then asking for equal treatment, although they had been 
intolerant enough themselves not long since, when they had 
the upper hand. Professing, in his assumed character of a 
bigoted High Churchman of the day, to show the vice of 
Dissent before teaching its cure, he dealt, in the first place, a 
fair blow to his own side for past intolerance. The Dissenters 
ought not, perhaps, to have been blind to the irony of the 
second half of the pamphlet ; but in the first half the irony 
is not all against ecclesiastical intolerance. Defoe was against 
all intolerance, and to the bigotry of his own party Defoe 
gave the first hit. The succeeding satire, since it could not 
easily surpass the actual extravagance of party spirit, had 
in it nothing but the delicate, sustained sharpness of ironical 
suggestion to reveal the author's purpose to the multitude. 
Several reasons, he said, are urged on behalf of the Dis- 
senters, " why we should continue and tolerate them among 
us, ;; as, " They are very numerous, they say ; they are a 
great part of the nation, and we cannot suppress them. To 
this may be answered, They are not so numerous as the 
Protestants in France, and yet the French king effectually 
cleared the nation of them at once, and we don't find he misses 
them at home." Besides, " the more numerous the more 
dangerous, and therefore the more need to suppress them ; and 
if we are to allow them only because we cannot suppress them, 
then it ought to be tried whether we can or no." It is said, 
also, that their aid is wanted against the common enemy. 
This, argues Defoe, is but the same argument of inconvenience 
of war-time that was urged against suppressing the old money ; 
and the hazard, after all, proved to be small. " We can never 
enjoy a settled uninterrupted union and tranquillity in this 
nation till the spirit of Whiggism, faction, and schism is melted 
down like the old money." The gist of the pamphlet, the 
scheme set forth on the title-page as the Shortest Way with the 
Dissenters, is propounded in this passage : — " If one severe 
law were made, and punctually executed, that whoever was 



to a.d. 1704.] DEFOE IN THE PILLORY. JJ7 

found at a conventicle should be banished the nation, and the 
preacher be hanged, we should soon see an end of the tale ; 
they would all come to church, and one age would make us one 
again. To talk of five shillings a month for not coming to the 
sacrament, and one shilling a week for not coming to church — 
this is such a way of converting people as never was known, 
this is selling them a liberty to transgress for so much money. 
If it be not a crime, why don't we give them full licence? And 
if it be, no price ought to compound for the committing it ; for 
that is selling a liberty to people to bin against God and the 

Government We hang men for trifles, and banish 

them for things not worth naming ; but an offence against God 
and the Church, against the welfare of the world and the 
dignity of religion, shall be bought off for five shillings. This 
is such a shame to a Christian Government that 'tis with regret 
I transmit it to posterity." 

The pamphlet delighted men of the Sacheverell school. A 
Cambridge Fellow thanked his bookseller for having sent him 
so excellent a treatise — next to the Holy Bible and the Sacred 
Comments, the most valuable he had ever seen. Great was 
the reaction of wrath when the pamphlet was found to be a 
Dissenter's satire ; nevertheless, the Dissenters held by their 
first outcry against the author. Defoe, aged forty-two, paid for 
this service to the English people in the pillory, and as a 
prisoner in Newgate. But his Hymn to the Pillo?y, which 
appeared on the first of the three days of the shame of the 
Government in his exposure, July 22, 30, and 31, in the year 
1703, turned the course of popular opinion against the men who 
placed him there — men, as his rhyme said, scandals to the 
times, who 

" Are at a loss to find his guilt, 
And can't commit his crimes." 

Defoe returned from the pillory to Newgate, whence he was 
not released till August, 1704. It was in Newgate, therefore, 
that he began his career as the first critical and independent 
journalist, by producing his Review. This was begun on the 
19th of February, 1704, came out on Saturdays and Tuesdays 
until 1705, and then three times a week till May, 17 13. 

25. Defoe's Review was established in the year of the battle 
of Blenheim. Before the death of childless Charles II. of 
Spain, there had been negotiations in Europe, and two Treaties 
of Partition, to reconcile rival interests and maintain " balance 



77% A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 7.70* 

of power," before the King of Spain died in November, 170c, 
leaving a will that made the Duke of Anjou, second son of the 
Dauphin, his heir. Louis XIV. having to choose between the 
share allotted to him by Treaty of Partition and a throne for 
his grandson, chose the throne, and his grandson entered 
Madrid, as King Philip V., in January, 1701. In the following 
September James II. died, and Louis openly named James's 
son, Charles Edward, King of England. In all negotiations 
between England and France before and after the death of the 
King of Spain, until the breaking out of the War of the Spanish 
Succession after the death of James II., Matthew Prior, 
secretary to Lord Jersey, was confidentially employed. He 
was so employed when he wrote, in the century year, his 
finest ode, the Carmen Secular e, in praise of William. In 
1 70 1 the war began in Italy, where Prince Eugene drove the 
French behind the Adda, and defeated Villeroi at Chiari. 
France suffered more and more. The coin had been de- 
based five times in eight years. Everything was taxed for 
war expenses, and the tax on wine had become so high that 
many ceased to cultivate the grape. In the winter of 1701 
Louis raised a hundred new regiments. In the following March, 
King William died. Queen Anne went on with the war. The 
Dauphin was generalissimo in Flanders, Villeroi in Italy ; and 
they were pitted against Marlborough and Prince Eugene. By 
1704 the struggle had become a series of sieges and reliefs ; but 
Marlborough's victory of Blenheim, August 13, 1704, by which 
he saved Austria, secured also a party triumph over those who 
in England and Holland opposed the policy that Marlborough 
personified. War meant for men like Steele and Addison re- 
sistance to the spread of despotism in Europe by the domination 
of Louis XIV., and more especially a crushing of the hope of 
English partisans of the Divine right of kings, who were dis- 
posed to undo the work of the Revolution, and, with French 
help, some day make a king of the Pretender. 

26. One of those who, in 1705, published their poems on 
Blenheim, was John Philips, born December 30th, 1676, at 
Bampton, in Oxfordshire, where his father, Dr. Stephen Philips, 
Archdeacon of Salop, was vicar. John Philips, of delicate con- 
stitution and great sweetness of character, was sent from home 
education to Winchester School, where he was excused much 
roughness of school discipline, and often read Milton in play- 
hours. He had written imitations of Milton before he was sent, 



toa.d. 1708.] MATTHEW PRIOR. JOHN PHILIPS. 779 

in 1694, to Christchurch, Oxford. There his simple, modest cheer- 
fulness, and his quick wit, surrounded him with friends. Milton 
still was his favourite study, and he knew Virgil almost by heart. 
He traced out Milton's imitations of the classics, and himself 
imitated the blank verse of his master poet. He was destined 
for the profession of medicine, and delighted in natural science, 
but his weak health made him unfit for active duty. At college 
he wrote in playful mood, to suggest to a careless friend the 
value of a shilling in the pocket, his Splendid Shilling, a bur- 
lesque poem representing, in about 150 lines, the commonest 
images in high-sounding Miltonic verse. In style as in subject 
it was small coin glorified, perhaps the best piece of burlesque 
writing in our literature. This was read in manuscript, praised, 
copied, printed without authority. It gave Philips a reputation 
for wit when he came to London, and was hospitably received 
into the house of Henry St. John (afterwards Lord Boling- 
broke), who was two years his junior. St. John had entered 
Parliament for Wootton Basset in 1701, and became one of the 
best speakers in support of Robert Harley. When Halifax and 
Lord Godolphin set Addison writing a poem upon Blenheim, 
their rivals, Harley and St. John, asked for a poem on the 
same theme from John Philips, and it appeared in 1705 as 
Blenheim : a Poem inscribed to the Right Honourable Robert 
Harley, Esq., a strain of blank verse, with echoes in it of the 
roll of Milton's music. In the same year appeared the authorised 
edition of "The Splendid Shilling: An Imitation of Milton. 
Now First Correctly Published." In 1706, John Philips pub- 
lished, also in blank verse, at a time when the orthodox measure 
was " heroic " couplet, his carefully-written poem in two books, 
Cyder. This is a good example of a form of poem which in 
modern literature had its origin in Virgil's " Georgics," and which 
had been especially cultivated in Italy by Alamanni, Rucellai, 
Tansillo, and others ; indeed, Philips's " Cyder " was presently 
translated into Italian. John Philips was preparing to rise to a 
higher strain, and attempt a poem on the Resurrection and the 
Day of Judgment, when his health entirely failed, and in 
February, 1708, he died of consumption in his mother's house, 
at Hereford, when he was not yet thirty-three years old. 

27. Joseph Addison (§ 21), at the beginning of Queen 
Anne's reign, with his pension lost and college debts unpaid, 
had only the income of his fellowship. He was at Vienna in 
November, 1702, where he showed to Montague's friend, George 



7So A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1702 

Stepney (ch. x. § 52), then British Envoy at Vienna, what he 
had sketched of his Dialogues on the Usefulness of Ancient 
Medals, written after the model of Fontenelle's " Dialogues on 
the Plurality of Worlds." They were not published until after 
his death. Addison probably travelled as tutor, but in June, 
j 703, he was at Hamburg, and politely declined to be travelling 
tutor to the son of the Duke of Somerset for the insufficient pay 
of a hundred a year. About September, 1703, he had returned 
to London, and was lodged up three pair of stairs in the Hay- 
market. But his friend Bichard Steele was again by his side. 
Addison was with Steele when he was finishing his second 
comedy, The Tender Husband, produced in 1703; and Steele 
afterwards wrote, " I remember when I finished The Te?ider 
Husband, I told him there was nothing I so ardently wished as 
that we might some time or other publish a work written by us 
both, which should bear the name of the ' Monument,' in memory 
of our friendship." In 1704, Steele's third comedy, the Lying 
Lover, was produced, and failed, because his strong sense of 
responsibility as a writer would not allow him, while adapting 
the story, to treat lightly the romancing of the hero. He took 
the hero from Corneille's Me7iteur, itself an adaptation from the 
Spanish of Alarcon. Steele felt bound to uphold the sacredness 
of truth, and therefore opened his last act with the hero in 
Newgate. Thus he spoilt the comedy. The Earl of Godolphin, 
who was Lord Treasurer, and a close friend of Marlborough's, 
and who was passing gradually from the Tories to the Whigs, 
having had the abilities and claims of Addison urged on him 
by Halifax during the rejoicings over Blenheim, gave him at 
once the post of a Commissioner of Appeal in the Excise, vacated 
by John Locke's removal to the Board of Trade, and asked him 
to write a poem on the battle. The result was Addison's 
Campaign, in the usual heroic couplets, a piece much praised, 
with especial admiration of the use made of a recent great 
storm, for likening of Marlborough in battle to the angel who 

" Pleased th' Almighty's orders to perform, 
Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm." 

Addison followed up the success of this piece by publishing 
his Remarks on Italy, with a dedication to Lord Somers. They 
chiefly treat travel in Italy as a way of illustrating passages 
from Latin poets. A copy of it Addison gave inscribed "to 
Dr. Jonathan Swift, the truest friend, and the greatest genius 
of his age." 



toa.d. 1706.] ADDISON. STEELE. SWIFT. FARQUHAR. 781 

28. Swift, who had graduated as D.D. in 1701, was in 
London in 1704, and then published his Tale of a Tub, and 
Battle of the Books (§ 23). " Tale of a Tub " is a very old 
English phrase for a nonsensical story, and had been used by 
Ben Jonson for the title of a play. Swift's tale was a satire 
on behalf of charity and good works among men of different 
forms of faith, represented by Peter (Church of Rome), Martin 
(Church of England), and Jack (Dissent), and (" let the priests 
be clothed with righteousness ") how they dealt with the coats 
their father had bequeathed to them and bidden them keep 
clean. In its main plan the "Tale of a Tub" is a wise book, and 
essentially religious, but its uncontrolled wit handled sacred 
things in a way shocking to many, and Swift was too good a 
partisan of his own Church to make a book that should be itself 
a great example of the charity it recommended. 'If Swift had 
not written the " Tale of a Tub " he would have died a bishop. 

Addison, early in 1706, was appointed Under-Secretary of 
State to Sir Charles Hedges, a Tory, who was, before the end 
of the year, succeeded in office by Marlborough's son-in-law, 
the Earl of Sunderland. In that year Addison produced, with 
music by Thomas Clayton, Rosamond, an opera that was to 
match the Italians with English genius. It only lived three 
nights, although Addison had chosen the subject to enable him 
to bring on the stage a compliment to Marlborough ; for 
Woodstock had been lately granted by the Crown to the. great 
general, and Addison put Henry II. to sleep in order to edify 
him and the public with a vision of the rising glories of the 
palace of Blenheim, voted by the nation, and then being built 
by Vanbrugh (§14). It was in this year, 1706, that Vanbrugh 
gave up writing for the stage. 

29. Farquhar (§ 14), under Queen Anne, produced his 
Inconstant in 1703, The Twin Rivals in 1705, The Recruiting 
Officer in 1706, and his last and best play, The Beaux Stratagem, 
written in six weeks when he was dying. He died, but thirty 
years old, during the height of its success. A woman who loved 
Farquhar had entrapped him into marriage by pretending to 
possess a fortune. When undeceived he never in his life re- 
proached her. From his death-bed he commended his two 
helpless daughters to his friend Wilks, the actor, who got them 
a benefit. His widow died in extreme poverty. One of his 
daughters married a poor tradesman, the other became a 
maidservant. 



782 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. t 7 o6 

30. Daniel Defoe, while still writing his Review, and, 
among other works, publishing, in 1706, a long poem in folio, 
Jtire Divino, in favour of limited monarchy, and against the doc- 
trine of Divine right in kings, was actively employed in Scotland 
as a promoter of the Union of the legislatures of Scotland and 
England, which became law on the 1st of May, 1707. In 1709 
Defoe published a History of the Union. 

31. Addison having received from Oxford a poem in praise 
of his " Rosamond," sought out the author, and found him to 
be Thomas Tickell (b. 1686, d. 1740), son of a Cumberland 
clergyman, and undergraduate of Queen's College, Oxford. 
Tickell thenceforth became Addison's friend and follower. In 
1707 Bichard Steele was appointed Gazetteer, and the value 
of the office was presently raised for him from sixty to three 
hundred pounds a year. He was made also a gentleman usher 
to the Prince Consort, with salary of a hundred a year. He 
had about this time an estate in Barbadoes, yielding over six 
hundred a year after payment of encumbrances upon it. This 
had been left him by a first wife, who died only a few months 
after marriage. In September, 1707, Steele was married to 
Miss Mary Scurlock. 

Addison, besides his public work, was acting in some way as 
friend and tutor to the ten-year-old son of the Dowager Countess 
of Warwick, the last Warwick of the family of Rich (ch. vii. § 61). 
At the end of 1708 the Earl of Sunderland was dismissed from 
his secretaryship, and Addison, his under-secretary, was trans- 
ferred to the office of chief secretary to the Earl of Wharton, just 
appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Addison was returned 
to Parliament, through Lord Wharton's interest, as member for 
Malmesbury, but was too nervous to speak in the House. He 
rose once, but, embarrassed by his welcome, stammered and sat 
down. Addison took with him to Ireland his first cousin, 
Eustace Budgell (b. about 1685, d. 1736). Budgell and 
Addison were sisters' sons. Budgell inherited a good fortune 
from his father in 171 1, was advanced by Addison in life and 
literature, afterwards ruined himself by the South Sea Bubble, 
and at last escaped from the life of a hack writer by drowning 
himself under London Bridge. Addison had gone to Ireland, 
where his cousin Budgell lived with him, when Eichard Steele 
issued the first number of the Tatler on the 12th of April, 1709. 

32. Doubtless it had occurred to Steele, as a reader of 
Defoe's " Review," that its little supplement of advices from 



toa.d. 1710.] DEFOE. SWIFT. STEELE. THE TATLER. 783 

the " Scandal Club," dealing lightly with characteristics of the 
common daily life in comments and imaginary letters, repre- 
sented a good form of service to society. Defoe said of this 
light matter, which some censured him for blending with his 
discussion of great public questions, that many "care but 
for a little reading at a time," and " thus we wheedle them in, if 
it may be allowed that expression, to the knowledge of the 
world, who, rather than take more pains, would be content with 
their ignorance, and search into nothing." Upon this hint, or, 
at any rate, in this spirit, Steele acted when he planned and 
began the Tatler, without taking his friend Addison into his 
councils. The Tatler, planned to give a little of its space to V 
news, was a penny paper, published three times a week ; and it 
was not until eighty numbers had appeared, and its success was 
complete, that Addison returned to London, became a contri- 
butor, and was drawn by Steele into a form of writing that 
brought all his powers into use. An accident made Isaac 
Bickerstaff the hero of the Tatler. Swift, then in London 
seeking fortune, had issued under that name, at the beginning 
of 1708, a jest against the superstition that maintained prophetic 
almanacks, in Predictions for the Year 1708, which included a 
prediction of the death of John Partridge, the chief maker of 
these almanacks, on the 29th of March next. After the date had 
gone by, Swift published an account of The Accoinplishment <rf 
the First of Mr. Bickeistaff's Predictions, being an Account of 
the Death of Mr. Partridge, the Almajtack Maker, on the 29th 
inst. Other wits kept up the joke. Partridge, in his next 
almanack, declared that he was "still living, in health, and they 
are knaves that reported it otherwise." In the first number of 
the Tatler — Swift, Addison, and Steele being then intimate 
friends — Steele, in the name of Bickerstaff, continued the joke, 
and explained to Partridge that if he had any shame he would 
own himself to be dead ; "for since his art was gone, the man 
was gone." The name of Isaac Bickerstaff, thus accidentally 
assumed at the beginning, was retained throughout the Tatler. 
Addison's return to London was at the end of July or beginning 
of August, 1 7 10. It was the time of the dismissal of Godolphin 
from office, when Harley came into power, and the tide of events 
was running against Marlborough, the Whigs, and the war 
party. Matthew Prior had left the Whigs, and was con- 
ducting, in the Tory interest, a paper called the Examiner. 
Addison, therefore, set up a Whig Examiner, " to give all 



784 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1709 

persons a re-hearing who have suffered under any unjust 
sentence of the Examiner." This paper of Addison's began 
on the 14th of September, 1710, and ended on the 8th of 
October following. On the 2nd of November, Swift began to 
write in the Examiner. Steele had also lost his place of 
Gazetteer, by writing against Harley, but retained the office of 
Commissioner of Stamps, which had been given to him a few 
months before. Nos. 190, 191, and 193 of the Tatler were the 
offenders. Of No. 193 it was said that Steele wrote political 
satire, while he professed only to be talking about the stage. 
Steele closed the Tatler at No. 271, on the 2nd of January, 
171 1, and it was re-issued in four volumes. 

33. On the 1st of March appeared the first number of its 
successor, the Spectator, which excluded politics, and, like the 
Tatler, was Steele's paper, but in which he had, from the first, 
Addison's co-operation. The Spectator was published daily, 
and its price was a penny, until the 1st of August, 17 12, when 
a halfpenny stamp duty killed many journals. It reduced 
the sale of the Spectator, which then had its price raised to 
twopence. Steele and Addison's Spectator ended at No. 555, 
December 6, 17 12. The other numbers, to 635 (June 18 to 
December 20, 17 14), forming afterwards the eighth volume, 
represent Addison's unsuccessful attempt to revive it, about 
a year and a half after it had ceased to appear. Steele's 
hearty interest in men and women gave life to his essays. 
He approached even literature on the side of human fellow- 
ship ; talked of plays with strong personal regard for the 
players ; and had, like Addison, depths of religious earnestness 
that gave a high aim to his work. He sought to turn the 
current of opinion against duelling. Some of his lightest papers 
were in accordance with his constant endeavour to correct the 
false tone of society that made it fashionable to speak with con- 
tempt of marriage. No man laboured more seriously to establish 
the true influence of woman in society. Addison's delicate 
humour, and fine critical perception, produced essays with 
another kind of charm. The Saturday papers in the Spectator, 
which many would read on Sunday, were, as a rule, on subjects 
that would harmonise with thought on sacred subjects, and the 
series of eighteen papers in which Addison brought Milton into 
fashion, by his criticism of " Paradise Lost," begun on Monday, 
Dec. 31, 171 1, were the Spectators for the first seventeen Satur- 
days of 17 12. Eleven essays on the pleasures of Imagination 



toa.d. 1712.] TATLER. SPECTATOR. ALEXANDER POPE. 785 

(Nos. 411 — 421) were another important series of his, appear- 
ing every day, from June 2i to July 3,1712. To the sketches 
of Sir Roger de Coverley and other members of the Spectator 
Club, both friends contributed, but they owed most to the tine 
humour of Addison. 

34. In the Spectator for December 20th, 171 1 (No. 253), 
Addison heartily commended the newly-published " Essay on 
Criticism," by young Alexander Pope. Pope was born in 
Lombard Street, May 21, 1688. He was the only child of Roman 
Catholic parents. His father was a linendraper, who retired from 
business about the time of his son's birth, and presently went 
to live at Binfield, about nine miles from Windsor, on the 
border of the forest. Sickly and frail from birth, Pope got 
instruction at home from a family priest, named Banister, was 
sent for a short time to school at Twyford, then to London, 
where he contrived to see Dryden, who had interest for him 
both as poet and as Roman Catholic. Pope, still a boy, went 
home to Binfield, studied in his own way, and tried his skill in 
verse upon translations and imitations of Latin and English 
poets — some of them done, he said, at fourteen or fifteen years 
old. The popularity of Dryden's "Fables" (§ 16) also caused 
him to try, in Dryden's manner, adaptations of Chaucer. At the 
age of sixteen, in 1704, Pope wrote his " Pastorals ;" but as they 
were not printed until he was twenty-one, they had, of course, 
the benefit of later revision. This was the case with all juvenile 
work of the poet, who wrote of himself (" Epistle to Arbuthnot") : 

"As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, 
I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." 

Pope first appeared as a poet at the age of twenty-one, in 
Tonson's Poetical Miscellanies, of which the series had been 
begun by Dryden (ch. x. § 52), and a former volume had con- 
tained the first published writing of Addison. The sixth part, 
issued in 1709, opened with the Pastorals of Ambrose Philips, 
and closed with Pastorals by Mr. Alexander Pope. It contained, 
also, Pope's January and May, from Chaucer's "Merchant's 
Tale," and his Episode of Sarpedon, translated from the Twelfth 
and Sixteenth Books of Homer's Iliad, with two poems in 
praise of Pope's Pastorals, one of them by Wycherley. The 
same volume contained translations from Lucan, by Nicholas 
Rowe ; and eight poemsyby Tickell, one of which was that on 
" Rosamond," which made Addison his friend. Also there were 
some pieces by Lawrence Eusden, and there was a pastoral 

Y Y 



786 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1703 

dialogue by the author of the poem on The Spleen. This was 
Matthew Green, whose cheerful, thoughtful octosyllabics 
dealt with remedy for the depression of spirits which was said 
to have its source in the spleen. 

35. Nicholas Rowe (b. 1673, d. 1718), son of a serjeant-at- 
law, was bred to the law, but, on the death of his father, turned 
to literature. He produced several plays — The Ambitious Step- 
mother, in 1700; Tamerlane, in 1702; The Fair Penitent, in 
1703 ; The Biter, an unsuccessful comedy, in 1705 ; Ulysses, 
in 1706; and, in 1708, The Royal Convert; afterwards, Jane 
Shore (17 13), the best of his tragedies. Rowe had a reverence 
for Shakespeare, and was the first editor of his works. After 
the four folio editions of Shakespeare's Tragedies, Comedies, 
and Histories, in 1623, 1632, 1664, and 1685, came, in 1709-10, 
in seven volumes, The Works of William Shakespeare; Revised 
and Corrected, with an Account of his Life and Writings, by 
Nicholas Rowe. Rowe's " Life of Shakespeare " preserves to 
us the traditions current in Rowe's time. Upon the death of 
Nahum Tate (ch. x. § 48), in 171 5, Nicholas Rowe succeeded 
him as Poet Laureate, and held that office in the reign of 
George I., when he published his translation of Lucan's 
Pharsalia. There were two future Laureates writing with Pope 
in Tonson's "Miscellany" for 1709, for upon Rowe's death, in 
171 8, his successor was the Rev. Lawrence Eusden. 

36. Ambrose Philips, born in 1671, was seventeen years 
older than Pope. He was of a good Leicestershire family, and 
educated at St. John's College, Cambridge. He came to London, 
was a zealous Whig, and published, in 1700, the Life of John 

Williams, Archbishop of York, celebrating him as an opponent 
of the policy of Laud. Ambrose Philips became, next to Steele, 
Addison's most familiar friend. In 1709, when his Pastorals 
were published, he was in Copenhagen, and wrote thence to the 
Earl of Dorset a Wi?iter Piece, much lauded by Addison in 
No. 393 of the Spectator. Addison was over-zealous on his 
friend's behalf, and greatly magnified in the Spectator Philips's 
translation of Racine's " Andromaque," as The Distrest Mother, 
acted in 171 1. Pope's Pastorals were four, entitled "Spring/ 
" Summer," " Autumn," " Winter," and their shepherds had 
names from the ancient classics. Ambrose Philips, in his 
six pastorals, included Spenser's " Shepherd's Calender" (ch. vii. 
§ 31) among his models, and had among his shepherds Lobbin, 
Thenot, Colinet, Cuddy, and HobbinoL 



fOA.D. 1711.] POPE'S ESSAY ON CRITICISM. 787 

37. In the Sftectatorior May 15, 171 1, appeared the advertise- 
ment, " This day is published An Essay 011 Criticism. Printed 
for W. Lewis, in Russell Street, Covent Garden." Lewis was a 
Roman Catholic bookseller. Published in 171 1, the Essay had 
been written in 1709. It was writing about writing, in the 
fashion of the day. Young Pope was following the lead of 
Boileau. But the " Essay on Criticism," though suggested by 
UArt Poetique (ch. x. § 23), was the work of a fresh mind, with 
native vigour of its own ; and Pope surpassed all preceding 
attempts to write couplets that packed thought, with brilliant 
effect of antithesis and shrewd aptness of word, within the 
compass of a line or couplet. Almost every truth is associated, 
in a thoughtful mind, with considerations modifying any one 
abrupt expression of it ; therefore, whoever seeks to express 
thought by a succession of bright flashes of speech must 
frequently say more or less than he means. For many of us, 
even now, the unaffected style of a true thinker is like the day- 
light that we work in, and don't stay to praise. Yet Pope, while 
perfecting an artificial style, was in his own way very much in 
earnest. In his " Essay on Criticism," while he followed the 
lead of Boileau in setting up for models the Latin writers of 
the Augustan time as the true artists who formed their style on 
nature, he dwells more than Boileau dwelt on the fact that 
nature is " at once the source, and end, and test of art." The 
spirit of the "Essay on Criticism" is, as a whole, thoroughly 
generous. Pope saw no critic in 

" The bookful blockhead ignorantly read 
With loads of learned lumber in his head." 

He knew the weak side of the legislation upon literature that 
had its source in Paris, for critic-learning nourished most in 
France. 

" The Rules a nation born to serve obeys ; 
And Boileau still, in right of Horace, sways." 

In Pope's ideal critic 

" Good nature and good sense must ever join ; 
To err is human, to forgive divine." 

There was no ill-nature in the poem, unless it were ill-nature 
to pair in a line Blackmore and Melbourne for their attacks on 
Dryden, and laugh at Dennis, who, with real merit, rather too 
much assumed the God, and was, in politics, intolerant of that 
which was to Pope most sacred. The wise, he said, can bear 
}o be told their faults. 

Y Y 2 



738 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1711 

" Eut Appius reddens at each word you speak, 
And stares, tremendous, with a threat'ning eye, 
Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry." 

John Dennis had produced, in 1709, a play of Appius and 
Virginia. His stare was a characteristic. " He starts, stares, 
and looks round him at every jerk of his person forward," said 
Steele ; and he Had an affection in his writing for the word 
" tremendous," that became a joke against him. Dennis, who 
had been referred to by name favourably in another line of the 
poem, resented this lesson in critical temper, and produced, 
towards the end of June, Reflections Critical and Satyricalupon a 
late Rhapsody called "An Essay on Criticism." Dennis's attack 
made Addison's good word in December the more welcome. 
Pope repaid it by contributing to the Spectator {or May 14, 17 12, 
(No. 37S), his Messiah : a Sacred Eclogue, in Imitation of VirgiVs 
" Pollio." The fourth eclogue of Virgil, predicting the birth of a 
wonderful boy while Pollio is consul, and said by Virgil to have 
been founded on Sibylline verses, has a parallelism with parts of 
Isaiah, which Pope therefore formed into a Virgilian eclogue^ 

The artificial gardening of the time had its match in the 
ornamental cultivation of the fields of poetry. But there is 
elevation in Pope's Messiah, though it does write "dewy 
nectar" where Isaiah had written "righteousness," and refine 
sheep into " the fleecy care." Pope contributed also to the 
Spectator of November 4, 17 12, a short letter with some lines 
on " Cephalus and Procris," and another letter upon the Emperor 
Adrian's lines beginning, " Animula, vagula, blandula," to the 
Spectator of November 16. Out of this correspondence came, 
by Steele's suggestion, Pope's poem called The Dying Christian 
to his Soul. One of its stanzas was a close imitation of a 
stanza by Thomas Flatman, a barrister of the Inner Temple, 
who published " Songs and Poems," in 1674, and painted 
pictures, and who died in 168S. Steele did not receive Pope's 
lines until just after December 6th, 171 2, the date of the last 
number of his Spectator. 

38. In 1 712, Bernard Lintot, the publisher, imitated Tonson 
by producing a volume of " Miscellaneous Poems and Transla- 
tions." Pope may have been its editor. It contained trans- 
lations of his from Statius and Ovid, with smaller original 
pieces, and The Rape o f the Lock in its first form, in two books. 
One of the smaller pieces, " To a Young Lady with a Volume 
of Voiture," recalls Pope's intimacy with Teresa and Martha 



to a.d. 1713.] THE RAPE OF THE LOCK. THE GUARDIAN. 789 

Blount, two daughters of a Roman Catholic family at Maple 
Durham, near Reading. Martha Blount, two years younger 
than Pope, probably would have become Pope's wife if his 
bodily infirmities, a chief cause of the irritable mind, had not 
kept him unmarried. She had his love till death, and when he 
died he left her ,£ 1,000, all his household effects, and the 
residue of his estate after payment of debts and legacies. Was 
there not here a point of fellow feeling between Pope and Swift ? 
The " Rape of the Lock" arose out of a suggestion made to Pope 
by his friend, Mr. Caryll, that a family quarrel arising out of the 
liberty taken by Lord Petre, aged twenty, in cutting off a lock of 
the hair of Miss Arabella Fermor, daughter of Mr. Fermor, of 
Tusmore, might be made the subject of a playful poem that 
perhaps would restore peace. The result was an airy satire on 
the vanities of fashionable life, which Pope thought he could 
enlarge into mock heroic by providing an epic machinery, 
lively and slight enough to be in harmony with its design. The 
reading of a French story, " Le Comte de Gabalis," by the Abbe 
Villars, whi-ch talked about Rosicrucians, and four kinds of 
spirits of the four elements — sylphs, gnomes, nymphs, and 
salamanders — suggested ;to him what he called a Rosicrucian 
machinery of sylphs in place of the interposition of heathen 
gods and goddesses. Addison told Pope that his poem, as it 
stood in Lintot's "Miscellany" in 171 2, was il merum sal" a 
delicious little thing, that he would not be likely to improve ; 
and Pope, then irritable towards Addison, ascribed honest and 
natural advice to a mean motive. 

39. In 1 71 3, before March 9th, Pope's Windsor Forest ap- 
peared as a separate publication. In 17 13, on the 12th of 
March, appeared No. 1 of Steele's Guardian, the successor 
to his Spectator. The change of name indicated one of his 
reasons for having dropped the Spectator three months before. 
He did not wish to be bound to neutrality, but would be free to 
speak, if he pleased, on public affairs. " The parties amongst 
us," he said, " axe too violent to make it possible to pass them 
by without observation. As to these matters I shall be im- 
partial, though I cannot be neuter.'' The Guardian was 
sketched as a Mr. Nestor Ironside, an old gentleman, guardian 
to the Lizard family, and thus in association with a Lady Lizard, 
widow of Sir Marmaduke Lizard, and her sons and daughters. 
As a daily half-sheet, the Guardian was continued through 1 75 
numbers, ending on the 1st of October, 17 13. Pope was a 



79° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1713 

contributor to it of eight papers. In No. 22 of the Guardian, 
for April 6th, Thomas Tickell began a series of five papers 
(Nos. 22, 23, 28, 30, 32) on pastoral poetry, which led up to a 
glorification of Addison's friend, Ambrose Philips ; the last 
paper, on the 17th of April, ending with the dictum that 
Theocritus "left his dominions to Virgil, Virgil left his to his 
son Spenser, and Spenser was succeeded by his eldest-born, 
Philips." Of Pope's pastorals there was only implied condemna- 
tion. Pope resented this, and, as Tickell was Addison's 
retainer, Pope would rightly believe Addison privy to the slight 
thus put upon him. He took prompt revenge cleverly in the 
Guardian, for April 27th (No. 40), with a paper professing to 
be one more of the series. This paper proceeded to compare 
Pope and Philips, and did so with ironical praise of all that 
Pope thought worst in Philips, and ironical condemnation of 
himself in company with Virgil. 

In 1 714 Pope reproduced The Rape of the Lock, as "an 
Heroi-Comical Poem in Five Cantos," separately published. 
Lintot paid £j for the original two cantos, and £15 for the 
enlarged poem, in February, 17 14. Success was immediate. 
The poem went through three editions in the year. In some 
sense inspired by Boileau's " Lutrin," as the " Essay on Cri- 
ticism" was inspired by " L'Art Poetique," "The Rape of the 
Lock " was a poem that surpassed all former writing of the kind. 
The fairy machinery was handled daintily ; the style suited the 
theme. As in the Essay on Criticism, there was a predominant 
good humour ; and substance was given to the work by under- 
lying English seriousness, that makes the whole a lesson summed 
up by Clarissa's speech in the fifth canto, which has for its 
closing lines : 

" Good humour can prevail 
When airs, and flights, and screams, and scoldings faiL 
Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll ; 
Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul." 

There is more than idling in such lines as those which 
represent the lady's toilet table as an altar, the toilet itself as a 
religious rite ; and place the lady's Bibles by her looking-glass, 
among puffs, powders, patches, and billet-doux. 

40. John Gay was of Pope's age, born near Barnstaple, in 
1688, and educated in that town before he was sent to London 
as apprentice to a silk weaver. In 1712 he passed from behind 
the counter into the service of the Duchess of Monmouth, as 
her secretary; and in 1 713 he published his first poem, Rural 



toa.d. 1714.] jiDDISOtf. PUPE. GAY. DENNIS. 79 1 

Sports, a Gsorgic, with a dedication to Pope. Thenceforth 
Pope and Gay were friends, and to his new friend, who had 
begun his career in verse with rural themes, Pope, with Tickell's 
trumpeting of Ambrose Philips fresh in his ears, suggested 
the writing of a set of pastorals that should caricature Philips's 
lauded rusticity. This was the origin of Gay's six pastorals 
called The Shepherd's Week, published in 17 14, with a proem 
in prose to the reader, and a prologue in verse to Bolingbroke. 
But though the proem burlesqued Philips, and the purpose of 
censure and caricature was evident enough, yet simple speech 
is better than the false classicism that condemned it ; and Gay, 
being much more of a poet than Ambrose Philips, and in 
himself, as Pope said, "a natural man, without design, who spoke 
what he thought," The Shepherd's Week made its own mark as 
pastoral poetry, and, in spite of its Cloddipole and Hobnelia, 
by its own merit went far to disprove its case. At the end of 
Queen Anne's reign Gay went to the Court of Hanover, as 
secretary to the Earl of Clarendon. 

41. Addison saw his tragedy of Cato first acted at Drury 
Lane, where Colley Cibber was joint patentee and manager, in 
April, 1 713, when the Guardian was a few weeks old. He had 
thought of a play on the subject before leaving Oxford, and wrote 
the greater part when on his travels. He gave all profits of acting 
to the players, who, therefore, spared no cost in putting " Cato " 
on the stage. Pope had written a prologue for it, Garth an 
epilogue. The very great success of the play was due to the 
fact that it was received as a patriotic manifesto ; and as each 
party claimed to be as patriotic as the other, factions strove 
who should applaud it most. Bolingbroke, indeed, wickedly 
drew from it a hit at Addison's own hero, Marlborough, who 
had so long .had his own way. He sent between the acts for 
Booth, who acted Cato, and gave him fifty guineas, " for de- 
fending the cause of liberty so well against a perpetual dictator." 

John Dennis appeared as a hostile critic, with Remarks 
upon Cato, a Tragedy; and Pope then, upon a question not per- 
sonal to himself, took occasion to pay off an old score of his 
own by Dr. Norris's (a mad-doctor's) Account of the F?-enzy of 
J. D., a form of advocacy which Addison repudiated as one to 
which "he could not in honour or conscience be privy." 

42. When Steele abruptly stopped the Guardian, Sir B,. 
Blaekmore (§ 17), with John Hughes (b. 1677, d. 1720), 
endeavoured to continue its work by establishing another series 



792 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1713 

of essays, published under the name of " The Lay Monk," but 
collected under the name of The Lay Monastery. This appeared, 
with little success, three times a week, for forty numbers, from 
Nov. 1 6th, 17 13, to February 15th, 1714. John Hughes is said 
to have caused Addison suddenly to finish Cato, by accepting 
an invitation to write the last act of it for him. Since his poem, 
" The Triumph of Peace," on the Peace of Ryswick, Hughes 
had written much that was creditable, including three or four 
letters in the Spectator. He had a situation in the Ordnance 
Office, was made afterwards, by Lord-Chancellor Cowper, 
Secretary for the Commission of the Peace, and died of con- 
sumption on the first night of his most successful play, " The 
Siege of Damascus." 

43. Among contributors to the Guardian, besides Addison, 
was George Berkeley, born at Kilcrin, in Kilkenny, in 1684. 
He was educated at the Kilkenny Grammar School and Trinity 
College, Dublin, of which he became a Fellow in 1707. In 1709 
appeared Berkeley's Theory of Vision; in 17 10, his Principles 
of Human Knowledge j and, in 17 13, his Dialogues belitfeen 
Hylas and Philonous. Pie opposed the materialist tendencies of 
the time with a metaphysical theory that represented an extreme 
reaction from them. The existence of matter could no more, he 
said, be proved, than the existence of the spirit could be dis- 
proved. We know only that we receive certain impressions on 
the mind. Berkeley was made Bishop of Cloyne in 1735, and 
died in 1753. 

44. Richard Steele made his interest in the political life of 
his time very conspicuous by his paper on the demolition of 
Dunkirk, in the Guardian for August 7th, 1713. When the 
Guardian had been brought to an end, it had a sequel in the 
Englishman, which appeared (from October 6, 1713, to Feb- 
ruary 15, 1 714) three times a week, forming 57 numbers, and in 
which the essays were chiefly political. Swift, whom Harley 
and St. John had this year (171 3) made Dean of St. Patrick's, 
violently attacked Steele for his paper in the Guardian, 
urging the fulfilment of that stipulation in the Treaty of Utrecht 
which required the demolition of the harbour and works at 
Dunkirk. Steele replied with a pamphlet, The Importance of 
Dtmkirk Considered. 

When, in 17 10, Robert Harley (made, in 171 1, Earl of Oxford) 
became Secretary of State, there followed a Dissolution of Par- 
liament, and a Ministry weary of war and taxation, and weary 



toa.d. 1714.] HUGHES. BERKELEY. STEELE. PRIOR. 793 

also of tolerance. It was ready to make peace at the expense 
of Holland. The preceding Ministry had of late years been 
making war at the expense of Holland, by tempting the un- 
willing Dutch with promises. Both parties were in the wrong. 
One had continued the war when all its ends could have been 
accomplished by an advantageous peace ; the other was now 
ready to end it with a peace that was discreditable and dis- 
advantageous. Louis XIV. negotiated with new hope, and 
greatly reduced his offers. Matthew Prior was now employed 
as a negotiator for the Tories. The English were bribed with 
commercial advantages over the Dutch, and the Dutch felt 
themselves betrayed. Prince Eugene had come to London in 
1712, and in vain sought to influence Queen Anne. Warm con- 
troversies over complicated questions preceded the signing of 
the Peace of Utrecht, on the nth of April, 1713. The Treaty 
of Commerce was rejected in the House of Commons by a 
small majority. The House was dissolved in July, and there 
was great party violence at the elections. Many wore emblems 
of allegiance to the Pretender. Jacobites were busy. The 
Pretender, inflexibly Romanist, claimed for himself the liberty 
of conscience he offered. The new Parliament met in February, 
1 7 14. Steele sat in it as member for Stockbridge, in Dorset. 
He put forth a pamphlet which is described by its long title : 
The Crisis j or, a Discourse Representing frojn the most 
Authentic!? Records, the just Causes of the late Happy Revo- 
lution : and the several Settlejnents of the Crowns of England 
and Scotland on Her Majesty j and on the Demise of Her 
Majesty without Issue, upon the most Illustrious Princess 
Sophia. . . . With some Seasonable Remarks 071 the Danger 
of a Popish Successor. The Queen, in her speech on opening 
Parliament, said, "There are some who are arrived to that height 
of malice as to insinuate that the Protestant Succession in the 
House of Hanover is in danger under my Government." The 
Lords, mostly Whigs, summoned before them the printer and 
publisher of The Public Spirit of the Whigs, and committed 
them to the custody of the Black Rod. Harley, Lord Oxford, 
had given Swift ^100 for writing it, but now affected indigna- 
tion at its tone. The House of Commons, mostly Tory, fell 
upon Steele as author of the Crisis and of a pamphlet called 
The Englishman, being the close (No. 57) of the paper so called. 
Steele defended himself well, but he was expelled the House on 
the iSth of March, 17 14, by a majority of 245 against 152. 



794 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. a.d. x-jx^ 

The Princess Sophia, aged eighty-four, died of apoplexy, on 
the 28th of May ; and her son George, Elector of Hanover, or 
rather of Brunswick and Liineburg, aged fifty-four, then became 
heir apparent. Queen Anne had a stroke of apoplexy on the 
30th of July, and died on the 1st of August ; so the Hanoverian 
became King George I. 



CHAPTER XII. 

FROM ANNE TO VICTORIA. 

I. At the beginning of the reign of George I. (1714 — 1727") 
the oldest living writer was Thomas d'Urfey (ch. x. § 26), aged 
about eighty-six, who lived on to within a few years of a hundred. 
John Locke had been dead ten years, Sir Isaac Newton, aged 
seventy-two, was still living, and lived to the close of the reign 
of George I., dying March 20th, 1727, two or three months 
before the king. Bishop Ken had been dead three years, 
Bishop Sprat three months, Gilbert Burnet (ch. xi. § 9), whom 
William III. had made Bishop of Salisbury, was seventy-one 
years old, and died in the next year. Jeremy Collier (ch. xi. 
§ 1 5) was sixty-four. He published in the year of Queen Anne's 
death the second of the two folio volumes of his Ecclesiastical 
History of Great Britain, chiefly of England, from the First 
Planting of Christianity to the End of the Reign of Charles the 
Second, with a brief Account of the Affairs of Religion in 
Ireland, collected from the best Ancient Historians. In 1721 
appeared the original supplement to his translation of Moreri's 
Great Historical, Geographical, Genealogical Dictionary, which 
he had issued in three volumes folio in 1701 and 1706. Jeremy 
Collier died in 1627, at the close of the reign of George I. But 
Joseph Butler, whose " Analogy of Religion " appeared in the 
reign of George II., was a young man of twenty-two at the 
accession of George I., and John Wesley was a boy of eleven. 
William Wycherley (ch. x. § 38) was then seventy-four years old, 
and had but a year to live. Elkanah Settle (ch. x. § 26) was 
sixty-six, with ten years of a life of poverty before him. Thomas 
Southern was fifty-five. Farquhar had died in the middle of 
Queen Anne's reign. Congreve (ch. xi. § 14) was forty-four, and 
lived through the reign of George I., dying in 1729. Colley 



a.d. 1714.] ACCESSION OF GEORGE THE FIRST. 795 

Cibber was forty-three, Vanbrugh forty-two, and died the year 
before the king. Nicholas Rowe was forty-one, and had four 
years to live. Richard Bentley (ch. xi. § 23) was fifty;two. The 
critic, Thomas Rymer, died in the year before Queen Anne, 
having chiefly spent his time during her reign in publishing the 
great collection of public treaties, known as Rymer's Foedera. 
The first of the ten folios issued by him appeared in 1704. Critic 
John Dennis (ch.xi. § 19) was fifty-seven ; Charles Gildon, born 
in 1665, of a Roman Catholic family in Dorsetshire, who failed as 
an actor, and became critic of the narrowest French school, was 
forty-nine, and produced, in the reign of George I., his Complete 
Art of Poetry (17 18), a Satirical Life of Defoe (17 19), and The 
Laws of Poetry (1720). He died in 1724. Daniel Defoe 
(ch. xi. § 24, 30) was about fifty, of like age with Matthew Prior 
(ch. xi. § 25). Jonathan Swift (ch. xi. § 32), and Samuel Garth 
(ch. xi. § 18), who was knighted at the accession of George L, 
were both forty-seven years old ; Steele and Addison both forty- 
two ; Gay and Pope both twenty-six ; James Thomson and John 
Dyer both fourteen. John Oldmixon (ch.xi. § 19) was forty-one, 
and had begun to take especial interest in history. He produced, 
early in the reign of George I., Memoirs of North Britain and 
Meinoirs of Ireland fro?n the Restoration, and he began, towards 
the end of the reign, A Critical History of England. Among 
friends and helpers of Pope, John Arbuthnot was thirty-nine, 
Thomas Parnell thirty-five, Elijah Fenton thirty-one. Addison's 
friend, who became also his secretary, Thomas Tickell, was twenty- 
eight, Samuel Richardson, the future novelist, was twenty-five, 
and Henry Fielding, seven, at the accession of George I., when 
Edward Young was thirty, Allan Ramsay twenty-nine, Richard 
Savage sixteen, Samuel Johnson a child five years old, David 
Hume three, Lawrence Sterne but a year old, and Shenstone 
newly born. 

2. The chief writings of the reign of George I. were Defoe's 
" Robinson Crusoe " (17 19), and the novels of his that followed 
it; Swift's " Drapier's Letters" (1724), and his "Gulliver's 
Travels" (1726) ; Pope's " Iliad" (1715 — 1720), and " Odyssey" 
(1723 — 5); Allan Ramsay's ''Gentle Shepherd" (1725), and 
Thomson's " Winter," and Dyer's " Grongar Hill," which were 
both published at the close of the reign, in 1726, and represented 
in the work of young men a reviving sense of nature. There 
were some indications, also, of coming social changes in Mande- 
ville's " Fable of the Bees " (1723). 



79^ A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1714 

3. Joseph Addison, on the death of Queen Anne, was 
made secretary to the Regency, until the arrival of George I. 
Then Marlborough's son-in-law, the Earl of Sunderland, t°ing 
made Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, appointed Addison Chief 
Secretary. Hichard Steele had, only the day before the last 
number of the Englishman appeared, started, February 14th, 
1 7 14, a paper called the Lover, dedicated to Garth as "the best- 
natured man," and published three times a week until its close, 
on the 27th of May. Whilst that was running he published 
nine numbers of another paper, called the Reader, through 
which he replied to the Examiner. Steele wrote, also, another 
pamphlet upon the Dunkirk question, and one on behalf of reli- 
gious toleration, after his expulsion from the House of Commons. 

The accession of George I. brought the Whigs again into 
power. Steele was made surveyor of the royal stables at 
Hampton Court, and a deputy-lieutenant in the Commission of 
the Peace for Middlesex. Through the death of the sovereign, 
the licence of the royal company at Drury Lane required re- 
newal. Steele was applied to ; his name was, at their request, 
inserted in the patent as Governor of the Company, and, in 
kindly relation with the players, he began to receive an income 
of six hundred a year from the theatre. He was returned also 
to the first Parliament of George I., as member for Borough- 
bridge in Yorkshire; and in April, 171 5, he was one of three 
deputy-lieutenants who were knighted upon going up to the king 
with an address. 

In this year Steele published a translation of an Italian 
book on The State of Roman Catholic Religion throughout the 
World, with an ironical dedication to the pope. At Drury 
Lane he produced his friend Addison's one comedy, The 
Drummer, written some years before. It was not successful, 
and is noticeable chiefly as another illustration of the religious 
feeling that was a mainspring of the literary work of Steele and 
Addison. A mock ghost of a drummer brings out a lively 
dread of the supernatural from below the surface of a fop who 
sets up for an atheist. 

In September, 17 15, rebellion in favour of the Pretender, 
Charles Edward, broke out in the North. It was suppressed, but 
there were many Jacobites of the party that had felt its strength 
during the last years of Queen Anne, and Addison was chosen 
by the Ministry to maintain the cause now identified with the 
Hanoverian Succession. He did this in a series of fifty-five 



to a.d. 1721.] ADDISON. STEELE. SUSANNA CENTLIVRE. 797 

papers called the Freeholder, which appeared between Decem- 
ber 23rd, 1715, and June 29th, 1716. In August, 1716, the 
Earl of Sunderland resigned his office of Lord Lieutenant, and 
Addison ceased to be the Irish Chief Secretary after ten months' 
tenure of office. In the same month Addison married the 
Countess Dowager of Warwick (ch. xi. § 31), and thenceforth he 
lived chiefly at Holland House, in Kensington. In April, 1717, 
Addison's steady friend, Lord Sunderland, became Secretary 
of State, and made Addison his colleague. Failure of health 
caused Addison to remain in office only eleven months. He 
resigned in March, 17 18. In 17 19 the Ministry to which he 
had belonged brought in a Peerage Bill, limiting the king's 
prerogative in establishing new peerages, except to replace such 
as should become extinct. The strong objections to such a 
measure were felt by many of the Whigs ; and Sir Richard 
Steele attacked it in papers connected by the name of the 
Plebeian. Addison, then near his death from asthma, replied as 
the Old Whig. 

Sir Richard Steele, appointed one of the Commissioners 
for Forfeited Estates, had a hearty welcome at Edinburgh, in 
November, 171 7. He had a patent device, called The Fishftool, 
for bringing salmon and other fish alive from Ireland to the 
London market, and published an account of it in 171 8. In 
December, 17 18, Steele's wife died, aged forty, leaving him with 
a son and two daughters. Then came, in 17 19, on the 14th of 
March, the first number of his Plebeian, against the Peerage 
Bill. Addison, on the 19th, replied with the Old Whig. On 
the 6th of April appeared the fourth and last number of the 
Plebeian; and Addison died on the 17th of June, aged forty- 
seven, leaving one daughter, who did not marry. 

4. Susanna Centlivre (b. about 1680, d. 1723), was the 
daughter of a Mr. Freeman, of Holbeach, in Lincolnshire, who 
was ruined by resistance to the Stuarts. She was married at 
sixteen to a husband who died in a twelvemonth, then to an 
officer who, after eighteen months, was killed in a duel ; then 
she supported herself by writing plays and acting. As actress 
she fascinated Mr. Joseph Centlivre, the king's head cook, who 
married and survived her. She wrote, between 1700 and 172 1, 
nineteen lively plays, with good plots and frequent expression of 
her political feeling as a hearty Whig. The most successful of 
her plays were The Busy Body (1709), The Wonder (171 3), and 
A Bold Stroke for a Wife ( 1 7 1 8). 



7QS a first sketch of English literature, [a.d. i 7 i 4 

5. To punish Steele for his opposition to the defeated 
Peerage Bill, his patent at Drury Lane was threatened by the 
Government, and he started a paper called the Theatre, con- 
tinued from January 2nd to April 5th, 1720, to protect his own 
interests and those of the stage. Steele's patent was revoked, 
whereby he was deprived of his ,£600 a year, and three years' 
continuance of that income after his death. This act pro- 
ceeded chiefly from the ill-will of the Duke of Newcastle, 
who was Lord Chamberlain. In May, 1721, Steele was re- 
stored to his office by the good -will of Robert Walpole, 
then at the head of the Treasury; and in the following year, 
1722 — the year of the death of his only son, Eugene — he pro- 
duced, with very great success, his fourth and last comedy, The 
Conscious Lovers. This was founded upon Terence's " Andria," 
designed, Steele said in the preface, " to be an innocent per- 
formance," and written chiefly for the sake of a scene in the 
fourth act, in which the younger Bevil so deals with a challenge 
from a friend as to enforce once more Steele's doctrine that 
Christian duty rises far above, and utterly condemns, the point 
of honour worshipped by the duellists. The old tenderness of 
Steele's love for Addison appeared also this year in a letter to 
Congreve, prefixed to a new edition of Addison's comedy of "The 
Drummer." Steele began two more comedies, " The School 
of Action" and "The Gentleman," but his health failed. He 
withdrew from London to the West of England, and about 1726 
settled on a mortgaged estate of his, derived from the Scurlock 
family, at Llangunnor, near Carmarthen. There he was at 
home, with failing health and struck with palsy, at the end of 
the reign of George I. One who knew him, and received kind- 
ness from him in his last days, said of Steele, " I was told he 
retained his cheerful sweetness of temper to the last, and would 
often be carried out of a summer's evening where the country 
lads and lasses were assembled at their rural sports, and with 
his pencil give an order on his agent, the mercer, for a new 
gown to the best dancer." Steele died on the 1st of September, 
1729, having survived Addison about ten years. Of his two 
daughters, the younger died in 1730, of consumption ; the other 
married a Welsh judge, who became Lord Trevor of Bromham. 
Steele had paid every creditor before his death, and his children 
were not left in want. He had been a tender husband, a good 
father, a devoted friend, was open and kindly, while imprudently 
generous in the fellowship of men ; and taking his place in 



toa-d. 1729.] THE CONSCIOUS LOVERS. STEELE. DEFOE. 799 

literature with a high sense of responsibility, he was throughout 
a faithful servant of God and his country. 

6. Daniel Defoe (ch. xi. § 24, 30), was under persecution for 
his independence of thought, both at the close of Queen Anne's 
reign, and after the accession of George I. For a time, at the 
close of Anne's reign, he had withdrawn to Halifax, where he lived 
in Back Lane, at the sign of the " Rose and Crown." Against the 
claims of the Pretender he wrote A Seasonable Catition, which 
he distributed gratuitously among the ignorant country-people 
in different parts of England ; and he wrote two other pamphlets, 
with titles designed to catch Jacobite readers, What if the 
Pretender Should Come ? and Reasons Against the Succession of 
The House of Hanover. For writing these, Defoe was arrested 
and prosecuted in 171 3. His enemies declared him Jacobite. 
They might as well, he said, have made him Mahometan. 
Nevertheless, he had to thank Harley for the queen's pardon. 
The persecution was continued under the new reign ; for Defoe, 
with sturdy independence, had opposed false cries of every party 
in the State, and had never flinched from upholding what he 
thought sound policy because it came from his political oppo- 
nents. Thus he had incurred a sort of infamy by asserting the 
soundness of what we should now all hold to be sound in the 
treaty of commerce which the Tories had associated with their 
treaty of peace with France, while he opposed the terms of 
peace ; for at the last elections in Queen Anne's reign, the 
Whigs raised their battle-cry hotly against the commercial 
treaty. In 171 5, Defoe, failing in health, and attacked on all 
sides, wrote his Appeal to Honour and Justice, being a J rue 
Account of his Conduct in Public Affairs. He had reason, he 
said, to think that his death might be near, and wished, before 
he embarked on his last voyage, to " even accounts with this 
world, that no slanders may lie against my heirs, to disturb them 
in the peaceable possession of their father's inheritance, his 
character." Defoe was, in fact, struck with apoplexy before the 
" Appeal " was finished ; and the publisher, after waiting six 
weeks, issued it as it then stood, with the note that " in the 
opinion of most who knew him, the treatment which he here 
complains of, and others of which he would have spoken, have 
been the cause of this disaster." Defoe said here, " It has been 
the disaster of all parties in this nation to be very hot in their 
turn, and as often as they have been so, I have differed from 
them all, and ever must and shall do so." He cited seven chief 



80O A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1719 

occasions of such differences with his friends. Against intem- 
perate party warfare, Defoe urged that to attain harmony in the 
State there must be moderation in the exercise of power by the 
Government, and that " to attain at the happy calm which is the 
consideration that should move us all (and he would merit to be 
called the nation's physician who could prescribe the specific for 
it), I think I may be allowed to say, a conquest of parties will 
never do it ; a balance of parties may." With such last words 
as these, Defoe retired from political strife, and lived at New- 
ington with his wife and six children. There, with a keen 
sense of his own political isolation, he now wrote " The Life and 
Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, 
Mariner, who lived Eight-and-twenty Years all alone in an 
Uninhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth 
of the great River of Oronooque ; having been Cast on Shore 
by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men Perished but Himself. With 
an Account of how he was at last as Strangely Delivered by 
Pyrates. Written by Himself." The two parts of Robinson 
Crusoe were published one at the beginning and the other at the 
close of the year 17 19, with prefaces affecting to present them 
to the world as a true narrative of fact. The book had no 
relation whatever to the existing novel of the French school, or 
to any other kind of novel. It was an imitation of those simple 
and graphic records of adventure by sea which, since the days 
of Elizabeth, had quickened the delight of England in her 
sailors. If we would bring to mind how much imagination 
went to Defoe's exact suggestion of the real in this thoroughly 
English story-book, let us think how a man of weak imagina- 
tion would have solved the problem : given one man and an 
island, to make a story. In Defoe's story, all is life and action. 
There is no rhetorical lament, or waste of energy upon fine 
writing ; attention, from first to last, is bound to the one man, 
only the more after the man Friday has been added to the 
scene, and the reader is made to feel that healthy life consists in 
trusting God, and using steadily with head and hand whatever 
faculties He gave us. Some part of the charm of the book 
springs from a reality below the feigned one, Defoe's sense of 
the fellowship of his own life with that of the solitary worker. 
The suggestion of the story was found in Captain Woodes 
Rogers's account of his " Cruising Voyage Round the World," 
published in 1712, which told how, in February, 1709, he took 
from the island of Juan Fernandez a seaman, named Alexander 



a.d. i 7 i9-] ROBINSON CRUSOE. JOHN ARBUTHNOT. 8oi 

Selkirk, who, when out on a piratical voyage, had been left 
ashore on that uninhabited island, after a quarrel with his 
captain, in September, 1704. Selkirk had been furnished only 
with a few books, nautical instruments, a knife, a boiler, an axe, 
and a gun, with powder and ball. Captain Rogers had brought 
him to England in 171 1. 

Robinson Crusoe was followed by Defoe's other novels, 
which still imitated forms of literature distinct from fiction, and 
sometimes included pictures of the coarse life of the time. The 
Life and Piracies of Captain Singleton, and Duncan Campbell 
appeared in 1720; Moll Fla?iders in 1721 ; The Life and 
Adventures of Colonel Jack, included commonly in genuine 
accounts of highwaymen, and the Journal of the Plague, which 
Dr. Mead quoted as the narrative of an eye-witness, both in 
1722; the Memoirs of a Cavalier in 1723 ; Roxana in 1724; 
The New Voyage Round the World 'in 1725. At the beginning 
of the reign of George II., Defoe produced, in 1728, The Life of 
Captain Carleton, which Dr. Johnson fastened upon as an 
addition to English history. Defoe's health then failed com- 
pletely, when he had begun another book. His last letter was 
to a son-in-law, when looking forward to his rest after life's 
troubled journey. "'By what way soever He please to bring me 
to the end of it, I desire to finish life with this temper of soul — 
Te Deum laudamusP Defoe died on the 24th of April, 1731. 

7. John Arbuthnot (b. 1667, d. 1735) was the son of a 
Scotch Episcopal clergyman. The Revolution having deprived 
the father of Church preferment, the son, M.D. of Aberdeen, 
came to London and taught mathematics for a living. He 
obtained notice in 1697, by an examination of Dr. Woodward's 
account of the Deluge ; was witty, learned, and a good talker, 
and was rising into medical practice. Then he chanced to be 
at Epsom when Prince George was in sudden need of medical 
attendance, was called in, treated him successfully, and became 
his regular physician. In 1709 he was made also Physician to 
the Queen, and Fellow of the College of Physicians. Already 
he was F.R.S., and a friend also of the wits and poets. In 1713 
he wrote one of the cleverest of English political satires, Law is 
a Bottomless Pit; or, the History of John Bull, after the fashion 
of Swift's " Tale of a Tub," an allegory on the political disputes 
associated with the French War to its close in the Treaty of 
Utrecht. In 1714 he amused himself with Pope, Swift, Gay, 
Parnell, as members of a Scribbler's Club, and began with Pope 

z z 



802 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1714 

and Swift a satire, after the manner of Cervantes, upon the 
abuse of human learning. The death of Queen Anne stopped 
them, when there had been produced only Book I. of the 
Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus. Swift went back to Ireland, 
and Arbuthnot was deprived of his post and of his official 
residence at St. James's. 

Thomas Parnell, born in Dublin in 1679, a pd M.A. of 
Trinity College there, took priest's orders in 1700, and in 1705 
was made Archdeacon of Clogher. He married, was intimate 
with the wits of Queen Anne's time, and towards the end of her 
reign went over to the Tories. The queen's death destroyed 
his hope of advancement by the change. Parnell obtained a 
prebend through the influence of Swift, and in 17 16 was Vicar 
of Finglass. He died in 17 17, aged thirty-eight, and his 
friend Pope published, in 1722, a collected edition of his poems. 
The best of them was The Hermit, modernised from an old 
moral tale. 

8. Jonathan Swift (ch. xi. § 23), about 17 12, began to 
give, when in London, some instructions to a Miss Esther 
Van Homrigh, daughter of Bartholomew Van Homrigh, a 
Dutch merchant, who had settled in Ireland after the Revo- 
lution, married an Irishwoman, and bequeathed ,£16,000 to 
his widow and four children, two of them sons, who soon 
died. The widow and daughters lived in London beyond 
their means, and ran away to Ireland. The mother and one 
sister died, leaving Esther sole possessor of the remaining 
fortune. She had an ill-regulated mind, and no personal 
beauty, and it pleased her to become enamoured of Swift. 
Turning her Dutch Van into Vanessa, and transposing the 
syllables of his dignity as Decanus or Dean, he wrote a poem 
on Cadenus and Vanessa, which, if it treated her delusions 
with unwise compliment to herself, was clearly intended to 
represent it as delusion. The girl overlooked the counsel in 
the poem, and magnified the compliment. Swift's vanity was, 
no doubt, flattered. He did not deal firmly with the young 
lady's diseased imagination. In Ireland, in 1716, he was 
privately married in his garden to the one woman who had his 
love, but the marriage made no difference in their relations to 
each other. In 1720 Swift was recommending to the Irish 
the use only of Irish linen manufactures. Miss Van Homrigh, 
who had settled at Selbridge, a house of her father's, ten or 
twelve miles from Dublin, drove him, by an excess of impor- 



toa.d. 1724.] THOMAS PARNELL. JONATHAN SWIFT. 803 

tunity, to over-harshness, and, being sickly, died in 1723 in the 
course of nature, considering herself a victim of love, and 
leaving the Dean's letters and " Cadenus and Vanessa " to be 
published after her death. An age especially delighting in low 
scandal took the meanest view of the case, and Stella had to 
run away for a time from the tattle that surrounded her. 
Surely, it was said to her, the Dean must have loved Vanessa 
very much to write of her so beautifully. " It is well known," 
replied Stella, " that the Dean can write very beautifully on a 
broomstick." This referred to the " Meditations on a Broom- 
stick," with which he had in earlier life edified Lady Berkeley, 
when she expected him to go on reading one day aloud to her 
Robert Boyle's "Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects" 
(ch. x. § 29). 

In 1724 Swift published The Drapier's Letters, against 
Wood's halfpence. Copper coin having become so scarce in 
Ireland that the chief manufacturers were paying their work- 
men with tin tokens, a patent was granted to William Wood, 
an ironmaster, of Wolverhampton, to make ,£80,000 worth of 
farthings and halfpence during fourteen years, for supply of 
copper coin to Ireland. Swift denounced the patent as an en- 
richment of William Wood at the expense of Ireland, which was 
to have its good money taken in exchange for copper coin of less 
than its nominal value. Sir Isaac Newton, as Master of the 
Mint, and two of the assayers, testified that Wood's halfpence 
not only contained more copper than any before sent to Ireland, 
but also excelled former coinages "in goodness, fineness, and value 
of the metal." No matter. Writing as an Irish trader, M. B 
Drapier, Swift raised a storm in Ireland. The "Drapier's Head" 
became a patriotic sign, and the Dean an idol of his country- 
men. Government offered in vain a reward of ,£300 for evidence 
to prove who was the writer of the fourth letter, dated Oct. 13, 
1724. The printer was arrested, but when the grand jury was 
to find a true bill against him a paper of the Drapier's, called 
" Seasonable Advice to the Grand Jury," had found its way to 
the hands of each of them, and they threw out the bill, though 
the Chief Justice sent them back several times to revise their 
return. Swift prevailed, Wood's patent had to be revoked, and 
the Irish sang the praises of their Dean : 

" Now we're free by nature, 
Let us all our power exert ; 
Since each human creature 
May his right assert. 

Z Z 2 



804 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1714 

[Chorus.) Fill bumpers to the Drapier, 
Whose convincing paper 
Set us, gloriously, 
From brazen fetters free." 

Swift was now at work upon his Travels into Several Remote 
Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon, and 
then a Captai7i of several Ships. Of this book he had the first 
suggestion from a passage in the " Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus" 
(§ 7) ; but it was also of the school of Cyrano de Bergerac's 
" Comic History of the States and Empires of the Moon," 
which had been twice translated into English (1659 and 1687), 
and Joseph Hall's "Mundus Alter et Idem" (ch. viii. § 15). 
Swift brought "Gulliver" to London in April, 1726 ; was with 
Pope till August, while the book was being printed, and recalled 
to Ireland by illness of Stella when it appeared, in the beginning 
of November, without the author's name. The first edition was 
sold in a week. Cleansed of impurities, it is now for its bright 
wit and bold flights of fancy read by children as a delightful tale 
of wonder. As a new book it was read by statesmen and men 
of the world as bitter political and social satire. Like " Robinson 
Crusoe," it takes the form of a sailor's book of adventure in 
strange lands ; but there all likeness ends. Lemuel Gulliver's 
four voyages were : (1) To Lilliput, where English politics of 
the Court of George I. are satirized in a people who are as 
men and women seen through a diminishing glass, and where 
Blefuscu stands for France ; (2) To Brobdingnag, where men 
and women are seen as through a magnifying glass, and the 
satire is continued with reference, particularly in the sixth 
chapter, to the politics of Europe ; (3) To Laputa, &c. — satire 
against the philosophers ; and (4) to the country of the 
Houyhnhnms — satire upon the whole human race. Although 
Swift lived until the middle of the reign of George II., the 
chief work of his life was done before the death of George I. 
Stella being better, he was in London again with Pope in 1727, 
collecting three volumes of " Miscellanies," but had again to 
hurry back. He was ill himself in October, and Stella, then 
within a few weeks of her own death, denied ease to herself that 
she might be his tender nurse. Lines of his " To Stella Visiting 
Me in my Sickness, October, 1727," end thus : 

" Best pattern of true friends, beware; 
You pay too dearly for your care. 
If while your tenderness secures 
My life, it must endanger yours. 



to a.d. 1726.] GULLIVER'S^ TRAVELS. POP^S HOMER. 805 

For such a fool was never found 
Who pulled a palace to the ground, , 
Only to have the ruins made 
Materials for an house decayed." 

Stella died in January, 1728, and all joy went out of Swift's life. 
His character lost what had softened its harsher lines. Disease 
of mind slowly increased upon him. In 1736 he was seized 
with a fit while writing, and he wrote no more. In 1741 he was 
insane beyond hope, and in charge of a legal guardian until his 
death, at the age of seventy-eight, in 1745. 

9. Alexander Pope (ch. xi. § 38, 39), at the accession of 
George I., was at work on his translation of the " Iliad." His 
literary life falls into three periods, corresponding to three reigns. 
Under Queen Anne he produced his own earlier poetry ; under 
George I. he was translator of Homer and editor of Shake- 
speare ; and the later period of his own verse falls under the 
reign of George II. After publishing, at the beginning of 171 5, 
his version of Chaucer's Temple of Fame, Bernard Lintot pub- 
lished,, in January the same year, the first of the six volumes of 
Pope's Iliad, containing four books with prefatory matter. In the 
same week Tonson published, as a verse pamphlet, The First 
Book of Homer's Iliad. Translated by Mr. Tickell. It had this 
notification : " To the Reader, — I must inform the reader that' 
when I began this First Book, I had some thoughts of trans- 
lating the whole ' Iliad;' but had the pleasure of being diverted 
from that design by finding the work was fallen into a much 
abler hand. I would not, therefore, be thought to have any 
other view in publishing this small specimen of Homer's i Iliad,' 
than to bespeak, if possible, the favour of the publick to a 
translation of Homer's * Odysseis,' wherein I have already made 
some progress." In spite of this courteous note, Pope resented 
the rivalry, ascribed it to Addison, who was supposed to have 
polished Tickell' s verse, and who took part in the inevitable 
drawing of comparisons. Addison had established, in 1712, 
Daniel Button, an old servant of the Countess of Warwick, in a 
coffee-house in Russell Street, Covent Garden, opposite Will's, 
made it his place of resort, and drew the wits to it. When 
Steele set up the Guardian, he set up its letter-box at Button's 
in the form of a lion's head, said afterwards to have been de- 
signed by Hogarth, though Hogarth was but sixteen when the 
Guardian was appearing. Of talk at Button's, when the first 
volume of Pope's " Iliad" was new, Gay told Pope, "Mr. Addison 



806 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1715 

says that your translation and Tickcll's are both well done, but 
that the latter has more of Homer." Pope now expressed his 
annoyance in that satire which lays a bitter emphasis on the 
defects of Addison, 

"Who when two wits on rival themes contest 
Approves of both, but likes the worse the best," 

but not without generous recognition of his worth as one 

" Blest with each talent and each art to please, 
And born to live, converse, and write with ease. 

This piece of satire was first printed in 1723, then among 
Pope's "Miscellanies," in 1727, and finally incorporated in the 
Epistle to Arbuthnot, in 1735. Addison was so free from un- 
generous feeling in this matter, that he went very much out of his 
way in the Freeholder, for May 7, 1716, to say that, as the illite- 
rate could judge of "Virgil" from Dryden's translation, "those 
parts of Homer which have already been published by Mr. Pope 
give us reason to think that the ' Iliad' will appear in English 
with as little disadvantage to that immortal poem." Addison 
added a generous word for Nicholas Rowe, then translating 
the "Pharsalia" of Lucan, "the only author of consideration 
among the Latin poets who was not explained for the use of the 
Dauphin, for a very obvious reason ; because the whole ' Phar- 
salia ' would have been no less than a satire upon the French 
form of government." 

In April, 1716, Pope's father and mother having sold their 
little house and ground at Binfield, the family removed to one of 
a row of houses — Mawson's New Buildings — at Chiswick. In 
October, 17 17, Pope's father died, and Pope wrote these few- 
words to Martha Blount : " My poor father died last night. 
Believe, since I don't forget you this moment, I never shall." 

About the same time, Colley Gibber produced his Non- 
juror, a version of Moliere's " Tartuffe," directed against the 
Roman Catholics and Non-jurors who had sympathised with the 
Jacobite insurrection of 17 15. It had a great success, and its 
loyalty marked Cibber for the post of Poet Laureate, to which 
he succeeded on the death of the Rev. Laurence Eusden (ch. 
x '- § 35)) m I 73°- But its bitterness towards those who were 
of the faith of Pope's household stirred Pope's resentment 
against Cibber, and marked him for the post to which he was 
afterwards promoted in " The Dunciad." Pops expressed his 
feeling at once in a satirical Key to the Non-juror, with a touch 



to a.d. 1720.] COLLEY CIBBER. POPE. BROOME. 807 

in it of serious indignation. This trifle was suggested by his 
former "Key to the Lock," published in 1715, when he ex- 
pounded the piece as a political allegory, the Lock being the 
Barrier Treaty, Belinda Queen Anne, and so forth. Cibber 
himself ascribed Pope's dislike of him to resentment of a piece 
of personal impertinence, introduced by Cibber as actor of the 
character of Bayes in the " Rehearsal." 

In 1718 Pope took a long lease of a house, with five acres of 
ground, at Twickenham, the house thenceforth known as Pope's 
Villa. An underground passage connecting the land on opposite 
sides of the public road, Pope, otherwise careful of money, spent 
much in transforming into an ornamental grotto. He lived at 
Twickenham with his mother, to whom he was a devoted son, 
upon his small patrimony, increased substantially by the profits 
of translating Homer. A volume of the "Iliad" appeared annually 
after the first in 171 5, until there was a pause in 1719, and in 
1720 the work was completed by the issue of the fifth and sixth 
volumes. Pope was paid ^200 a volume by his publishers, and 
660 copies to supply subscribers. Pope's friend, Parnell, wrote 
the Life of Homer, Broome and others found material for notes; 
but Pope, after deducting payment for aid, must have received 
at least ,£5,000 for his translation of the " Iliad." All his original 
work in Queen Anne's reign had not brought him £100 ; and 
Dryden had not obtained more than ,£1,200 for his translation 
of Virgil. Pope next undertook to supply Tonson with an anno- 
tated edition of Shakespeare, and Lintot with a translation of 
the " Odyssey." For each there was to be a subscription list. In 
the proposals for a translation of the " Odyssey," Pope said he had 
undertaken it, but that the subscription was also for two friends 
who would assist him in his work. These were Broome and 
Fenton. 

10. William Broome had been educated at Eton as a 
foundation scholar, and at Cambridge by the subscription of 
friends, and was Vicar of Sturston in Suffolk. He had a turn 
for verse, and, with repute as a Greek scholar, had begun his 
literary life by taking part in a prose translation of the " Iliad." 
Introduced to Pope at Sir John Cotton's, in Cambridgeshire, 
Broome pleased the poet, and was employed in selecting extracts 
for notes to the " Iliad." Upon the " Odyssey" Broome was a chief 
helper. He translated eight books, the 2nd, 6th, 8th, nth, 12th, 
1 6th, 1 8th, and 23rd, and compiled all the notes. The 1 ith and 
12th books he had translated some years before, for his diversion. 



808 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, {a.d. 1715 

Elijah Fenton, who, after a Cambridge education, had been 
usher in a school, afterwards master of the school at Seven- 
oaks, then secretary to Lord Orrery and tutor to his son, Lord 
Boyle, had published verse in 1709 and 17 17, and in 1723, while 
at work for Pope, produced a tragedy, Ma?'iamne. He also 
edited Waller, and wrote a Life of Milton. Fenton, as fellow- 
worker on the "Odyssey," translated four books, the 1st, 4th, 19th, 
and 20th. Pope translated the other twelve, and his knack of 
translating Homer was so easily caught that, when he had 
touched over the work of his assistants, few readers could 
observe in the Odyssey a difference between the books translated 
by him and those done by his colleagues, Broome and Fenton. 
Pope's reputation made the profit of the undertaking, and his 
share of the earnings by the Odyssey, produced in 1723-4-5, 
was ,£3,500, after paying Broome £400 for the eight books and 
£100 for the notes, and Fenton £200. Thus Pope earned eight 
or nine thousand pounds in the reign of George I. by that work 
of his life which is least valuable to posterity. But it was the 
age of French classicism, when Homer and Virgil were the 
names to conjure by. Addison knew that he enjoyed the 
" Babes in the Wood" and " Chevy Chace," when he wished to 
make others do so by commending them in the Spectator. But 
to do that, or justify to himself his own enjoyment, he must 
needs show how they reminded him of Virgil and Horace (see 
the Spectator, Nos. 70, 74, and 85). While the "Odyssey" 
translation was in progress, Broome wrote of Pope to Fenton, 
"he turns everything he touches into gold." When it was 
ended, he obliged Pope by appending a note, in which he 
claimed for himself the translation of only three books, and for 
Fenton only two ; with expectation that the rest of their work 
was to be praised as Pope's by the public, and its glory then 
claimed for the authors. But Broome's relation to Pope ended 
in just discontent ; and, with a sense of fraud upon his reputation, 
he wrote of Pope to Fenton as a King of Parnassus, who held 
" all its gold and silver mines as privileges of his supremacy, 
and left coarser metals to the owners of the soil." Broome 
published a volume of Miscellaneous Poems in 1727, married a 
rich widow, and became LL.D. at the beginning of the reign 
of George II. He was afterwards Vicar of Eye, in Suffolk, 
and died in 1745. 

11. In 1725 Pope's Edition of Shakespeare appeared, in six 
volumes. Only 750 copies were printed, and of these 140 



to a.d. 1727.] FENTON. POPE. THEOBALD. 809 

remained unsold, until their price was much reduced. Shake- 
speare was not then a name to conjure with, and Pope received 
little more than ^200 for his work upon him. But he brought 
Shakespeare into notice at a time when a writer on the Laws 
of Poetry, editing the "Essay on Poetry" by John Sheffield 
(Lord Mulgrave, who died Duke of Buckinghamshire, in 1720), 
Lord Roscommon's "Essay on Translated Verse," and Lord 
Lansdowne on "Unnatural Flights of Poetry," said, in 1721, 
" To go through all the soliloquies of Shakespeare would be to 
make a volume on this single head. But this I can say in 
general, that there is not one in all his works that can be 
excused by reason or nature." 

When Swift brought " Gulliver " to town, and was with 
Pope at Twickenham, in 1726, with aid from Gay and 
Arbuthnot, of whom Swift said that if the world contained 
twelve Arbuthnots he would burn " Gulliver's Travels," the 
friends began to collect many pieces, chiefly of Swift's, into 
three volumes of Miscella?iies, of which the last appeared in 
1727. Among Pope's contributions were a satire on Burnet's 
" History of His Own Times," in which Gay took part, called 
Memoirs of P. P., Clerk of this Parish, and a Treatise on Bathos; 
or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, in which Pope dealt satirically 
.with many of the minor poets of the day, and did not spare his 
dissatisfied colleague, William Broome. The next step from 
this was to the " Dunciad." 

12. Lewis Theobald, son of an attorney, at Sittingbourne, 
in Kent, and bred to the law, published, in 17 14, a translation 
of the Electra of Sophocles ; and produced in the following 
year an acted tragedy, the Persian Princess, written before he 
was nineteen. His Perfidious Brother, acted in 17 16, was on 
the model of Otway's " Orphan." In 17 15 he published trans- 
lations of the "CEdipus" of Sophocles, and versions from Aristo- 
phanes of Plutus and The Clouds. To these he had added opera, 
melodrama, and, in 1725, when Pope issued his " Shakespeare," 
the pantomime of Harlequin a Sorcerer, before his attack 
upon Pope's " Shakespeare," in 1726, with a pamphlet, called 
" Shakespeare Restored ; or, Specimens of Blunders Committed 
and Unamended in Pope's Edition of this Poet." Theobald 
understood Shakespeare better than Pope did, and lived to 
show it ; but this did not lessen the annoyance of his attack, 
and, fresh from the smart of it, Pope made Theobald the hero of 
his "Dunciad." In 1727 Theobald gave work to the critics by 



8lO A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1714. 

producing at Drury Lane, as a play of Shakespeare's, The 
Double Falsehood; or, the Distrest Lovers. 

13. Bernard de Mandeville represented in the reign of 
George I. the rising tendency to speculate on the corruptions of 
society. Great principles still underlying public contests were 
now buried under party feuds and personal ambitions. Men 
were growing up with little in the public life about them to 
inspire a noble faith or stir them to the depths. Polite life 
became artificial ; with small faith in human nature, negligent 
of truth. The fashionable world had the king's mistress for a 
leader; and the prevailing influence of French fashion, which 
had been low at its best, was degraded since the death of Louis 
XIV., in 1715. Louis XV. became King of France from 1715 
to 1774 ; until 1723, under the regency of the Duke of Orleans. 
The Court of France was sinking into infamy. Polite society 
in France was the more tainted, and the nation suffered many 
tyrannies. Mandeville, born at Dort, in Holland, about 1670, 
graduated as a physician, and practised in England. After a 
coarse, outspoken book, in 1709, he published, in 171 1, a treatise 
on Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Affections, in three dialogues, 
with amusing strictures upon medical follies ; and in 17 14 ap- 
peared a short poem of 500 lines, called The Grumbling Hive; 
or, Knaves Turned Honest. There was a volume, in 1720, of 
" FreeThoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happi- 
ness," and the " Grumbling Hive " reappeared, in 1723, with a full 
prose commentary, as The Fable of the Bees. This book outraged 
conventional opinion, by working out an argument that civilisa- 
tion is based on the vices of society. The bees lived in their 
hives as men, " millions endeavouring to supply each other's 
lust and vanity;" lawyers, physicians, priests, thriving upon the 
feuds, follies, and vices of mankind. Luxury employed its 
million, pride its million, envy stirred men to work. Fickle- 
ness of idle fashion was the wheel that kept trade moving. But 
the hive grumbled at the vice within it, and the knaves turned 
honest. In half an hour meat fell a penny a pound ; masks 
fell from all faces. The bar was silent, because there were no 
more frauds ; judges, jailors, and Jack Ketch retired, with all 
their pomp. The number of the doctors was reduced to those 
who knew that they had earned their skill. Clergy who knew 
themselves to be unfit for their duty resigned their cures. All 
lived within their incomes, and paid ready money. Glory by 
war and foreign conquest was laughed at by these honest bees, 



toa.d. 1727.] BERNARD MANDEVILLE. ALLAN RAMSAY. 8ll 

" who fight but for their country's sake, when right or liberty's 
at stake." Then followed fall of prices, extinction of trades 
founded upon luxury, and of the commerce that supplied it. 
These glories of civilisation are gone, still Peace and Plenty 
reign, and everything is cheap, though plain. At last the dwellers 
in the honest hive appeared so much reduced as to become a mark 
for foreign insult, and they were attacked. Because there was 
no hireling in their army, but all were bravely fighting for their 
own, their courage and integrity were crowned with victory. 
But they suffered much loss in the conflict. " Hardened with 
toils and exercise, they counted ease itself a vice ; which so 
improved their temperance that, to avoid extravagance, they 
flew into a hollow tree, blest with content and honesty." This 
satire, with the remarkably plain speaking in the appended 
notes and dissertations — one " A Search into the Nature of 
Society "—startled many people; and in 1723 the book was 
presented by the Grand Jury of Westminster as one " having a 
direct tendency to the subversion of all religion and civil 
government, our duty to the Almighty, our love to our 
country, and regard to our oaths." Bernard Mandeville, who 
certainly meant none of these things, but whose book was as 
a first faint swell before the rising of another mighty wave of 
thought, published a second volume of it in 1728. He was 
partly supported by some Dutch merchants, and had for his 
patron the first Earl of Macclesfield. In 1732 he published An 
Inquiry into the Origin of Honour , and Usefulness of Christianity 
in War ; and he died in 1733. Before the close of the reign of 
George I. there were other indications of a slowly-coming change. 
14. Allan Eamsay, born in 1685, at a hamlet of a few 
cottages among the hills between Clydesdale and Annandale, 
was the son of a poor worker in Lord Hopetoun's lead mines. 
He worked there himself as a child, washing ore. Then he 
was sent to Edinburgh, apprenticed to a barber, and worked 
at that trade some years. But he delighted in old songs and 
ballads of his country, and could sing himself. His interest 
in literature made him a bookseller ; and his cheery nature, his 
gift of verse and innocent pride in it, made his shop popular. 
In 1 72 1 he published, by subscription, a volume of Poems, 
partly in his native dialect, and, in 1 724, The Evergreen : Scots 
Poejns Writte7i by the Ingenious before 1 600. These were mostly 
taken from George Bannatyne's MS. (ch. vii. § 16), and included 
pieces by Henryson, Dunbar, Kennedy, Lindsay, and the true 



Si 2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. |a.d. 1725 

old ballad of "Johnnie Armstrong," never before printed. It 
was one of the first signs in our literature of the coming revival 
of nationality, and it began among the people, for correction of 
false classicism. In the same year followed Allan Ramsay's 
Tea-table Miscellany, and in 1725 The Gentle Shepherd, of 
which the first sketch, only a short dialogue, had already 
appeared in 1720, as Patie and Roger : a Pastoral by Mr. Allan 
Ramsay, i?i the Scots Dialect; to which is added an Imitation of 
the Scotch Pastoral, by Josiah Burchett. Ramsay's admirer, 
Mr. Burchett, was Secretary of the Admiralty. Allan Ramsay's 
Gentle Shepherd is a pastoral play in five acts, with rustic 
humour and rustic sentiment breaking often into delightful 
lyric forms. Duplicate dialogue was provided in the lyric 
parts lest any performer should be unable to sing ; for the 
Gentle Shepherd has, from Ramsay's time to this day, been 
accepted by Scottish peasantry as a play of their own, and 
may even yet be seen acted by them in barns on holiday 
occasions. The true and homely sense of life is in the piece, 
although its author was not yet so free from the literary 
influences of the time as to venture on a Patie, for his hero, 
who was not to turn out well-born at the end. Therefore he is 
a "gentle" shepherd, that is, a shepherd in appearance, but 
really the son of a Sir William Worthy ; and his Peggy also 
proves to have been born a lady. But Allan Ramsay's home- 
bred poetry is so simple and true that it is little damaged by 
contact with his more formal strains, and by his surface 
adoptions of the taste of a polite world that helped him to keep 
house in comfort. He wrote occasional verses for rich friends, 
and loved the poets. He sang praise of Pope's Iliad; wrote 
a Scottish ode to Gay ; a pastoral, " Sandie and Richie," on the 
death of Addison ; another on the death of Prior ; lamented, in 
verse, Newton's death in 1727. For Allan Ramsay had broad 
sympathies, looked upon himself also as a man of genius, and 
spoke with a free, musical and hearty voice. He died in 1758. 

15. In Roxburghshire there was born, in September, 1700, 
another poet, who was harbinger of a new time. James 
Thomson, eldest son of the minister at Ednam, and educated 
at Jedburgh, became, in 17 19, Student of Divinity at Edinburgh, 
where he had David Mallet among his fellow-students ; and, in 
1720, contributed to the Edinburgh Miscellany an essay "On a 
Country Life, by a Student of the University." In March, 
1725, Thomson, aged twenty-five, embarked at Leithfor London. 



ro a.d. 1727.] ALLAN RAMS A V. ?AS. THOMSON. JOHN DYER. 813 

He arrived almost without money ; what was to have been sent 
to him could not be sent. His letters of introduction, wrapped 
in a handkerchief, were stolen from him, and presently he 
received news of the death of his mother. In July he was at 
East Barnet, teaching the five-year-old son of Lord Binning to 
read, and writing his Whiter. This little appointment was 
obtained for Thomson by his college friend, David Malloeh 
(b. about 1700, d. 1765), who had smoothed his name into 
Mallet, become tutor to the sons of the Duke of Montrose, 
and was able to help in finding friends. Mr. Duncan Forbes, of 
Culloden, who had seen some of Thomson's poetry in Scotland, 
and Mr. Aikman, a good friend also to Allan Ramsay, were 
helpers who had influence in London society. Thus Thomson 
became introduced to Pope, Arbuthnot, and Gay, and his 
Winter, the first published section of his Seasons, appeared in 
March, 1726. Its author went to be tutor to a young gentle- 
man in an academy in Little Tower Street ; but " Winter " 
was soon in a second edition, and opened a better career to 
the poet. Summer appeared in 1727, and the other seasons 
followed in the beginning of the reign of George II. There 
is more of the artificial and rhetorical in Thomson's poetry 
with its triple adjectives than we should now associate with 
a true sense of nature. His English is very Latin, but his 
words are apt, and he paints with a minute truth of detail. 
Until French classicism was overthrown, young poets who 
were growing into a new sense of beauty, found a quickening 
influence in Thomson's " Seasons." Even Burns drew, in his 
youth, inspiration from the book which came out in the days 
of Swift's "Gulliver" and Pope's "Dunciad," alone of its kind 
with one remarkable exception. 

16. John Dyer, a young Welshman of Thomson's age, 
published his "Grongar Hill" in the year 1726, when Thomson's 
" Winter " first appeared. Dyer was born at Aberglasney, in 
Carmarthenshire, and educated at Westminster School. He 
abandoned law for painting, found himself a poor artist, took 
orders, got some preferment, and wrote, not in the orthodox 
ten-syllabled couplet, but in octosyllabic verse, his Grotigar 
Hill, celebrating the charms of that hill near his birthplace in 
a strain of the simplest natural poetry. 

" Be full, ye courts, be great who will ; 
Search for peace with all your skill 
Open wide the lofty door, 
Seek her on the marble floor. 



814 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1727 

In vain you search, she is not there ; 
In vain ye search the domes of care ! 
Grass and flowers Quiet Heads, 
On the meads and mountain heads, 
Along with pleasure, close ally'd, 
Ever by each other's side : 
And often, by the murm'ring rill, 
Hears the thrush while all is still, 
Within the groves of Grongar Hill." 

Isaac Watts, born at Southampton in 1674, son of' a 
Nonconformist schoolmaster, became first a tutor, then pastor 
of a congregation in Mark Lane ; and after the failure of his 
health in 1712, retained his pastoral charge, preaching when he 
could, and lived as guest with his friends, Sir Thomas and Lady 
Abney, at Theobalds, until 1748, the year of his death and of 
James Thomson's. In 1728 he had been made D.D. by the 
Universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen. He published Horcs 
Lyricce in 1706, Hymns in 1707, Psalms and Hymns in 17 19, 
Diviiie and Moral Songs for Children, 1720; and, among 
various other works, a volume of Logic, in 1725. There was a 
supplement on Improvement of the Mind, in 1741. 

17. In the reign of George II. (1727 — 1760) we find our 
national life advancing still to a new vigour of expression, 
and the fourth of the periods into which our literature may be 
divided — The Period of Popular Influence — slowly gaining 
strength as the French Influence, although strong throughout 
the reign, loses its hold upon the faith of our best writers. 
The most vigorous advance made in this reign was by the 
development of the great English novelists, Richardson, 
Fielding, and Smollett. At the same time the revolt against 
all despotism was rising throughout Europe. Authority was 
questioned with increasing boldness. 

John Gay made the great success of his life just after the 
accession of George II. with The Beggars' Opera. The publi- 
cation of his Poems in two volumes by subscription in 1720 
had produced him a thousand pounds. In 1726 he published 
his Fables, with a dedication to the Duke of Cumberland, 
for whom they professed to be written. In January, 1728, 
his Beggars' Ope?'a, written on Swift's suggestion, with Newgate 
characters to caricature Italian Opera, was produced with 
wonderful success. Gay was a bright, natural poet. Captain 
Macheath, Polly, and Lucy were for the public a welcome 
escape from the conventional, and Gay's profits from his 
author's rights came to £700. The Court considered itself 






TO a. d 1 737-3 THE BEGGARS' OPERA. THEDUNCIAD. 8l$ 

satirized. The Archbishop of Canterbury thought that robbery 
was recommended. The performance of a sequel, Polly, was 
therefore interdicted. But Gay got all the more from his book- 
seller for the publishing of " Polly," and the Duke and Duchess 
of Queensberry took care of him until his death in 1732, when he 
left ,£6,000 to his sisters. 

William Somerville, a gentleman of property at Edston, 
in Warwickshire, who loved literature and field sports, died in 
1742, aged fifty, having produced in 1735 his poem of The Chase. 

18. Pope in this third period of his life worked in accord 
with the new energy of the time. Even through the small 
pique and personal bitterness of The Dunciad there flowed a 
deeper current, that did work of its time in scouring out the 
channel through which better literature was to flow than that 
of the small critics and weak poets who claimed to represent 
the " understanding age." As first published in three books in 
May, 1728, "The Dunciad" had Lewis Theobald (§ 12) for its 
hero. In the first book, the goddess of Dulness chose Theobald 
to be Settle's successor, and* carry diversions of the rabble from 
Smithfield to the polite West. In the second book, poets, critics, 
and booksellers contended in games to honour the new king. 
In the third book the new king, sleeping on the lap of Dulness, 
was transported in a vision to the banks of Lethe ; where 
Settle's ghost having discoursed to him of the glories of 
Dulness past and present, prophesied the triumph of her empire 
in the future. In April, 1729, "The Dunciad " appeared with 
the " Prolegomena of Scriblerus and Notes Variorum," to which 
Swift and Arbuthnot had contributed. There was, of course, 
much outcry ; and in January, 1730, a Grub Street Journal was 
established, which appeared weekly unto the end of 1737, Pope 
contributing. It professed to be written by certain Knights of 
the Bathos, who under guise of attack on Pope, fought his 
battle, and really attacked his adversaries. 

19. In 1731 Pope wrote his Epistle to the Earl of Burlington, 
Of Taste, including a satire of the false luxury of the Duke of 
Chandos at Canons. In August of that year he had finished 
three books of his "Essay on Man." In 1732 appeared his Epistle 
to Lord Bathurst, Of the Use of Riches, including his famous 
character of the Man of Ross, and his moralising on the death- 
bed of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. In the same 
year he published, as an experiment, the first part of his Essay 
on Man, containing the first t-uo Epistles inscribed to Boling- 



8l6 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE [a.d. i 73 x 

broke as Laelius. There was no author's name, and for a little 
while nobody — not even Swift— supposed this to be Pope's 
work. In 1733 Pope published the third Epistle of the Essay 
on Man, and an imitation of Horace (Satire 1 of Book. II.) in 
dialogue between Pope and his friend Fortescue, a lawyer in 
good practice, soon afterwards a Baron of the Exchequer. To 
the same year belonged the Moral Essays, Characters of Men. 
In the summer of this year, Pope lost the mother so long 
witness to the successes of the son who cheered her with un- 
failing love. In 1734 appeared the fourth Epistle of the Essay 
on Man. In January, 1735, Pope published the Epistle to Dr. 
Arbuthnot,'m which he defended himself against aspersion. His 
friend Arbuthnot died only a month later. In the same year 
appeared the Moral Essays, Characters of Women; in 1737 five 
of the Imitations of Horace; and in 1738 the U?iiver sal Hymn, 
closing the Essays on Man, and the satirical dialogue, " 1738," 
which afterwards formed an Epilogue to the satires. Pope's 
ethical writings in the reign of George II. indicate not only 
the thoughtfulness of advancing years, but in some degree also 
new tendencies of thought in Europe. The Essay on Man, an 
argument for God's goodness, as Father of all mankind, excited 
warm controversy. It was, and is ascribed to the influence 
of Bolingbroke. Its doctrines really came from Leibnitz's 
Theodicee. 

20. Henry St. John (ch. x. § 26), who, in 1712, was 
called to the House of Lords as Viscount Bolingbroke, was 
dismissed after the death of Queen Anne from the office of 
Secretary of State, which he had held four years. In 171 5 he 
was impeached for high treason by Robert Walpole, attainted, 
and had his name erased from the roll of peers. He became 
for a time Secretary of State to the Pretender, who gave him a 
paper earldom, dealt treacherously with him, entered upon the 
Scottish rebellion against his counsels, and dismissed him 
summarily after his return. Bolingbroke had seen enough of 
Jacobitism at head-quarters, knew that its last chance of success 
was lost, and gave it up. Bolingbroke lived for the next seven 
years in exile at La Source, near Orleans. His wife died in 
17 1 8, and in May, 1720, he privately married the widow 01 the 
Marquis de Villette, with whom he had been living. At La 
Source, in harmony with the new tone of French thought, 
Bolingbroke began his philosophical writings, and was visited 
by young Voltaire. His French wife managed his return to 



toa.d. 1738.] POPE. BOL1NGBROKE. ESSAY ON MAN. 817 

England in 1723, through the Duchess of Kendal, with a bribe 
of ;£ 11. 000. In 1725 he obtained a grant of restored property, 
but not the reversal of attainder, which would restore him to 
the House of Lords and political life. He bought an estate at 
Dawley, near Uxbridge, within easy ride of Twickenham. There 
he affected philosophical contempt of ambition and played at 
farming. He was much visited by Pope ; and by Swift also 
when, in 1726, Swift came to England. But Bolingbroke had 
ambition, and took his place as the most vigorous writer against 
Sir Robert Walpole, by his letters in The Craftsman, after 1726; 
and a series of letters, called The Occasional Writer, begun in 
January, 1727 : there was also A Dissertation on Parties, in 
nineteen letters, and a series of letters on The History of 
Englajid, signed Humphrey Oldcastle, and ironically dedicated 
to Walpole. Bolingbroke's writing gave The Craftsman a sale 
far exceeding even that of " The Spectator." After this, in 
1735, be retired again to France, until the death of his father 
called him home in 1742. He died himself in 175 1. The 
religion expressed in Bolingbroke's essays on Human Know- 
ledge, and the Philosophical Writings, published by David 
Mallet, in 1754, was contained in his parting words to Lord 
Chesterfield, after he had given orders that none of the clergy 
should visit him in his last moments : " God, who placed me 
here, will do what He pleases with me hereafter ; and He knows 
best what to do. May He bless you/' 

21. Pope's "Essay on Man" sprang from an endeavour to 
meet and grapple with the rising want of faith in France, that 
came of the corruption of the Church and of Society. Pierre 
Bayle, who died in .1706, published, in 1697, at Rotterdam, the 
first edition of his " Historical and Critical Dictionary ;" the 
second edition, in four volumes, appeared in 1702, and in 1710 
it was translated into English. It raised many doubts and 
questions embarrassing to theologians ; and to these, in the book 
of which Pope adopted the teaching in his "Essay on Man/' 
Leibnitz undertook to reply. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz 
(b. 1646, d. 1716), son of a Professor of Moral Philosophy at 
Leipzig, wrote on jurisprudence and mathematics at the age of 
twenty-two, came afterwards to England, knew Newton and 
Boyle, was made F.R.S. ; was a leader of science also in Paris, 
claiming priority as discoverer of the differential calculus, when, 
in 1 7 10, he wrote in French his Theodicee, to justify God in His . 
works by showing TV rod ©eoG Sjktjz/. Boyle having lately died ? 

AAA 



8l8 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. i 73 r 

Leibnitz began by putting him in heaven, where he now saw 
Truth at its source ; and having spoken in his preface of forms 
and ceremonies as only the shadows of the truth, he argued that 
naked truth would easily bring Faith into accord with Reason. 
But we are in love, he said, with superficial subtleties. Leibnitz 
held by the continuity of nature, and sought to blend the truths 
of different schools of philosophy. 

Pope, following Leibnitz, argued in his Essay on Man that 
Man being only part of the great Universe, linked to it by nice 
dependencies and just gradations, which he cannot understand 
until he see the whole plan of creation, we must have faith, while 
we see but in a glass darkly, that " our proper bliss depends on 
what we blame;*' must know that there is in discord harmony 
not understood, in partial evil universal good. He argued that 
God's goodness may be found in passions and imperfections of 
the individual man. On self-love social love is built, and self- 
love, pushed from social to divine, " gives thee to make thy 
neighbour's blessing thine." He argued that God for man in 
society " on mutual wants built mutual happiness," and traced 
from the state of nature the development of government. Here 
there was abnegation of the old faith of his party in the Divine 
right of kings, " For Nature knew no Right Divine in men." 
Advance of thought was indicated when from Pope the question 
came : 

"Who first taught souls enslaved, and realms undone, 
Th' enormous faith of many made for one ?" 

Thus, while injuring the expression of his mind by the constant 
labour for a brilliant antithesis not reconcileable with full 
sincerity of style, Pope wrote his " Essay on Man" in the spirit 
of his lines, 

" In Faith and Hope the world will disagree, 
But all mankind's concern is Charity : 
All must be false that thwart this one great end ; 
And all of God that bless mankind, or mend." 

His fourth epistle on the source of happiness placed it in virtue 
alone, and in the sympathies of life : 

" Abstract what others feel, what others think, 
All pleasures sicken, and all glories sink;" 

placed it in love of God and love of man, open to each who can 
but think or feel, 

" Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, 
But looks through Nature up to Nature's God ; 



to a.d. 1738.] ESSAY OH MAN. BUTLER'S ANALOGY. WESLEY. 819 

Pursues that chain which links th' immense design, 
Joins heav'n and earth, and mortal and divine ; 
Sees that no being any bliss can know, 
But touches some above and some below ; 
Learns, from this union of the rising whole, 
The first, last purpose of the human soul ; 
And knows where faith, law, morals, all began, 
All end, in love of God, and love of man. " 

Whatever we may think of the sufficiency of Pope's doctrine, 
it was assuredly not irreligious in design or temper. Our best 
poet even of a corrupt and artificial age did what he could to 
meet the scepticism it produced. In Milton's day it had been 
the aim of the great poet to "justify the ways of God to man," 
by answering doubts of His goodness that touched doctrines of 
the national religion. A bolder spirit of doubt now asked 
whether the daily experience of life was consistent with man's 
faith in an All- wise and Almighty Ruler. Therefore, even 
adapting Milton's line, Pope, to the best of his own lower 
power, sought to meet this doubt and " vindicate the ways of 
God to man." It is easy to misunderstand, away from its con- 
text, the formula twice repeated in the fourth epistle, " Whatever 
is is right ;" but Pope meant only what Milton meant when he 
wrote : 

" All is best, though oft we doubt 
What the unsearchable dispose 
Of highest Wisdom brings about, 
And ever best found in the close." 

22. In 1 736 Joseph Butler (b. 1 692, d. 1752), son of a Presby- 
terian at Wantage, and first educated at a school for Dissenters, 
and then at Oxford, had become one of the chief preachers in 
the Church of England, and in that year he sought to satisfy the 
questioner by his Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, 
to the Constitution and Course of NaUire. In 1738 Butler was 
made a bishop. In 1739 Wesley began to preach. John 
Wesley (b. 1703, d. 1791) and his brother Charles (b. 1708, d. 
1788) produced in 1738 their Collection of Psalms and Ifymns. 
John Wesley was a clergyman's son, educated at the Charter- 
house and Christchurch, Oxford, where his brother Charles 
followed him from Westminster. Charles persuaded some 
undergraduates to join with him in seeking religious improve- 
ment, living by rule, and taking the sacrament weekly. They 
were laughed at as " Bible Moths," " The Godly Club," &c. 
Then somebody, noticing their methodical ways, said that, like 
the old school of physicians so called, here was a new school of 

A A A 2 



820 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1727 

Methodists. This name abided by them. John, when he 
returned to Oxford, became leader of the little society established 
by his brother. Then there was added strong influence upon 
his mind by the Moravians, and by his associate, George 
Whitefield (b. 1714, d. 1770), and in 1739 John Wesley began 
to influence the people as a preacher, with an enthusiasm that 
gave life to their religion. In 1749 Wesley published at Bristol, 
where he had built a meeting-house, A Plain Account of the 
People called Methodists. Among Wesley's other writings was, 
in 1763, A Survey of the Wisdom of God i?i the Creation. 
Methodism under John Wesley became an organized associa- 
tion, with himself for its directing head. The conditions of 
membership were prayer, and study of Scripture, with a resolved 
attempt to avoid vices and follies, practise Christian virtues, 
and bear in patience the reproach of men, for Christ's sake. 
Wesley sought, in fact, to join men in one grand endeavour to 
be true, without fear of the world and its conventions. 

23. In 1740 Pope sketched the plan of a " History of the 
Rise and Progress of English Poetry." In 1741 he began a 
fourth book of the " Dunciad." completed during six weeks, in 
the house of Ralph Allen, at Bath. Ralph Allen, the friend of 
many writers of the time, and the Mr. Allworthy, the ideal good 
man, of Fielding's " Tom Jones," was a man of little education, 
great simplicity and kindliness, and a shrewd practical mind, 
who, as postmaster at Bath, had seen serious defect in our postal 
system from the absence of direct communication between 
country towns, so that a letter from Birmingham to Manchester 
had to be sent through London. "Quickened and improved 
correspondence is the life of trade," Allen wrote to the Lords of 
the Treasury, when offering to provide direct communication 
between certain towns. As farmer of cross posts he made a 
large fortune by his energy and enterprise, greatly improved the 
whole postal system, and added much to the material well-being 
of his country. In March, 1741, Pope published The New 
Dunciad, as it was Found in the Year 174.1. with the original 
three books modified, a fourth book added, and Colley Cibber, 
who had been since 1730 Poet Laureate, replacing Theobald as 
its hero. Theobald had made good his claim to criticise 
Pope's "Shakespeare," by producing, in 1733, his own Edition 
of Shakespeare, in seven volumes. The literary controversy 
had brought Shakespeare into notice. Pope had replied to 
•Theobald's strictures in a second edition of his own " Shake- 



toa.d. I744-] POPE. THEOBALD. CIBBER. WARBURTON. 821 

speare," in 1728 ; but Theobald's edition, in 1733, destroyed 
Pope's,, and 13,000 copies of it were sold. Colley Cibber, 
hero of the " Dunciad" in its second form, and then more than 
seventy years old, had, in an Apology for his Life, published in 
1740, referred to Pope's hostility, of which the source lay deeper 
than he understood (§ 9). He took his place in the " New 
Dunciad " good-humouredly, published A Letter from Mr. 
Cibber to Mr. Pope Inquiring into the Motives that might Induce 
him in his Satirical Works to be so Frequently Fond of Mr. 
Gibber's Name; and then Another Occasional Letter fro?n Mr. 
Cibber to Mr. Pope, wherein the New Herd's Preferment to his 
Throne in the " Dunciad" seems not to be Accepted, and the Author 
of that Poem his Rightful Claim to it is Asserted; with an 

Exposhdatory Address to the Rev. Mr. W. W -n, Author of 

the New Preface, and Adviser in the Curious Improvements in 
that Satire. The Rev. Mr. W. W n was William "War- 
burton, who joined a commentary to the edition of Pope's 
" Essay on Man" and " Essay on Criticism," published in 1743. 
Pope died on the 30th day of May, 1744. 

Colley Cibber had given up acting, but occasionally 
played fops and feeble old men for ^50 a night. In 1745 he 
played, at the age of seventy-five, Pandulph, in his own version 
of Shakespeare's " King John," as " Papal Tyranny." He died 
in 1757. 

24. William Warburton, born in 1698, son of the town 
clerk at Newark-upon-Trent, was educated at the grammar 
school there, and then articled to an attorney, with whom he 
served five years. In 1723 he took deacon's orders, and pub- 
lished Miscellaneoiis Translations, in Prose and Verse, from 
Roman Authors, with a Latin dedication to Sir Robert Sutton, 
who gave him a small Nottinghamshire vicarage in 1726. He 
then came to London with a few introductions, one to Theobald, 
whom he helped a little in his Shakespeare. In 1727 he dedi- 
cated to Sir Robert Sutton, whose wife was the Countess of 
Sunderland, A Critical and Philosophical Inquiry into the 
Causes of Prodigies and Miracles, as related by Historians, with 
an Essay towards Restoring a Method and Purity in History. 
Sir Robert caused Warburton to be put on George II.'s list 
of Masters of Arts, created when he visited Cambridge in 1728; 
and procured for him the better living of Barnet Broughton, 
in Lincolnshire, where Warburton lived some years with his 
mother and sisters. In 1736 he produced a book on the 



822 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1726 

Alliance between Church and State, which went through four 
editions in his lifetime; and in 1738, The Divine Legation of 
Moses, proved from absence of reference to a future state. This 
led to controversy, and was followed by a Vindication. In the 
same year, 1738, Warburton was made Chaplain to the Prince 
of Wales. When M. de Crousaz, Professor of Philosophy 
and Mathematics in the University of Lausanne, attacked the 
" Essay on Man," Warburton defended Pope in six letters, 
published together in 1739, followed by a seventh in 1740. 
This established the friendship between Pope and Warburton. 
In 1741 Pope introduced his friend to Ralph Allen, at Prior 
Park, near Bath. Warburton afterwards added a commentary 
to Pope's " Essay on Man " and " Essay on Criticism," and was 
left, in 1744, Pope's literary executor. In the following year he 
married Ralph Allen's niece and heiress, Miss Gertrude Tucker, 
and thenceforth lived chiefly at Prior Park, which became his 
own when Allen died, in 1764. In 1747 Warburton followed 
Theobald in the series of Editions of Shakespeare. Pope's 
edition, in 1725, and Theobald's, in 1733, had been followed, in 
1744, by the edition of Sir Thomas Hanmer, thirty years 
Member, and at last Speaker of the House of Commons. Now 
came that of Warburton, in 1747, with much rash and dog- 
matic change, but not a few happy suggestions. These were 
the editions preceding that of Samuel Johnson, in 1765, all 
from Pope's downward resting their claim to credit on con- 
jectural dealing with the text, but all helping to fix attention on 
the greatest of all poets. Warburton became King's Chaplain 
in 1754; got, in 1755, tne Lambeth degree of D.D. from Arch- 
bishop Herring; in 1757 became Dean of Bristol, and in 1759 
Bishop of Gloucester. He died in 1779, aged eighty-one. Two 
years afterwards his wife married again, and gave Prior Park to 
her late husband's chaplain. 

25. James Thomson, who had published his "Winter" 
in 1726, and " Summer" in 1727 (§ 15), added Spring in 1728. 
He failed on the stage in 1729, with his first tragedy, Sophonisba, 
though it went through four editions in 1730, when his Seasons 
first appeared in a complete edition, with. Autumn and the closing 
Hymn of praise from all the works of Nature : — 

" These as they change, Almighty Father, these 
Are but the varied God. The rolling year 
Is full of Thee." 

In 1730 and 1731 Thomson travelled in France and Italy 



to a.d.j 748.] JAMES THOMSON. WILLIAM SHENSTONE. 823 

with a young gentleman, Charles Richard Talbot, who soon 
afterwards died, and to whose memory he inscribed his poem on 
Liberty. Part I. of " Liberty " the poet published in December, 
1734, when his pupil's father had become Lord Chancellor, and 
gave Thomson the office of Secretary of Briefs in the Court of 
Chancery. Parts II. and III. appeared in 1735, Parts IV. and 
V. in 1736. The poem deserved, perhaps, more credit than it 
received, but " Liberty" was no fresh topic, while a real sense of 
the charm of natural objects, almost gone out of our literature, 
had been revived in The Seasons. Lord Chancellor Talbot's 
death, in 1737, caused Thomson to write a poem honouring his 
memory. He now lost his office as Secretary of Briefs. In 
1738 another play of Thomson's, Agamemnon, was acted 
without success. In 1739 tne acting of his play of Edward 
and Eleonora was prohibited, because it took part, in marked 
political allusions, with the Prince of Wales against the king. 
His love of liberty caused Thomson to write a preface, in 1740, 
to a new edition of Milton's " Areopagitica ; " he wrote also in 
that year, with Mallet, the masque of Alfred, which contains 
the now national song of Rule Britatmia. In 1744 Thomson 
received the sinecure office of Surveyor-General of the Leeward 
Islands, worth ^300 a year. In 1745 his most successful play, 
Tattered and Sigismunda, was acted at Drury Lane. In 1747 
he visited Shenstone at the Leasowes, and afterwards worked 
at a poem begun years before, The Castle of Indolence, in 
Spenser's manner. Shenstone had then written his " School- 
mistress," in Spenserian stanza. Gilbert West, who was 
made LL.D. of Oxford in 1748, and who died in 1756, pub- 
lished in 1749 a translation of The Odes of Pindar, and wrote 
Imitations of Spenser. John Armstrong (b. 1709, d. 1779), 
a physician, published in 1744 a poem on The Art of Preserving- 
Health, and contributed to Thomson's " Castle of Indolence " 
four stanzas at the close of Canto 1, describing the diseases 
indolence has caused. 

26. William Shenstone (b. 1714, d. 1763) was the eldest 
son of a gentleman farmer, who owned an estate worth about 
^300 a year, called the Leasowes, near Hales Owen, in a bit 
of Shropshire set in Worcestershire. He was educated as a 
commoner at Pembroke College, Oxford ; and after his father's 
death ceased to farm the small property as before, but wasted 
its resources in the work of turning it into ornamental ground. 
He suffered house and land to go to ruin, that he might make 



824 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1727 

beautiful gardens, with grottos, temples, and inscriptions, ac- 
cording to the invalid taste of his day. Shenstone left 
Leasowes to be sold after his death for payment of the debts 
incurred in beautifying it. His love of natural beauty was 
blended, far more than in Thomson, with the conventional life 
of his time ; but he wrote pleasant verse, often with tender 
simplicity, and, in his Essays on Men, Manners, and Things, 
pithy prose. Perhaps the origin of his inactive life is told by his 
Pastoral Ballad in Four Parts, written in 1743. The four parts 
are four love-poems, entitled " Absence," " Hope," " Solicitude," 
" Despair." Of the tickle fair one, in the strain of " Hope," he 
wrote : 

" One would think she might like to retire 
To the bow'r I have labour'd to rear ; 
Not a shrub that I heard her admire, 
But I hasted and planted it there." 

And in the strain of "Disappointment :" 

" Yet time may diminish the pain ; 

The rlow'r, and the shrub, and the tree, 
Which I reared for her pleasure in vain, 
In time may have comfort for me. 
* * * * 

" O ye -woods, spread your branches apace ; 
To your deepest recesses I fly ! 
I would hide with the beasts of the chase, 
I would vanish from every eye." 

Perhaps this was not an empty sentiment. But in a healthy 
man there is no plea that can make inactivity respectable. 
Shenstone's Schoolmistress was first published in its complete 
form in 1742, developed from some early verse of his. It 
sketches a village schoolmistress in thirty or forty Spenserian 
stanzas, with kindly humour and poetic feeling, and is only bad 
as an imitation of Spenser. In that respect it is feeble, with 
mock antique phrases, and eighteenth century affectations of 
rusticity. 

27. But Shakespeare was coming to his own ; the popularity of 
" The Schoolmistress " indicated a returning relish for Spenser ; 
and when, in 1748, Thomson's Castle of Indolence appeared, 
begun fifteen years before as satire on the poet's own indolence, 
and since developed with much care, there was evidence of a 
rich fancy at work, playfully imitating an old master poet, with 
a true sense of his worth. The Castle of Indolence was the last 
work published by Thomson. It appeared in May, and the 
poet died on the 27th of August, 1748. 



TOA.D. i 7 57.] THOMSON. DYER. SAMUEL RICHARDSON. 825 

28. John Dyer (§ 16) became Rector of Belchford, and after- 
wards of Kerkby, in Lincolnshire ; then Sir John Heathcote gave 
him the rectory of Coningsby in the same county; and there, in 
1757, he died of consumption. His Ruins of Rome, published 
in 1740, was a poem suggested by his wanderings and sketches 
in Rome as an artist. The Fleece, in four books, published in 
the year of his death, was the longest of Dyer's three poems. 
Beginning with a sketch of sheep upon the English downs, he 
described, in his four books, (1) the shepherd's craft, and the 
sheepshearing ; (2) passed to the wool, its qualities and treat- 
ment, and the trade created by it for the well-being of men ; 
(3) spinning and weaving, roads and rivers by which mer- 
chandise is conveyed about our own country ; (4) export and 
far trade with the world. Dyer's Fleece is an elevation of the 
Georgic to the praise of commerce, and shows how the con- 
templative mind of a good natural poet can find a soul of things 
in the wool-pack. " Trade," Dyer sang, 

" Trade to the good physician gives his balms ; 
Gives cheering cordials to the afflicted heart ; 
Gives to the wealthy delicacies high ; 
Gives to the curious works of nature rare. 
And when the priest displays, in just discourse, 
Him, the all-wise Creator, and declares 
His presence, pow'r, and goodness unconfin'd, 
'Tis trade, attentive voyager, who fills 
His lips with argument. To censure Trade, 
Or hold her busy people in contempt, 
Let none presume." 

29. Samuel Richardson was born in 1689, in Derbyshire, 
one of the nine children of a joiner who had been in business 
in London, and who could afford him only a common school 
education. As a boy he liked letter-writing, and wrote their 
love-letters for three damsels of his village.' In 1706 he was 
apprenticed to a printer in London, served seven years, and 
corresponded with a gentleman of fortune who " was a master of 
the epistolary style." When out of his time, he worked five or 
six years as compositor and corrector of the press, married his 
late master's daughter, and set up for himself in a court in Fleet 
Street. Richardson's first wife died in 1731, and he married 
afterwards the sister of a bookseller at Bath. By his first wife 
he had five boys and a girl, and by his second, five girls and a 
boy. He lost all his sons and two of his daughters ; the 
remaining four daughters had much work in transcribing his 



826 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1740. 

letters. By ability and steady industry Richardson advanced in 
life, removed to Salisbury Court, and was employed by book- 
sellers not only to print but also to make indexes and write 
prefaces and dedications. Two booksellers, Mr. Rivington and 
Mr. Osborne, asked the good printer to write for them a volume of 
" Familiar Letters,'' in a common style, on such subjects as might 
be of use to those country readers who were unable to indite 
for themselves. Then writes Richardson, " ' Will it be any harm/ 
said I, ' in a piece you want to be written so low, if we should 
instruct them how they should think and act in common cases, 
as well as indite ?' They were the more urgent with me to begin 
the little volume for this hint. I set about it, and in the progress 
of it writing two or three letters to instruct handsome girls who 
were obliged to go out to service, as we phrase it, how to avoid 
the snares that might be laid against their virtue," a story 
occurred to him that he had heard from a friend many years 
before. He thought that this, if told by letters, " in an easy and 
natural manner, suitably to the simplicity of it, might possibly 
introduce a new species of writing that might possibly turn 
young people into a course of reading different from the pomp 
and parade of romance-writing; and dismissing the improbable 
and marvellous, with which novels generally abound, might tend 
to promote the cause of religion and virtue." The book, as first 
complete in two volumes, was written in two months, from 
November 10th, 1739, t0 January 10th, 1740, published at once, 
received with great applause, and immediately translated into 
French and Dutch. Richardson, as well as he could, brought 
simple nature into the novel, from which it had been altogether 
banished (ch. x. §1), and led strong reaction against the 
faith in princes and princesses as the only true heroes and 
heroines. I will take, he said to himself, a poor servant 
girl, make her the namesake of one of the choicest of romance 
princesses — the Pamela of Sidney's "Arcadia" — set my Pamela 
corresponding artlessly with her low-born father and mother, 
Goodman Andrews and his wife, and make you feel that human 
sympathies are broader than conventional distinctions. It was 
another step from the conventional towards that clear light of 
nature which for most writers was still lost in the cloud of French 
classicism. But as Allan Ramsay must needs give a titled father 
to his Gentle Shepherd, and as Thomson's young Lavinia could 
not make Palemon happy without turning out to be the daughter 
of his noble friend Acasto, 



A.D. i74o.] RICHARDSON'S PAMELA. HENRY FIELDING. 827 

" Whose open stores, 
Though vast, were little to his ample heart ; " 

so in Pamela the conventional homage to rank was still con- 
spicuous. Pamela, left by the death of her mistress subject to a 
young master who was a worthless libertine, resisted infamous 
practices upon her, in the hope that she might thus become his 
wife ; and the second title of Richardson's book, Paniela; or, 
Virtue Rewarded, means that in the end she did, with pious 
gratitude, marry the scoundrel. As for Goodman Andrews, when 
he heard the glad tidings, his " heart was full ; and he said, with 
his hands folded and lifted up, ' Pray, sir, let me go— let me go to 
my dear wife, and tell her all these blessed things while my breath 
holds ; for it is ready to burst with joy/ " The success of the 
book caused Richardson to write two more volumes, which were 
superfluous, the work having been completed as first published. 

Richardson's "Pamela" struck new life into literature, not 
only by its bold and direct challenge to the romance-writing 
hitherto in fashion, by what was new and right in its plan, but 
also by what was wrong in its plan ; for the flaw in its morality 
— obscured by the prevalence of the low social tone it repre- 
sented — was obvious to Henry Fielding, and in ridicule of this 
he began to write his " Joseph Andrews." He would pair the 
virtuous serving-maid with a virtuous serving-man. Before he 
had gone far he felt his strength, and produced not a mere 
caricature, but a true novel. Thus Fielding, our greatest 
novelist, received his impulse from Richardson. 

30. Henry Fielding was born on the 22nd of April, 1707, 
at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, Somersetshire, son of a 
Lieutenant-General Fielding, who was youngest son of the 
youngest son of a George Fielding, Earl of Desmond, who was 
second son of the first Earl of Denbigh. Young Henry Fielding 
was educated at Eton and at the University of Leyden, where 
he was to study civil law, and did study, until the supplies from 
home failed. His father lived with careless extravagance, had 
married again, and was adding a young family to the five or six 
children of his first wife. At twenty Henry Fielding had to 
leave Leyden and live by his wits, with a nominal allowance 
from his father of ^200 a year. At twenty-one (in 1728) he 
wrote his first comedy, Love i?i Several Masques ; then followed 
The 7 emple Beau and The Author's Farce, in January and 
March, 1730 ; in 1731, The Coffee-House Politician and Tom 
Thumb. This, published as Tragedy of Tragedies; or, the Life 



025 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1728 

and Death of Tom Thumb the Great, with the Annotations of 
Scriblerus Secundus, was a burlesque on the conventional fine 
writing of the stage, having an aim like that of Buckingham's 
"Rehearsal" (ch. x. § 17), and was richly illustrated with 
ironical notes, showing the passages burlesqued. Another 
burlesque on stilted tragedy, " Chrononhotonthologos," was 
produced in 1734, by Harry Carey, a musician, who, says 
Dibdin, " led a life free from reproach, and hanged himself 
October 4th, 1743." Among the dramatic pieces of Fielding 
were, in 1732, The Covent Garden Tragedy, a jest on Ambrose 
Philips's version of " Andromaque" as "The Distrest Mother," 
also versions from Moliere of " Le Medecin malgre' Lui ;; and 
" L'Avare ;" and, in 1734, Don Quixote in England. During his 
first nine years in London, Fielding was among the players at 
Bartholomew Fair, and kept a booth in the George Inn Yard, 
usually with John Hippesley. The fair was a great institution 
then, and the theatres closed that the players might appear in 
it. In 1735 Fielding married a Miss Craddock, one of three 
sisters who were beauties of Salisbury. The lady had ^1,500^ 
and he had from his mother a small country house at East 
Stour, in Dorsetshire. Fielding had married for love. He 
would live at East Stour and feel the peace of a country life. 
But country life, with open hospitality, horses, coach, and livery 
servants, soon made an end of ,£1,500. Fielding and his wife 
then came to lodgings in London with a single maidservant, and 
Fielding worked for bread. He formed, in 1736, a " Great 
Mogul's Company of Comedians," and produced with great 
success Pasquin : a Drarnatic Satire on the Times, its plan a 
mock rehearsal of two plays. In 1737 he continued his free 
dramatic criticism upon life and politics with a piece called The 
Historical Register for 1736, Sir Robert Walpole figuring in the 
piece as " Quidam." The result of this was the passing, fti June, 
1737, of the Act which forbade any play to be represented before 
it had obtained the licence of the Lord Chamberlain. The 
Licensing Act broke up the Great Mogul's Company, and in 
November Fielding entered himself as a student of the Middle 
Temple. To a paper of periodical essays, called the Chainpion, 
Fielding became an active contributor from November, 1739, to 
June, 1740, creating representatives of the chief subjects of 
discussion in a Vinegar Family. In June, 1740, he was called to 
the bar, and began practice on the Western Circuit. In June 
1 74 1, his father died, but there was nothing to inherit. In 



toa.d. I744-] HENRY FIELDING. 829 

February, 1742, Fielding published the novel suggested by 
Richardson's " Pamela," The Adventures oj 'Joseph Andrews and 
of his friend Mr. Abraham Adams. In Mr. Abraham Adams, 
Fielding drew, with exquisite humour and a healthy sense of 
what is pure and true, a scholar and a Christian, who had 
external oddities, as absence of mind, which might bring him 
into ridiculous situations, but whom nothing could lower in our 
respect, simply by reason of his essential purity and truth. 
Parson Adams was a clergyman dignified with the best graces 
of his office, and in Parson Trulliber his opposite was shown. 
Through Parson Adams, Fielding, in his first novel, spoke out of 
the depths of his own heart not seldom, and it is pleasant to 
find him in a first novel, that, under genial disguise of Abraham 
Adams, expresses so much of his own sense of religion, noticing 
the character of Richard Steele's work, when he makes Parson 
Adams, in talking of the theatre, say, " I never heard of any 
plays fit for a Christian to read but ' Cato ' and ' The Conscious 
Lovers ;' and, I must own, in the latter there are some things 
almost solemn enough for a sermon." Fielding, who was not 
all himself as an eighteenth century dramatist, quitted the stage 
in 1743, after the not unmerited failure of his last comedy, The 
Wedding Day. In the same year he published three volumes 
of Miscellanies. These contain some verse, a few essays — on 
" Conversation," on " Knowledge of the Characters of Men," on 
" Nothing," — and two works of mark, A Journey from this 
World to the Next, and the History of the Life of the Late Mr. 
Jonathan Wild the Gi-eat, a thieftaker who came to be hanged. 
Fielding's " Jonathan Wild " was written with masterly irony, as 
"an exposition of the motives which actuate the unprincipled 
great in every walk and sphere of life, and which are common 
alike to the thief or murderer on the small scale, and to the 
mighty villain and reckless conqueror who invades the rights or 
destroys the liberties of nations." At this time Fielding lost the 
wife to whom he was devotedly attached. He had lost a child 
but a few months before, and was himself suffering much from 
gout. He wrote a preface for his sister, Sarah Fielding, to her 
clever novel, The Adve?itu?'es of David Simple j Co?itaining an 
Account of his Travels through the Cities of London and West- 
minster, in the Search of a Real Friend, published in 1744. She 
published another, The History of Ophelia, in 1760. Henry 
Fielding and his sister Sarah were much together after his 
wife's death. 



830 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1745 

On the 5th November, 1745, Fielding began a paper, the True 
Patriot, to oppose the Jacobitism stirred into activity by the 
Rebellion of that year. After the final ruin of the Stuart cause 
at the battle of Culloden, in April, 1746, among eight victims 
who suffered the capital penalties of high treason was a young 
Jacobite officer, James Dawson, the day of whose expected 
pardon was to have been his wedding day. The young lady 
who loved him could not be dissuaded from witnessing his 
execution ; and, says a letter of the time, " she got near enough 
to see the fire kindled which was to consume that heart which 
she knew was so much devoted to her, and all the other dreadful 
preparations for his fate, without being guilty of any of those 
extravagances herjriends had apprehended. But when all was 
over, and that she found he was no more, she drew her head 
back into the coach, and crying out, * My dear, I follow thee — I 
follow thee ! Sweet Jesus, receive both our souls together V fell 
on the neck of her companion, and expired the very moment she 
was speaking." The incident, as thus described, was made by 
Shenstone (§ 26) the subject of a little ballad, Jemmy Dawson, 
which endeavoured to reproduce its simple pathos. Fielding 
about this time defied conventional opinion by taking for second 
wife the Mary Mac Daniel who had been his first wife's one 
faithful servant, and had been the nurse of his children ; with 
whom, therefore, he could still live in memories of her, and 
whom his children from their birth had learned to love. In this, 
if he was unwise, at least he acted upon principles above the 
sense of many who laughed at him. 

The work of Fielding's True Patriot changed only its form 
when, in December, 1747, he started the " Jacobite Journal; by 
John Trott-plaid, Esq.," to throw cold water of jest and satire 
upon the yet smouldering embers of rebellion. This paper 
appeared every Saturday until November, 1748, and about that 
time, by the good offices of his friend, George Lyttelton, then 
Lord of the Treasury, Fielding was made a justice of the peace 
for Middlesex and Westminster. In those days such an office 
had been brought into contempt by men like Justice Thrasher, 
in his " Amelia," who had drawn dishonourable profit out of it. 
Henry Fielding, by taking the highest view of his duty, " re- 
duced," as he says, " an income of about ,£500 a year of the 
dirtiest money upon earth to little more than ^300, a consider- 
able portion of which remained with my clerk ; and, indeed v 
— (observe the kindliness of what follows) — " if the whole had 



Toa.d. 1748.] RICHARDSON'S CLARISSA HARLOWE. 83I 

done so, as it ought, he would be but ill-paid for sitting sixteen 
in the twenty-four in the most unwholesome as well as nauseous 
air in the universe, and which hath in his case corrupted a good 
constitution without contaminating his morals." 

31. In 1748 Samuel Richardson took his place in litera- 
ture by publishing, when his age was fifty-nine, the second of 
his three novels, Clarissa Harlowe, in eight volumes, with an 
interval of several months before the publication of the second 
half. Here, as always, Richardson told his story in the form of 
correspondence. Clarissa Harlowe, a young lady of birth and 
fortune, pressed by her family to marry against her inclination, 
left home, and threw herself on the generosity of her lover, Sir 
Robert Lovelace, an attractive libertine. He persecuted her, 
and treacherously wronged her to the uttermost ; she refused 
then his offer of marriage, and died broken-hearted. Lovelace 
left England, not reformed, and was killed in a duel by one of 
Clarissa's relations, Colonel Morden. Clarissa's correspondent 
was Miss Anne Howe, a widow's lively daughter, with a formal 
but estimable suitor, Mr. Hickman. Lovelace had for his 
correspondent a friend, Mr. John Belford ; this party of four 
answering the place of hero and he-friend, heroine and she- 
friend in the mock classical French tragedies. The moral of 
the piece was that the most unhappy home is shelter for a 
young girl safer than she may succeed in finding by quitting it 
to trust herself among the snares of life. The book is full of 
improbability ; it contains, like " Pamela," scenes unfit to be read 
by the young, and no page of it is like the work of a man of 
genius in texture of thought or vigour of expression. Yet the 
whole effect produced is equal to that of a work of high 
genius. If Richardson's mind was not large, his story filled it. 
His nature, even with all its little pomps and vanities, was 
absorbed in his work ; the ladies about him, who, as the least 
critical of his admirers, were his chosen friends, fed him with 
sweet solicitudes and enthusiasms about the persons of his 
story ; his fictitious characters and situations lived and were real 
for him ; and he became the great example, in our literature, of 
the might that comes of giving all one's powers — even if they be 
not great powers — to whatever one has to do. By thoroughly 
believing in his work, and giving all his mind to it, Samuel 
Richardson, as novelist, secured the full attention of his readers, 
and sometimes even by importunity of tediousness, by the drop 
after drop that in time hollows the stone, compelled his readers 



§3 2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1748 

to see as he saw, feel as he felt, and not seldom to weep where 
he wept — and he wept much himself — over the sorrows of 
Clarissa. 

32. The first novel of Tobias Smollett appeared in the same 
year as Richardson's " Clarissa," and the year before " Tom 
Jones." Smollett, born in 1 721, in the parish of Cardross, was 
left dependent on his grandfather, Sir James Smollett, of Bon- 
hill, sent to school at Dumbarton, where he wrote satirical 
verse, and a poem on Wallace, went from Dumbarton to 
Glasgow, where he studied medicine and was apprenticed to 
a surgeon, the Potion of his first novel. He came to London 
with a tragedy, " The Regicide," written before he was eighteen 
It was rejected by managers, but ten years afterwards published 
with a preface. In 1741, when Pamela was a new book, 
Smollett, aged twenty, was surgeon's mate on board a ship of 
the line, and sailed in the expedition to Carthagena. This 
experience of life was also used as material for his first novel. 
He quitted the service when in the West Indies, lived some 
time in Jamaica, and met the lady whom he afterwards married. 
He was back in London in 1746, and then published anony- 
mously The Tears of Scotland, expressing from his heart, though 
no Jacobite, his just indignation at the cruelties that disgraced 
the suppression of the Rebellion of 1745 ; also Advice, a satire 
which gave offence. He wrote " Alceste," an opera, for Covent 
Garden, quarrelled with the manager, published in 1747 Reproof 
a sequel to " Advice," married, and produced in 1748, when his age 
was twenty-seven, his first novel, Roderick Random. Richardson, 
who in the same year published " Clarissa," was eighteen years 
older than Fielding, and thirty-two years older than Smollett. 
" Roderick Random," written in the form of autobiography, was a 
bright story, rich in mirth and a quick sense of outside character, 
that painted life as Smollett had seen it, blending his own ex- 
periences with his fiction. It became immediately popular, and 
helped much in establishing the new form of fiction in which 
writers dealt immediately with the life of their own time, and 
the experience in it of common men and women. 

33. Henry Fielding didnot laugh at Richardson's " Clarissa," 
but he also had been long at work on a great novel, and when 
his age was forty-two, in 1749, the year after " Clarissa " and 
" Roderick Random," published his Tom Jones. No critic has 
over-praised the skilful construction of the story of " Tom 
Jones ;" but the durability of the work depends on something 



to a.d. 1749.] TOBIAS SMOLLETT. FIELDINGS TOM JONES. 833 

even of more moment than its construction — upon the im- 
perishable character of its material, and on the security with 
which its foundations are laid, deep in the true hearts of English- 
men. Fielding ; s first novel was provoked by an affectation, 
and it was prefaced with a distinct explanation of his own 
"idea of romance." In the first pages of his first novel he 
taught that "the only source of the true ridiculous is affectation." 
His jest was against insincerity in all its lighter forms ; his 
power was against untruth. In all his novels, and in Tom 
Jones most conspicuously, a generous and penetrating mind, 
familiar with the ways of men, dealt mercifully with all honest 
infirmities, sympathised with human goodness, and reserved its 
laughter, or its scorn, only for what was insincere. In Tom 
Jones a work was planned upon the ample scale to which 
readers had become accustomed. There was room for a wide 
view of life. The scene was divided fairly between country and 
town. The story was built out of the eternal truths of human 
nature, and was exquisitely polished on its surface with a delicate 
and genial humour that suggested rather than preached censure 
on the follies of society in England, not unmixed with the 
directest Christian condemnation against crime. The very soul 
of the book enters into the construction of Tom Jones. The 
picture of a good man, coloured by Fielding with some of the 
warmth of living friendship for Ralph Allen of Bath (§ 23), is 
presented at once in Squire All worthy ; and there is a deep 
seriousness in the manner of presenting him, on a May morning, 
walking upon the terrace before his mansion, with a wide pros- 
pect around him, planning a generous action, when " in the full 
blaze of his majesty up rose the sun, than which one object alone 
in this lower creation could be more glorious, and that Mr. 
Airworthy himself presented — a human being replete with be- 
nevolence, meditating in what manner he might render himself 
most acceptable to his Creator, by doing most good to His 
creatures." The two boys bred by Allworthy, Tom Jones and 
Blifil, about whom the whole story revolves, are as the two poles 
of Fielding's mimic world. One of them is everybody's friend 
but his own ; the other nobody's friend but his own. One is 
possessed of natural goodness, with all generous impulses, but 
with instincts, as we are once or twice distinctly reminded, 
wanting the control of prudence and religion. He lies open to 
frequent heavy blame, and yet more frequent misconstruction j 
yet we have faith in him because he is true, his faults are open, 

B B B 



834 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. i 74 $ 

his affections warm. We know that time and love will make a 
noble man of him. The other conceals treachery under a show 
of righteousness and justice. His fair outside of religion and 
morality, the readiness with which he gives an honest colouring 
to all appearances, are represented wholly without caricature. 
His ill deeds are secret, his affections cold, and he is base to us 
by reason of his falsehood. Appreciation is not only due to the 
sterling English in which this book is written, and the keen but 
generous insight into human character that animates every page, 
but also to its brave morality. Scenes of incontinence, which 
the corrupt manners of his age permitted Fielding to include 
among his pictures of the life about him, were not presented as 
jests by their author. Fielding differs in this, as in many things, 
essentially from Smollett, that in his novels he has never used 
an unclean image for its own sake as provocative of mirth in 
ruder minds. In Fielding's page evil is evil. In " Tom Jones," 
Allworthy delivers no mock exhortations ; whenever Jones has 
gone astray, the purity of Sophia follows next upon the scene, 
a higher happiness is lost, and his true love is removed farther 
from his reach. At last the youth is made to assent to 
Sophia, when she replies, very gravely, upon his pleading of the 
grossness of his sex, the delicacy of hers, and the absence of 
love in amour : " I will never marry a man who shall not learn 
refinement enough to be as incapable as I am myself of making 
such a distinction." 

The episodes of the book are as true limbs of it. It is not 
merely variety that they supply. It is completeness. It is true 
that the Man of the Hill's story is not a part of the direct 
mechanism of the plot ; but it is equally true that it is a vital 
part of the whole epic history. Only by episode could there 
have been interpolated between Jones's generous and Blifil's 
ungenerous principle of intercourse with other men, the picture 
of one who has wholly withdrawn himself from human inter- 
course, and dares to solve the question of life's duties by looking 
from afar with scorn upon his fellows. 

It is a minor excellence that this part of the work has been 
contrived also to supply to the large study of English life those 
chapters, excluded from the main action of the tale by the 
peculiar education and the characters of Jones and Blifil, which 
paint the follies of youth at the University and the life of the 
gambler. Partridge once breaks upon the narrative of the Man 
of the Hill with a characteristic story of his own, in which 



to a. d. 1754-3 HENRY FIELDING. 835 

Fielding commands wise reflection on the undefended state of 
criminals tried for their lives. 

In June, 1749, Henry Fielding, who had been elected by the 
Middlesex magistrates their Chairman of the Sessions, delivered a 
Charge to the Grand Jury touching seriously upon many faults in 
the condition of society ; and in January, 1751, he published An 
Inquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers, &r*c.; with 
some Proposals for Remedying the Growing Evil, in which he 
urged the checking of intemperance, and denounced the new 
vice of gin-drinking. This led to an Act of Parliament that 
placed restrictions on the sale of spirits. It was also in the year 
175 1 that Fielding, aged forty-four, published his Amelia. For 
"Tom Jones" the publisher had paid ^100 beyond the stipu- 
lated price of ^600. For Amelia he paid ,£1,000. Thus, by 
the middle of the eighteenth century, Richardson and Fielding, 
with Smollett for new ally, had destroyed the faith in royal 
Arcadians, had carried a large body of the people on from 
reading of short papers, to the reading of substantial works 
of fiction that dealt with the life they knew and cared for, 
and had made the novel of real life a great recognized power. 
French classicism was decaying, and there was no influence 
above that of the main body of the people influencing the 
form of our best literature. Fielding's Amelia, dedicated to his 
kind friend Ralph Allen, of Bath (§ 22), has for its theme 
the beauty of true womanhood. He constantly identified his 
first wife with Amelia, while condemning often his own failings 
in the character of her husband, Mr. Booth. Fielding dealt 
also in his novel with those evils of society against which he 
had been contending, and brought pathos and sharp satire in 
his jail scenes against what were in his day the iniquities of 
criminal law. 

On the 4th of January. 1752, Fielding began Rhe Covent 
Garden Journal; by Sir Alexander Draii)ca?isir, Knight, Censor 
of Great Britain, which lasted until the end of the year. His 
health was still failing, but he stayed in London to complete 
the breaking up of an organised gang of street ruffians ; took, 
morning and evening, half a pint of the tar-water recommended 
by Bishop Berkeley's " Siris" in 1744; and, when hope of life 
was gone, left England with his wife and eldest daughter for 
Lisbon. The account of his Voyage to Lisbon was Fielding's 
last work. He arrived in the middle of August, and died, aged 
forty-eight, on the 8th of the following October, 1754. 

B JB B 2 



836 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, (a.d. 1751 

34. Samuel Bichardson published his third and last novel, 
Sir Charles Gra?idiso7i, a year before the death of Fielding. 
He had accused his lady correspondents of liking Lovelace too 
well They replied that he had given them nobody else to like. 
Thereupon he resolved to give them his ideal of a good man in 
Sir Charles Grandison, well-born, rich, accomplished, travelled, 
and always right, in Richardson's view, though he has two 
heroines in love with him, and is in love with each — the one 
who did not marry him went mad — and though he fought 
duels. Richardson could not rise like Steele above convention 
(§ 5) ; but as he knew duelling to be wrong, and reasoned 
against it in his novel, he compromised by making Sir Charles 
so skilful a swordsman that he could disarm without murdering 
an antagonist. Richardson's three novels painted life respec- 
tively in the lower, middle, and higher classes of society. Sir 
Charles Grandison was published in 1753. Richardson, mean- 
while, throve in business. His printing-offices and warehouses 
at Salisbury Court covered the site of eight houses which he 
had pulled down. In 1755 he removed from his country house 
at North End, Hammersmith, to a house at Parson's Green. In 
1760 he bought half the patent of Law Printer to the King; and 
in July, 1761, the first year of the reign of George III., he died, 
at the age of seventy-two. 

35. Tobias Smollett graduated as physician in 1750, at 
Marischal College, Aberdeen, but was a doctor with few patients. 
In the summer of 1750 he visited Paris, and probably wrote there 
his Peregri?ie Pickle, published in 1751. Its brightness, and 
the hearty fun of many of its chapters, like that (ch. xliv.) which 
describes an entertainment in the manner of the ancients, made 
the book widely popular and Smollett famous. The pompous 
gentleman caricatured by Smollett, as the giver of this banquet 
was Mark AKenside (b. 172 1, d. 1770), son of a butcher at 
Newcastle-on-Tyne. He was sent to the Edinburgh Univer- 
sity, with aid of a fund for the purpose, to be educated as a 
Dissenting minister ; but he made medicine his study, was proud 
of his oratory in the debates of the Medical Society, and aspired 
to a seat in Parliament. After three years at Edinburgh 
Akenside went to Leyden, where he stayed another three years, 
took his degree as M.D., and found a friend in a student of 
law, Mr. Dyson, who came home with him. The Pleastires of 
Imagination, in its first form, appeared in 1744, when Akenside's 
age was twenty-three. Its subject was suggested by Addison's 



to a.o. 1771.} RICHARDSON. AKENSIDE. SMOLLETT. S37 

Essays on Imagination, in the Spectator. Akenside wrote 
odes also, and worked at the elaboration of his chief poem 
throughout his life, publishing the enlargement of his First Book 
in 1757, and of the Second in 1765 ; the enlargement of Book 
III., with an unfinished fragment of Book IV., appeared after 
his death. Akenside had less feeling for the sense of poetry 
than for its sound. His style was artificial. In life he affected 
a false dignity, and his pompous manner laid him open to 
Smollett's ridicule. He was ashamed of a lameness caused in 
childhood by the fall of a cleaver in his father's shop. He 
never married, and was greatly indebted to the liberality of 
Mr. Dyson for income while he was endeavouring to make a 
practice. 

36. Smollett's Peregrine Pickle was followed, in 1752, by 
a study of depravity in an adventurer chosen from the purlieus 
of treachery and fraud, the Adventures of Ferdinand Count 
Fathom. In 1755 he published a free Translation of Don 
Quixote, then visited his mother and friends in Scotland, and 
when he came back, accepted the invitation of booksellers to 
edit the Critical Review, set up in 1756, to oppose the Whig 
Monthly Review, that had been started in 1749. Smollett was 
genial, but irritable, and now submitted himself to vexation 
by the irritable race of the small authors. At this time Smollett 
began A Complete History of England, deduced from the Descent 
of Julius Cozsar to the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapellc, 1741, contain- 
ing the Transactions of One Thousand Eight Hundred and Three 
Years. He is said to have written it in fourteen months. It 
was published in four volumes in 1758, and reprinted next year 
in numbers, extending to eleven volumes, with a weekly sale of 
12,000. For a paragraph in the " Critical Review," Smollett 
was fined ^100 and imprisoned for three months, at the suit of 
Admiral Knowles, and worked in prison at The Adventures of 
Sir Lancelot Greaves, an imitation of Cervantes, published in 
"The British Magazine * in 1760 and J761. Smollett then 
worked at the Continuation of the History of England to 1765, 
published in 1769, in two volumes 4to. After the loss of his only 
child, Smollett had traveled for health, and in 1766 he published 
his Travels through Franc: and Italy. In 1769 appeared his 
Adventures of an Atom, deakng, under Japanese names, with 
English politics, from 1754 to 1768. In 1770 he went to Italy 
witn broken health, and while there published, only a few 
months before his death, his last, and perhaps his best novo, 



S35 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1727 

The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker. Smollett died, at the 
age of fifty, near Leghorn, in October, 1771- 

37. George Lytteltcm, born in 1709, at Hagley, Worcester- 
shire, friend to Fielding and to some of the best poets of his 
time, was educated at Eton and Oxford, and became secretary 
to Frederick Prince of Wales, when he was in opposition 
to George II. He became a Lord of the Treasury after Sir 
Robert Walpole's resignation, and was Chancellor of the 
Exchequer in 1757, when he resigned and took a peerage. He 
printed verses, also Letters f?-om a Persia?! in Engla?id to his 
Friend at Ispahan, in 1735 ; Dialogues of the Dead; and in 
1 767, The History of the Life of King Henry the Second and 
of the Age in which he Lived, a book upon which he had been at 
work for thirty years. He died in 1773. 

38. George Lillo (b. 1693, d. 1739), a London jeweller, had a 
turn for writing plays. He was a Dissenter, who, said Fielding, 
had the spirit of an old Roman joined to the innocence of a 
primitive Christian. There was more of moral purpose than 
of genius in his tragedies. One of them, " George Barnwell," 
produced in 1731, for a long time kept the stage. Another 
citizen, Edward Moore, bred as a linendraper, had an 
earnest purpose in his three plays, of which one, The Foundling, 
produced in 1748, was condemned for its resemblance to 
Steele's " Conscious Lovers;" and the tragedy of, The Gamester 
had imperfect success, because of the righteous severity with 
which it attacked a fashionable vice of the day. David 
Mallet (§ 15), besides writing the tragedies of Eurydice, in 
1 73 1, and Mustapha, in 1739, an< ^ working with Thomson, in 
1740, at the masque of Alfred, published also, in 1740, the 
Life of Lord Bacon, in which, as Warburton says, he forgot 
that Bacon was a philosopher. Among Mallet's poems is the 
ballad of William and Marga?'et, a sentimental double to the 
old ballad of (t Sweet William's Ghost," which had been given 
by Allan Ramsay in his " Tea-table Miscellany." In the original 
ballad the tormented ghost of an unworthy Sweet William 
visits Marjorie, and shows her at his grave that which makes 
her give back to him the plight of troth he suffers for having 
broken. 

" And she took up her white, white hands, 
And struck him on the breast, 
Saying, ' Have here again thy faith and troth. 
And I wish your soul good rest."' 

In Mallet's ballad. Margaret, killed by William's faithlessness, 



TOA.D. 1748.] DRAMATISTS AND POETS. JOSEPH SPENCE. 839 

comes to the living William and draws him to her grave, where 
"thrice he called on Margaret's name, and thrice he wept full 
sore ; then laid his cheek to her cold grave, and word spoke 
never more." Mallet said that the ballad was suggested to him 
by lines in Fletcher's " Knight of the Burning Pestle:" 

When it was grown to dark midnight. 
And all were fast asleep, 
n came Margaret's grimly ghost 
And stood at William's feet." 

The reviving taste for simple writing is indicated by this piece, 
as by Shenstone's " Jemmy Dawson " (§ 30). Vincent Bourne 
(b. about 1697, d. 1747), a sub-master of Westminster School, 
who was the best Latin poet of his time, turned " William and 
Margaret" into Latin, as Thyrsis et Chloe. Vincent Bourne's 
Latin poems were collected in 1772. William Whitehead 
(b. 17 1 5, d. 1788), son of a baker at Cambridge, was educated 
at Winchester School and Cambridge, became tutor to the son 
of Lord Jersey, wrote poems and plays, prospered by the good- 
will of the Jersey family, and, in 1757, succeeded Cibberas Poet 
Laureate. Paul Whitehead (b. 1710, d. 1774), was of another 
family, born in London, and apprenticed to a mercer before he 
entered the Temple. He lived by his writings till he obtained 
a place worth ^800 a year. Among his verse was the Gymnasiad, 
a mock heroic against the taste for boxing. Richard Glover 
(b. 1 712, d. 1785), son and partner of a London merchant trading 
with Hamburg, published, at the age of twenty-five, in 1737, a 
serious epic poem on Leonidas. It appealed to patriotic feeling, 
and was very popular. In 1739 he produced another poem, 
London; or, the Progress of Commerce j and the ballad of Hosier's 
Ghost, to rouse national feeling against Spain. Pie was a leading 
patriotic citizen; produced, in 1735, a tragedy, Boadicea, and 
afterwards Medea. He entered Parliament at the beginning 
of the reign of George III. Christopher Pitt, educated at 
Winchester School and New College, Oxford, was Rector of 
Pimpern, in Dorsetshire. He wrote some original verse, pub- 
lished in 1725 a Trcmslation of Vidds Art of Poetry ', and in 
1740 a Translation of the sEneid. He died in 1748. 

39. Joseph S pence, born in Northamptonshire, in 1698, 
and educated at Winchester School and New College, Oxford, 
published in 1727 an Essay on Pope's Odyssey. In 1728 he 
became Professor of Poetry at Oxford; and, in 1742, Professor 
of Modern History, and Rector of Great Horwood, in Bucking- 



840 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. r A t>. 1730 

hamshire. In August, 1768, he was found accidentally drowned 
in his garden. Spence's chief original work was Polymetis 
(1747), an inquiry into the relations between Roman poets and 
remains of ancient art. But, as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, 
he expressed a rising sentiment of the time by introducing to 
the public, in 1730, Stephen Duck as "a poet from the barn, 
though not so great a man, as great a curiosity as a dictator from 
the plough." Stephen Duck, who began life as a thresher, had a 
turn for verse, which was developed in his early manhood by 
the reading of Milton, who inspired him with a deep enthusiasm. 
His chief pieces were drawn from his work and his religion, 
" The Thresher's Labour," and '* The Shunamite." Spence's 
good offices obtained for Stephen Duck a pension of ^30 from 
Queen Caroline, and afterwards, when he had prepared himself 
for holy orders, the living of Byfleet, in Surrey. Like his friend 
Spence, Stephen Duck died by drowning. He fell into religious 
melancholy, and committed suicide from a bridge near Reading, 
in 1756. 

40. Joseph Warton, born in 1722, son of an Oxford pro- 
fessor of poetry, was educated at Winchester School and Oriel 
College, Oxford. He wrote verse ; went to France, in 1751, as 
companion to the Duke of Bolton, and obtained from him the 
Rectory of Wynslade, to which that of Tunworth afterwards was 
added. In 1755 he became second master of Winchester 
School, and was head master from 1766 to 1793. He published, 
in 1756, an Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, to which 
a second volume was added in 1782. In his latter days he had 
more Church preferment, and he died in 1800. His brother, 
Thomas Warton, six years younger, educated at Winchester 
School and Trinity College, Oxford, also wrote poems, and, in 
1753, aided the reviving taste for our best literature by critical 
Observations on the Faerie Queene. In 1756 he was elected 
Professor of Poetry at Oxford for ten years; and, in 1774, pro- 
duced the first volume of his History of English Poetry, fol- 
lowed by a second volume, in 1778, which brought the account 
down to the time of Elizabeth. Thomas Warton succeeded 
William Whitehead as Poet Laureate, in 1785 ; published 
in that year Milton's Minor Poems,, with notes ; and died in 1790. 
Richard Hurd, born in 1720, who became Bishop of Lich- 
field and Coventry in 1775, and died in 1808, was a friend 
of Warburton ; and, among other works, wrote, between 1758 
and 1764, his Dialogues Moral and Political, and Letters on 



ro. a.d. 177S ] THE WARTONS. HURD. YOUNG. COLLINS. Si I 

Chivalry and Romance. Edward Young, also, was a Win- 
chester boy, son of a chaplain to William III., and born at 
Upham, near Winchester. He passed from Winchester School 
to New College, obtained a fellowship at All Souls, and pub- 
lished his first verse in Queen Anne's reign, in 1712, an Epistle 
to Lord Lansdowne on the Creation of Peers, and a poem on 
the Last Day in 17 13. He produced, in the reign of George I., 
his tragedies of Busiris, King of Egypt, and The Revenge, both 
acted at Drury Lane, in 1719. In. 1725-6 appeared his Uni- 
versal Passion, in seven satires, on the Love of Fame. He 
took orders in 1727, became Chaplain to George II., and was 
presented by his college to the living of Welwyn, Herts. In 
1730 he published two epistles to Mr. Pope, concerning the 
authors of the age, satires in aid of Pope against the Dunces. 
Dr. Young — he had graduated as LL.D. — married, in 1731, the 
daughter of the Earl of Lichfield, and widow of Colonel Lee. 
She died in 1741. While in grief for this, he began to write 
his " Night Thoughts." The Complaint ; or, Night Thoughts 
on Life, Death, and Immortality, in eight parts, first appeared 
in 1742-3. In 1745 followed The Consolation; and in 1755 
Young published a prose-book, The Centaur not Fabulous; in 
Six Letters to a Friend on the Life in Vogue, — the Centaur 
being the profligate seeker of pleasure, in whom the brute runs 
away with the man. Young died in 1765. The subject of 
Young's " Night Thoughts " is the Immortality of the Soul, but, 
with aim to produce good lines that very often hit the mark, the 
treatment of the theme has a gloom not proper to it, although 
characteristic of much of the literature of his time. Robert 
Blair (b. 1700, d. 1746), the minister of Athelstaneford, in 
Haddingtonshire, published his poem of The Grave in 1743, 
at the same time as Young's " Night Thoughts." 

41. William Collins (b. 1720, d. 1759), the son of a hatter 
at Chichester, was another Winchester boy. He passed from 
Winchester to Oxford in 1740 ; published, in 1742, his Persian 
Eclogues, written at Winchester ; and, having taken his degree 
of B.A., came to London with genius and ambition, but an 
irresolute mind, not wholly sound. He suffered much from 
poverty. In 1747 he published his Odes polished with nice 
care, and classical in the best sense, rising above the affectations 
of the time, and expressing subtleties of thought and feeling 
with simple precision. The " Ode to Evening " is unrhymed, in 
a measure like that of Horace's " Ode to Pyrrha." The Ode on 



842 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1747 

the Passions, for music, rose in energy of thought and skill of 
expression to the level even of Dryden's "Alexander's Feast." 
But the volume was not well received. When Thomson died, 
in 1748, William Collins wrote an ode upon his grave at Richmond. 
In 1749 Collins was released from want by the death of his 
mother's brother, Colonel Martin, who had often helped him, 
and now left him about ^2,000. But in another year, his reason 
began to fail. He had been in a lunatic asylum at Chelsea 
before he was removed to Chichester in 1754. There his sister 
took charge of him, and he died, at the age of thirty-nine, in 
June, 1759. When the great cloud was coming over him, he 
carried but one book about with him — a child's school Bible. 
u I have but one book," he said, "but that is the best;" and 
when he suffered most, in his latter days at Chichester, a neigh- 
bouring vicar said, " Walking in my vicaral garden one Sunday 
evening, during Collins's last illness, I heard a female (the ser- 
vant, I suppose) reading the Bible in his chamber. Mr. Collins 
had been accustomed to rave much, and make great moanings ; 
but while she was reading, or rather attempting to read, he was 
not only silent, but attentive likewise, correcting her mistakes, 
which, indeed, were very frequent, through the whole twenty- 
seventh chapter of Genesis." 

42. David Hartley (b. 1705, d. 1757) was a physician 
educated at Cambridge, who. in 1749, published Observations on 
Mati j his Frame, his Duty, atid his Expectations, arguing that 
vibrations of the nerves produce all intellectual energy, by 
causing the association of ideas. 

43. Thomas Gray, born in 17 16, was son ot a money- 
scrivener on Cornhill, and the only one of his twelve children 
who survived their infancy. His father was morose and 
indolent, neglected business, and spent money in building a 
country house at Wanstead, without telling his wife what he 
was about. Mrs. Gray, on her part, had joined Miss Antrobus 
— one of her sisters — in business, and made money by a kind of 
India warehouse, on Cornhill. Gray was sent to school at Eton, 
because his mother had a brother among the assistant masters 
there. At Eton he formed a friendship with Horace Walpole 
(b. 1717, d. 1797), youngest son of Sir Robert. His uncle at 
Eton being a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, Gray entered 
there as a pensioner, in 1734. In 1738 he left without a degree, 
and in the spring of 1739 set out f° r travel in France and Italy, as 
the companion of Horace Walpole. In Italy the friends dis- 



toa.d. i77i.] WILLIAM COLLINS. THOMAS GRAY. 843 

agreed. Gray left Walpole at Reggio, went on before him to 
Venice, and returned to England about two months before his 
father's death, in 1741. Gray and Walpole were not reconciled 
till 1744. After the death of his father, Gray's mother and her 
maiden sister (and late partner in business), Miss Antrobus, 
went to live at the house of their other sister, Mrs. Rogers, who 
was also a widow, at Stoke Pogis, near Windsor. Thenceforth, 
Gray's home was with his mother and two aunts, at Stoke Pogis. 
Being urged by them to make law his profession, Gray went 
to reside at Cambridge again, and took the degree of B.C.L. 
At Stoke, in 1742, he wrote his "Ode to Spring" — much of 
his verse was written in the spring and summer of this year — 
and in the autumn his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton 
College, the first published verse of Gray's, although it did not 
appear until 1747. From 1742 until his death, in 1771, Gray 
lived chiefly at Cambridge, where, in 1768, he was made Pro- 
fessor of Modern History. His Aunt Antrobus died in 1749; 
and in 1750 he had written his Elegy in a Country Churchyard, 
suggested by the churchyard at Stoke Pogis. In February, 
1751, Gray wrote to Horace Walpole that the proprietors of a 
magazine were about to publish his Elegy, and said, " I have 
but one bad way left to escape the honour they would inflict 
upon me ; and therefore am obliged to desire you would make 
Dodsley print it immediately (which may be done in less than 
a week's time) from your copy, but without my name, in what 
form is most convenient to him, but on his best paper and 
character. He must correct the press himself, and print it 
without any interval between the stanzas, because the sense is in 
some places continued beyond them ; and the title must be, 
' Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.' If he would add a 
line or two to say it came into his hands by accident, I should 
like it better." Walpole did as was wished, and wrote an 
advertisement to the effect that accident alone brought the poem 
before the public, although an apology was unnecessary to any 
but the author, On which Gray wrote, " I thank you for your 
advertisement, which saves my honour." Gray's fame has its 
deepest foundations in the simplest of his poems — that on the 
sight of his old Eton playground, and the Elegy, which in all 
revisions he sought to bring into simple harmony with its theme. 
He expunged classicism. In one familiar stanza he put Hamp- 
den in the place of Gracchus, or some other ancient worthy. 
Milton and Cromwell, for Tully and Cassar, improved the lines — 



844 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1727 

" Some mute, inglorious Tully here may rest, 
Some Csesar guiltless of his country's blood." 

In March, 1753, Gray's mother died, as his father had died, of 
gout, from which he himself suffered severely; and in the same 
year appeared Six Poems, with designs by R. Bentley. In 1754 
he wrote his Ode on the Progress of Poetry, and The Bard, 
published in 1757, at Strawberry Hill. The first collected 
edition of Gray's Poe?ns was not published till 1768, three years 
before his death. 

44. Horace Walpole had a large income from posts given 
him by Sir Robert, his father. He entered Parliament in 1741, 
but seldom spoke, though for many years a member. In 1747 
he bought the estate of Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham, and 
lavished money upon its adornment. There he set up a printing 
press, from which, in 1757, Gray's "Bard" and "Ode on the 
Progress of Poesy," were the first works issued. In 1791, he 
became Earl of Orford, and he died, aged eighty, in 1797. His 
chief works were A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors 
of England (1758) ; Anecdotes of Painting in England, with 
some accounts of the principal artists, by George Vertue, 
digested from his MSS. (1762-71); The Castle of Otranto, a 
romance, published in 1765 ; and Historic Doubts on the Life 
and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768). Publications of 
Horace Walpole's Letters began to appear in 181 8, and were 
finally arranged in nine volumes in 1857. The small talk of 
their time is also illustrated by the letters of Lady Mary 
Wortley Montague, born in 1690, eldest daughter of Evelyn 
Pierrepont, Duke of Kingston. She married, in 17 12, Addison's 
friend, Edward Wortley Montague, went with him, in 17 16, to 
Constantinople, and after their return lived near Pope, at 
Twickenham. In 1739 Lady Mary left her husband and con- 
nections, to live abroad, and did not return to England for twenty 
years. She was in Venice when her husband, with whom she 
had corresponded, died in 1761. She came home in January; 
and died in August, 1762. There was, in the following year, an 
unauthorised publication of her letters. They were collected by 
ker grandson, in 1803. 

45. Let us now see how we passed out of the bondage of dead 
forms into the truer life of our own time. War against despotism 
in life, and in the literature through which life speaks, was rising 
throughout the eighteenth century. In Germany, revolt against 
wha. was called the a la viode age had for its leaders men iik- 



to a.d. 1768.] REACTION. BODMER AND GOTTSCHED. 845 

fluenced by the freer English thought. Simple truth of life in 
Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" (1719) pleaded so strongly against 
false classicism to many a German mind, that the book was not 
only translated in Germany, but had there more than forty 
imitators. There were two Westphalian Robinsons ; there was 
a Saxon, a Silesian, a Franconian, a Bohemian Robinson; there 
were Robunse and Robinschen, Robinsonetta, the Moral Robin- 
son, and the Invisible Robinson. Two young men of like age, 
Bodmer and Gottsched, both of them pastor's sons, became 
leaders of literature, and represented the two forms of thought 
now coming into battle-array one against the other. Johann 
Jacob Bodmer (b. 1690, d. 1793), son of the Swiss pastor of 
Greifeusee, shrank from the gloom of his father's theology, and 
instead of becoming himself a pastor, learnt silk manufacture. 
His interest in literature was strong, especially in the old life and 
literature of his own country. In the year when " Robinson 
Crusoe" appeared, young Bodmer became a clerk in a Zurich 
Government office. In the following year, he expressed to a 
friend his wish to improve the German taste in letters. For 
this purpose he joined Hagenbusch, Breitinger, and others, in 
1.721, in establishing a weekly journal on the model of Addison's 
Spectator, called the P ainter of M anners ("Mahler der Sitten"). 
It was revised and re-issued in 1746. Johann Christoph 
Gottsched (b. 1700, d. 1766), a year or two younger than 
Bodmer, was son of a pastor near Konigsberg, was tutor there, 
and thence went to Leipzig, where he became Professor of 
Eloquence, and a leader of literature with a true enthusiasm, 
but his faith was in strict obedience to rules drawn from the 
ancient classics. In 1729 Gottsched published a Critical Art 
of Poetry (" Kritische Dichtkunst"). Between 1730 and 1740 
he was supreme as a German critic. In 1737, in a second 
edition of his " Art of Poetry," he attacked Milton. This 
raised Bodmer against him, and the battle for free nation- 
ality in German literature was fought in the name of Milton. 
Bodmer's reply to Gottsched was a treatise published in 1740, 
on The Wonderful in Poetry (Uber das Wunderbare in der 
Poesie). Gottsched mocked. Bodmer replied again. Young 
literary Germany gathered itself to One side or the other. On 
the side of Bodmer, with his battle-cry of " Milton ! " were 
Klopstock, Wieland, Haller, all the young men who repre- 
sented the advance of the great blossom-time of German 
literature. Goethe was born in 1749, Schiller in 1759, when 



S46 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE. [a.d. 1749 

the battle was won, and Gottsched deposed from his critical 
dictatorship. Bodmer not only defended Milton's choice of 
subject, and the details of his plan, but he translated from the 
Spectator Addison's essays upon Milton; finally he translated 
"Paradise Lost" itself. He went back to early German litera- 
ture, published, with a glossary and critical remarks, the text of 
" Fables from the Suabian Period ; " following that up at once 
with a main part of the old German saga of the " Nibelungenlied," 
and its sequel, the " Klage." In his old age he was translating 
early English ballads. 

46. In France, Montesquieu (b. 1689, d. 1755) published, in 
1749, based upon studies of England in England, his fourteen 
years' labour upon the theory of government, De VEspnt des 
Loix, and the conditions necessary to the welfare of the subject. 
In 175 1 appeared the first volume of the " Encyclopedic," com- 
pleted in 1765, which was to be a free review of all knowledge, 
by men who were in no field of it slaves to authority. It was 
planned by Denis Diderot (b. 1712, d. 1784), who had been 
imprisoned two years before for his " Lettre sur les Avcugles, 
a V Usage de Ceux qui Voient." Diderot offered to sell his 
library in aid of the costs of the great dictionary, but Empress 
Catherine gave him a high price for it, appointed him its 
librarian, and left it in his hands. The Preliminary Discourse 
to this encyclopaedia was by Jean le Rond d'Alembert 
(b. 1717, d. 1783), who had charge of its mathematical depart- 
ment. D'Alembert sprang out of the profligacy of the time, 
the son of a nun who became, as Madame de Tencin, a noted 
wit and beauty. He was bred by a glazier's wife, who found 
him, a deserted infant, laid at a church door. 

Authority in France had forfeited respect. It was repre- 
sented in religion by self-seeking men, notoriously corrupt. At 
Court it was despicable, while terrible throughout the land for 
its oppressions. In the earlier days of Louis XV., under the 
Regency of the Duke of Orleans, there was a fashion for cutting 
up engravings, that the figures in them might be stuck on fans 
and fire-screens ; a fashion for making ribbon-knots ; for playing 
with a cup and ball. The Duke of Gesures kept open house for 
forty ; twenty, in green suits of his giving, were alone admitted 
to his presence in green magnificence making green ribbon 
knots. The Duke of Epernon had a bold fancy for performing 
surgical operations on his vassals. After the Regency there was 
the twenty years' rule of Madame de Pompadour, a person of 



toa.d. 1765.] REACTION. VOLTAIRE AND ROUSSEAU. 847 

low birth, who maintained influence when she had lost beauty 
by encouraging the infamous seraglio of the Pare aux Cerfs. 
What wonder if the revolt was fierce, and men of intellect were 
urged to deny all that rested on authority alone, and seek to 
build afresh on other ground ? What wonder if the intellectual 
reaction led to an excess of scepticism, and men, weary of cold 
formalism, broke loose, defied it all, and gave a passionate ex- 
pression to their feelings ? In France, Voltaire chiefly repre- 
sented the intellectual reaction, Rousseau the emotional. 

47- Voltaire, twenty years older than Rousseau, was born in 
1694, son of a notary, educated by Jesuits, and early introduced 
into the salon of Ninon l'Enclos, who left him two thousand 
francs to buy books. He left law for literature. In 17 16 he 
was sent to the Bastile, on suspicion of having written a satirical 
poem against Louis XIV. In 1718 his tragedy of " CEdipe" was 
acted. Afterwards he was in the Bastile again ; then was for 
three years in England, where, in 1728, he published his 
"Henriade;" then came his " Lettres Philosophiques," and 
other writings of all kinds. In 1750 Voltaire settled at the 
Court of his friend, Frederick the Great, but left him after three 
years ; presently settled with Madame Denis, near the territory 
of Geneva, at Ferney, which was raised by him from a hamlet 
to a town of watchmakers, and where he lived until his death, 
in 1778. He died, aged eighty-four, of excitement caused by 
the enthusiasm with which he was received when he paid a 
visit to Paris. Jean Jacques Rousseau, born in 1712, son of 
a watchmaker at Geneva, had his taste for literature, his 
romance-reading, and republicanism encouraged by his father ; 
was placed to no purpose with an attorney and with an 
engraver, from whom he ran away before he was sixteen ; and, 
after many adventures, first made his mark as a writer when he 
won, in 1750, the prize offered by the Academy of Dijon for an 
essay on the question whether the Revival of Learning had 
contributed to the Improvement of Morals. His argument was 
that it had not ; and so said many. Three years later Rousseau, 
in another essay, attacked society for its irregularities, and 
praised the state of nature. Voltaire, in thanking him for a 
copy of it, said, "Really, the reading of your work makes one 
anxious to go on all-fours." It did represent a weariness of 
wigged and powdered civilization that led many to glorify 
natural man as something greater than the same animal as he 
had been perverted by culture. Glorification of " the noble 



64o A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. i 7 6x 

savage" now came into literature as one form of the reacfion 
against despotism of conventionality. Rousseau rejected the 
positive idea of duty, and took sensibility for the rule of conduct. 
The heart is good, he said ; listen to it : suffer yourselves to be 
led by Sensibility, and you will never stray, or your strayings 
will be of a creditable sort. A stream of sentiment, unwhole- 
some at its source and becoming yet more sickly as it flowed, 
now poured into literature. It was the excess of a good thing ; 
another form of the excess that marks reaction. Rousseau, per- 
suaded that virtue was incompatible with wealth or dependence, 
gave up a place under a receiver-general of finance, put off his 
sword, left off white stockings, took to a round wig, sold his 
watch, and said, " Thank God, I shall never again be obliged to 
know what o'clock it is!" He attached himself to an ignorant 
maidservant, Therese Levasseur, and five children were born 
to him between 1747 and 1755, but he sent them all to the 
Foundling Hospital, and, when writing six months before his 
death, gave as reason that, " unable to educate them himself, 
they would have been left to their mother, who would have 
spoilt them, or her family, who would have made monsters of 
them. I tremble still to think of it." But he had said, in 
" Emile," "No toils, no poverty, and no respect of men absolve a 
father from the duty of being himself the educator of his children." 
Rousseau's "Emi/e, 011 Traite sur V Education? appeared in 
1762 ; in the same year with his sentimental elaboration of the 
principles of the Dutch Declaration of Independence and the 
English Settlement of 1689, into an ideal of the Social Contract 
— Contrat Social — which had a most powerful influence on the 
subsequent course of the French Revolution. In the preceding 
year, 1761, he had published his sentimental novel, the 
" Nouvelle Heloise." Rousseau's theory of the Social Contract 
established the sovereignty of all, and that the general voice 
might ordain articles of religion, " not as dogmas, but as senti- 
ments of sociability," banishing those who refused to accept 
them, and punishing with death those who, after acceptance, 
violated them in practice. But he said that "the most just 
revolution would be bought too dearly by the blood of a single 
citizen." Such was the stir of thought abroad, gathering in- 
tensity during and after the days of our George II., and having 
for one of its signs the French Revolution of 1789. Our 
Revolution of a hundred years before had been so far sustained 
and turned to right account that while we felt strongly the 



toa.d. 1762.] ROUSSEAU. SAMUEL JOHNSON. 849 

impulse from abroad, it only quickened the old English sense 
of duty. We pass into the new times with Samuel Johnson and 
with David Hume. 

48. Samuel Johnson was born on the 18th of September, 
1709. His father was a bookseller at Lichfield, and he was 
named Samuel, as godson of a friendly lodger in the house, Dr. 
Samuel Swinfen. He was born scrofulous, and as in his earliest 
days the Tory party was re-asserting the doctrine of Divine 
right, by reviving in the person of Queen Anne the pretence to 
cure scrofula, therefore called " king's evil," by touch of a royal 
hand, he was taken to London to be touched by Queen Anne. 
The disease remained, and it was part of the hard work of 
Johnson's life to battle with it. In 17 16, at the age of seven, he 
was sent to Lichfield Grammar School ; and in 1724, aged 
fifteen, to a school at Stourbridge, as assistant pupil. In 1726 
he came home for two years, and in October, 1728, aged nine- 
teen, went, by Dr. Swinfen's advice, and with some assistance 
from him, to Pembroke College, Dr. Swinfen's own college, at 
Oxford. There the hypochondriacal oppression of the brain, to 
which he had been subject, increased. Johnson's scrofulous 
constitution made itself felt by him chiefly in the brain, and 
might have reduced another man to the insanity of which he 
never lost the dread. He feared it at college, and wrote in 
Latin for Dr. Swinfen an account of his symptoms. Dr. 
Swinfen, proud of the Latin, and forgetting that Johnson was 
revealing to him a very secret dread, showed the report to 
others, and made Johnson less willing to accept help from him. 
Johnson remained at Oxford, even during vacation, from the 
31st of October, 1728, to the 12th of December, 1729; he then 
left, probably because of illness, and did not return, because of 
poverty. His father died in 173 1. Johnson, then twenty-two 
years old, received ^20, all he could hope for from his father's 
effects, laid by eleven guineas of it, and in 1732, aged twenty- 
three, went to be usher in the school at Market Bosworth. He 
gave that up in a few months, and went to stay with a friend 
and schoolfellow, Edmund Hector, who was seeking practice in 
Birmingham as a surgeon, and lodged at the house of a book- 
seller. For the bookseller Johnson translated, for five guineas, 
Father Lobds Voyage to Abyssinia, which was published in 
1735. I n *734 Johnson was at home with his mother, who 
kept the shop at Lichfield, proposing to print the Latin poems 
of Politian by subscription. In November of that year he 

C C C 



850 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1734 

wrote to Edward Cave, who in the preceding year, 1733, had 
established " The Gentleman's Magazine/' offering to supply it 
with a literary column ; and Cave answered the letter. In July, 
1736, Johnson, aged twenty-seven, married Elizabeth, aged 
forty-eight, widow of Mr. Porter, who had sons and a daughter, 
Lucy. Her first husband, a mercer, had died insolvent. 
Johnson loved the wife thus chosen, who was twenty-one years 
older than himself. Through life she was his " dear Tetty ;" and 
eighteen years after her death he wrote of her in his "Diary," 
" When I recollect the time in which we lived together, my grief 
for her departure is not abated ; and I have less pleasure in any 
good that befalls me, because she does not partake it. On many 
occasions I think what she would have said or done. When I 
saw the sea at Brighthelmstone, I wished for her to have seen it 
with me. But with respect to her, no rational wish is now left 
but that we may meet at last where the mercy of God shall 
make us happy, and, perhaps, make us instrumental to the 
happiness of each other. It is now eighteen years." After his 
marriage Johnson set up school in a large house at Edial, near 
Lichfield. He had been refused the mastership of the grammar 
school at Solihull, because it was found, on inquiry, that he was 
so independent in spirit that he might " huff the feoffees;" and 
"y* he has such a way of distorting his fface (w h though he can't 
help) y e gent, think it may affect some young ladds." The 
want of control over his face and gestures sprang from that 
affection cf the brain against which Johnson battled through 
life. And he was grateful to an old wife for the love that, with 
his visible ungainliness, he had not ventured to seek among the 
young. There came to Johnson's school at Edial only the two 
sons of Captain Garrick, of Lichfield, who had known and 
respected Johnson at home, and one other boy. Here the 
foundation was laid of a lifelong friendship between Johnson 
and David Garrick (b. 1716, d. 1779). The school failed, 
and in March, 1737, Johnson, aged twenty-eight, and Garrick, 
aged twenty-one, came to London together, Mrs. Johnson being 
left at Edial or Lichfield, while a new start in life was being 
looked for. Garrick studied a little more, then joined his 
brother as wine merchant, but after the death of an uncle, who 
left him a thousand pounds, and the deaths of his father and 
mother, he followed his natural bent, and in 1741 took to the 
stage, became the greatest actor of his time, and author, trans- 
lator, or adapter of about forty plays. Johnson, while school- 



toa.d. 1744.] SAMUEL JOHNSON. 85 1 

keeping, had begun a tragedy, Irene. Having come to London 
with Garrick in March, 1737, in July he was lodging at Green- 
wich, to work at his play, and offered to translate for Cave a 
" History of the Council of Trent." He went back for three 
months to Lichfield, where he finished " Irene," and next year, 
I 73^ J aged twenty-nine, returned to London with his wife, to do 
or die. His tragedy was refused. He looked again to Cave, 
and in March appeared his first contribution to " The Gentle- 
man's Magazine," Latin verses to Sylvanus Urban. In June 
he began to contribute to the Magazine " Debates of the Senate 
of Lilliput." Report of proceedings in the English Parliament 
was unlawful, but a Mr. William Guthrie provided Johnson with 
accounts of them, which he worked up in his own way. These 
became famous, and were dropped by Johnson when in full 
success, because they were accepted as faithful reports, and he 
would not be even indirectly party to a fraud. In May of 1738 
appeared Johnson's first poem, his London, a poem in imitation 
of the third satire of Juvenal, for which Dodsley gave ^10. 
It came out at the same time with Pope's, 1738 (§ 19), expressed 
the depth of Johnson's own feeling as a lonely struggler in the 
great city, and had printed in capitals one line, 

" This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, 
Slow rises worth by poverty depressed." 

It was in a second edition within a week. Pope caused 
inquiry to be made for the author, and recommended him to 
the good offices of Lord Gower, who would have made him 
master of a grammar school at Appleby, in Leicestershire, with 
a salary of about £60 a year : but the degree of M.A. was a 
necessary qualification. This was asked in vain for the author 
of " London " from his own university at Oxford, and also from 
Dublin. In the following year, 1739, Johnson, aged thirty, 
received advances from Cave, as small as half-a-crown, for 
work to be done. One letter was signed "Yours ithpransus* — 
without a dinner ; for Johnson sturdily sought to pay his way, 
and dined or hungered as his means required. As a good Tory 
he published this year a small satirical pamphlet, " Marmor 
Norfolciense ; or, an Essay on an Ancient Prophetical Inscrip- 
tion in monkish rhyme, lately discovered near Lynne, in 
Norfolk" (the county of Sir Robert Walpole), "by Probus 
Britannicus." The next four years were years of work and 
poverty. In 1744 he was thirty-five years old, still struggling, 

C C C 2 



8$2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1729 

and it was at this time that he wrote his Life of Savage, who 
had died in 1743. 

49. Richard. Savage, born in 1698, was a natural son of 
the Countess of Macclesfield. When he accidentally discovered 
who was his mother she repelled him. He wrote plays, and was 
befriended by Steele, lived an ill-regulated life, killed a man in 
a tavern brawl, was found guilty, and had his mother active in 
opposing the endeavours made to obtain mercy for him. He 
was pardoned, and stayed from writing against his mother by a 
pension of ^200 a year from Lord Tyrconnel, who also received 
Savage into his family. He published, in 1729, a moral poem 
called The Wanderer. Lord Tyrconnel found Savage's wild 
way of life unendurable, and Savage, asked not to spend all his 
nights in taverns, resolved to " spurn that friend who should 
presume to dictate to him." They parted. Savage attacked 
his mother in a poem ; in another poem, The Progress of a 
Divine, described a profligate priest who rose by wickedness, 
and who found at last a patron in the Bishop of London. He 
received ^50 a year from the queen, and when he received the 
money annually disappeared till it was spent. After the queen's 
death his friends promised to find him ^50 a year, if he would 
live quietly in Wales. He went to Wales, but was coming back 
to London when he was arrested for debt, died in prison, and 
was buried at the expense of his gaoler. Johnson, who knew 
and pitied him — as poor as he, and knowing what the struggle 
was in which Savage had fallen, while he rose himself in dignity 
— said, "Those are no proper judges of his conduct who have 
slumbered away their time on the down of plenty." He told 
Savage's sad tale with the kindliness of a true nature, while he 
drew from it the lesson " that nothing will supply the want of 
prudence; and that negligence and irregularity, long con- 
tinued, will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius 
contemptible." 

50. In 1745, Johnson, aged thirty-six, published Miscella- 
neous Observations on the Tragedy of Hamlet, with Remarks 
on Sir Thomas Hanmer's Edition of Shakespeare, to which he 
added proposals for a new edition of Shakespeare. In 1747 his 
friend Garrick opened Drury Lane, and turned at once to 
Johnson for the opening prologue. In the same year Johnson 
issued the Prospectus of his Dictionary, addressed to Lord 
Chesterfield. In 174S he wrote "The Vanity of Human 
Wishes," chiefly at Hampstead, where his wife was staying for 



toa.d. 1756.] RICHARD SAVAGE. JOHNSON. S53 

her health ; and in 1749, the year of the publication of "Tom 
Jones" — Johnson being then forty years old — Garrick, as 
patentee of Drury Lane, brought out Johnson's Irene, and, 
though it was not successful, forced its run for nine nights, 
that Johnson might not lose his three author's nights. They 
brought him in ^195 17s., besides ^100 from Dodsley for the 
copyright. In the same year Dodsley gave but ^15 for 
Johnson's second poem, published in May, The Vanity of 
Human Wishes, which has in it, like " London," depths of 
feeling stirred by a long conflict with adversity. 

In 1750 Johnson began The Rambler on the 20th of March, 
and continued it every Tuesday and Saturday till its close, on 
the 17th of March, 1752, about a fortnight before the death of 
his wife. The deeply religious nature of Johnson animated his 
work in joining himself to the number of those who had followed 
the track of the " Tatler " and ''Spectator." The Latin style 
of " The Rambler," and its studied avoidance of common words, 
represented only a full working out of the fashionable theory of 
the time, derived from France. Johnson did for the style of 
his own day what Lyly had done in his time, and identified his 
name with it. But he lived on and outgrew it, as his neigh- 
bours did ; so that the style of his " Lives of the Poets " differs 
altogether from that of " The Rambler." His wife's death left 
Johnson with none but his old mother at Lichfield dependent 
on him. In 1754 Cave died with his hand in Johnson's, and 
Johnson wrote his life for the next number of the "Gentleman's 
Magazine." To the Adventurer a series of 140 papers, issued 
between November 7, 1752, and March 9, 1754, by his friend, 
Dr. John Hawkesworth, Johnson contributed. From 
January 31, 1754, to September 30, 1756, appeared, in 140 
numbers, The Connoisseur, by Mr. Town, critic and censor- 
general, its editors being George Colman (b. 1733, d. 1794) 
and Bonnel Thornton. Colman became an active dra- 
matist, and was succeeded in that character, and in his man- 
agement of the little theatre in. the Haymarket, by his son, 
George Colman the Younger (b. 1762, d. 1836). In The 
World, by Adam FitzAdam, a series of essays in 210 numbers, 
published between January, 1753, and December, 1756, the 
Earl of Chesterfield — Philip Dormer Stanhope (b. 1694, d. 
I 773) 5 whose Letters to his Son were published the year after his 
death — praised Johnson's Dictionary. Chesterfield's two letters 
appeared in The World just before the Dictionary came out, 



854 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1755 

and on the 7th of February, 1755, Johnson addressed a letter 
to him, repudiating the patronage of one to whom seven years 
before he had looked for aid, and who during his seven years of 
labour against difficulties had not given him one word of en- 
couragement or one smile of favour. In 1755, when Johnson 
was forty, his Dictionary appeared. To supply letters after his 
name upon the title-page, for satisfaction of the booksellers, 
Oxford had now conceded to Johnson the degree of M.A., and 
Dublin spontaneously added that of LL.D. Johnson received 
for the "Dictionary" in all ,£1,575, which was payment at the 
rate of ,£225 a year while it was in progress, out of which he had 
to buy books for reference and pay six amanuenses. He was 
so poor that in March next year he was arrested for a debt of 
£5 1 8s., and was helped by Samuel Richardson. To avoid 
debt, he did any honest work — wrote sermons for clergymen 
. and prefaces for authors. It was at this time that he issued 
Proposals for his Edition of Shakespeare. In April, 1758, he 
began The Idler \ a weekly essay in " The Universal Chronicle," 
continued for two years. In 1759 his mother died, at the age 
of ninety. His poverty had kept him from her, because he 
could not spare from his aid to her the money it would cost 
to go to and from Lichfield. There were her little debts to pay, 
and there would be the funeral expenses. To provide these he 
wrote his moral tale of Rasselas, for which he was paid £100, 
with £2$ afterwards for a second edition. Johnson had now 
neither wife nor mother to support, and " The Idler " was dis- 
continued in April, 1760. In that year his influential friends 
obtained for him, from Lord Bute, a grant of ,£300 a year. It 
required courage to tell him that they had done so. In his 
"Dictionary," as in all works of his, he had set the mark of his 
mind. Its religious spirit was in his careful choice of illustra- 
tive extracts, which should be in themselves worth reading, and 
tempt nobody to read a book that he believed could be injurious. 
Its spirit of independence broke out in some of his definitions, 
and he had defined Pension, "a grant made to any one without 
an equivalent ;" Pensioner, " a slave of state, hired by a stipend 
to obey his master." When told of the grant of a pension to 
himself, and assured that this was not said to him in joke, he 
remained silent for a time, and then assented. His after course 
of life showed that he had resolved to take this part of the money 
usually wasted on unworthy men, not for his own enrichment, 
but in trust for those whom it could relieve from unmerited 



to a.d. 1765.] SAMUEL JOHNSON. JAMES BOSWELL. 855 

suffering. He always carried money for occasional charities, 
and he had, in Bolt Court, these house companions, rescued 
from distress : — Robert Levitt, a poor, awkward and helpless 
surgeon to the poor, had shown his need of a protector, and for 
the last thirty years of his life found shelter under Johnson's 
roof. Miss Williams, a friend of his wife's, daughter of a Welsh 
doctor, who ruined himself, had, in Mrs. Johnson's time, come 
to London for an operation in her eye. She became blind. 
Poor creature ! Johnson must take care of her. She stuttered, 
and had a vile temper. Johnson bribed the maid to bear with 
that by the addition of half-a-crown a week to her wages. Mrs. 
Dumoulin ; for her claim it was enough that she was Dr. 
Swinfen's daughter, now the widow of a writing-master, and. 
in want. Another of his pensioners and hearth -sharers was 
Miss Carmichael ; another, a negro, Francis Barber, whom 
Johnson took when his old master, Dr. Bathurst, had been 
unable to support him. Disdainful of so poor a bar to human 
fellowship as colour of the skin, Johnson treated this negro 
servant with friendship, was at some cost to educate him, and 
addressed him in letters as " Dear Francis," signing himself 
" Affectionately yours." Johnson lived among these people as 
their friend, not as their benefactor, and did not affect patron- 
age. "No man," said Mrs. Thrale, "loved the poor like Dr. 
Johnson." His outside rudeness covered the tenderest heart. 
His own experience of poverty quickened his sympathies, while 
it roughened his spirit of independence. " He had nothing of 
the bear but his skin," said Garrick. 

51. It was not till 1763 that James Boswell (b. 1740, d. 1795) 
then a young man of twenty-three, first saw Dr. Johnson in the 
back-parlour of Thomas Davies, actor, bookseller, and author oi 
some useful books upon the stage. Boswell had studied law in 
Scotland, and was afterwards called to the English bar. His 
minute chronicling, thenceforth, of Johnson's sayings and doings 
is made interesting by a rare vigour of thought in the man 
whose common talk is thus recorded. Such hero-worship as 
Bos well's has its weak side, but there was no meanness or self- 
seeking in the young gentleman's choice of an object of rever- 
ence. Boswell's Life of Johnson was first published in 1791, 
seven years after Johnson's death. Mrs. Thrale, who, before 
she married the rich brewer, had been a lively Welsh girl — Miss 
Hester Salusbury — first met Johnson in 1764, when he was 
brought to her house at Streatham to meet a poetical shoemaker 



c^6 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 173.9 

named Woodhouse who was then being talked about. He soon 
became the most honoured friend of the house, and the centre 
of attention at Mrs. Thrale's literary parties. In 1765 Johnson's 
mind suffered so much that he wrote in his diary on Easter day, 
" My memory grows confused, and I know not how the days 
pass over me. Good Lord deliver me !" In that year his 
Editio?i of Shakspeare appeared, and he wrote to Joseph 
Warton that, as he felt no solicitude about the work, he felt no 
comfort from its conclusion. In 1766 he was confined to his 
room for weeks together, and declared himself on the verge of 
insanity. In 1770 he was sixty-two. His failing health had 
obliged him to feel that he was himself benefited by his pension, 
and as he resolved that he would not take the benefit without 
giving an equivalent, he began to write political pamphlets. 
His first, in 1770, was called the False Alarm, on the commo- 
tion caused by the expulsion of Wilkes from the House of 
Commons. This was the year of the birth of Wordsworth. 

52. David Hume, about a year and a half younger than 
Johnson, was born in April, 171 1, of a good Scottish family. 
His father died when he was young. His mother bred him to 
the law, but he cared most for literature. In 1734, at the age of 
twenty-five, he was sent to Bristol with letters to merchants. 
Proving unfit for commerce, he went to France to economize and 
write. In 1737 he came to London, and in 1738, when Johnson 
published his " London," David Hume published his Treatise on 
Human Nature, written in France. It was unsuccessful. In 
1742 he published at Edinburgh, Essays, Moral, Political, and 
Literary, in which he discussed politics as a science, superstition 
and enthusiasm, civil liberty, national characters, the rise of arts 
and sciences. Among studies of different solutions of the social 
problem, Hume expressed inclination rather to dispute than to 
assent to the conclusions of the philosophers. He upheld the 
dignity of human nature, and held " that the sentiments of those 
who are inclined to thmk favourably of mankind are much more 
advantageous to virtue than the contrary principles, which give 
us a mean opinion of our nature. " In 1745 Hume, aged 
thirty-four, came to England to live with the young Marquis of 
Annandale, who was weak in mind and body. In the following 
year General St. Clair made him secretary in an expedition 
against France. In 1747 he was with St. Clair on a military 
embassy to Vienna and Turin. He recast his first part of the 
treatise concerning Human Nature, and it was published in 1748 



toa.d. 1770.] SAMUEL JOHNSON. DAVID HUME. 857 

Avhile he was abroad, as an Enquiry concerning Human Under- 
standing. In 1749 and 1750 Hume was in Scotland with his 
brother in the country, writing. In 175 1 he removed to Edin- 
burgh, and published there his Political Discourses, which were 
well received. In the same year he published in London, with 
less success, an Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, 
which he considered to be his best work. In 1752 he was made 
Librarian to the Faculty of Advocates at Edinburgh, and had 
an access to books which suggested the writing of his History. 
The first section appeared in 1754, as a History of the Reign 
of James I. and Charles I., in a quarto volume, which was 
decried and neglected. There were only forty-five copies sold 
in a twelvemonth. In 1755 Hume published his Natural 
History of Religion, and in 1756 a continuation of his History 
of England, from the death of Charles I. to the Revolution. 
This was better received. He then went back in time, and 
published, in 1759, the History of the House of Tudor, which 
was clamoured against; and in 1761, the year after the death 
of George II., he went back to a still earlier time, and com- 
pleted his History of England from the Conquest to the Revo- 
lution. Smollett's History (§ 36), from that date to the death of 
George II. is usually printed as a continuation of Hume. As a 
philosopher, Hume denied miracle, and drew from Locke's doc- 
trine, that knowledge comes to us only from the outside world, an 
argument that the experience we reason from is based only on 
custom, without assurance that we see cause and effect. Our 
notion of necessity, he said, rests only on the association of 
ideas. From a combination of swiftly-succeeding ideas which 
arise from and cease with movements of the body, we form, 
Hume argued, an imaginary entity which we call the soul, 
and assign to it immortality. In 1763 Hume went with 
the Earl of Hertford, who was ambassador, to Paris, became 
secretary to the embassy, and remained in Paris as Charge 
d' Affaires till 1766, when he returned to England. He brought 
with him Rousseau (§ 47), who was made much of in England, 
and pensioned by George III.; but he listened to the ill-con- 
ditioned grumblings of Therese Levasseur, looked upon Hume 
as an agent of his enemies, quarrelled with him and with the 
gentleman who had placed a country house at his disposal, and 
when the wind was against his prompt departure, harangued the 
people of Dover on the shore in French. Rousseau left England 
in May, 1767, after a stay of thirteen months. He had then 



858 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1761 

begun to write the "Confessions " which appeared after his death 
in 1778. Hume, between 1767 and 1769, was an under-secretary 
of state. In 1769 he retired to Edinburgh, possessed of a 
thousand a year, and died in 1776, aged sixty-five. 

53. Thomas Keid (b. 1709, d. 1796), a Scottish clergyman, 
who became, in 1752, Professor of Moral Philosophy at King's 
College, Aberdeen, was the first who attempted a philosophical 
answer to Hume's scepticism. This was by his Inquiry into the 
Huma7i Mind, which appeared in 1764, and was submitted to 
Hume's friendly criticism before publication. Reid's Essays on 
the Intellectual Powers of Man, in 1785, and Essays on the 
Active Powers, in 1788, completed an argument which Reid 
sought to pursue by Bacon's method of investigation, carefully 
distinguishing between observation and reflection, while he 
endeavoured to vindicate against attacks of scepticism those 
fundamental laws of belief which base human knowledge upon 
what Reid called the common sense of mankind. 

54. William Robertson (b. 172 1, d. 1791) was a popular 
pulpit orator, who published, in 1759, a History of Scotland, in 
the Reigns of Mary and James VI, until his Accession to the 
Throne of England, a work of labour and pains rather than 
genius, and written with artificial dignity. It went through 
fourteen editions in his lifetime. In 1761 Robertson was made 
King's Chaplain ; in 1762, Principal of the Edinburgh University ; 
and in 1764, Historiographer Royal for Scotland, a post revived 
for him, with a salary of ^200 a year. In 1769 he published a 
History of the Reign of Charles V., with a View of the Progress 
of Society from the subversion of the Roman Empire to the 
beginning of the sixteenth century ; and in 1777, a History of 
America. Robertson had the natural insight of good sense 
with patient industry, but none of Hume's freshness of thought, 
and his Latin style wants the wealth of mind and richness of 
expression that gives life to the pomp of a Latin style in 
Edward Gibbon (b. 1737, d. 1794), the first volume of whose 
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared, when its author 
was thirty-nine years old, in 1776, the year of the death of David 
Hume. Gibbon had been a delicate child, and had been educated 
chiefly at private schools before he went to Magdalen College, 
Oxford. When he had been there fourteen months he turned 
Romanist, and to wean him from his new opinions his father 
placed him under a Calvinist minister at Lausanne, by whom he 
was re-converted. In 1758, aged twenty-one, he returned to 



toa.d. i 7 88.] REID. ROBERTSON. GIBBON. STERNE. 859 

England ; in 1761 he published, in French, his Essai sur 
r Etude de la Litterature. In 1763 he travelled through France 
and Switzerland to Italy, and in 1764, aged twenty-seven, when 
musing among the ruins of the capital, it first occurred to him to 
write a history showing the cause of the Decline and Fall of the 
great Roman Empire. In 1770, the year of the birth of Words- 
worth, Gibbon was thirty-three years old, and the death of his 
father gave him property. He was in Parliament for eight years 
after 1774, finished his history at Lausanne, and published the 
close of it on his birthday in 1788. In those parts of his History 
that dealt with the Church, Gibbon sometimes brought the 
scepticism of the time into sharp contact with Christianity. 

55. Laurence Sterne (b. 17 13, d. 1768), grandson of 
Richard Sterne, Archbishop of York, and son of Lieutenant 
Sterne in a marching regiment, was born at Clonmel barracks. 
After education at Halifax in Yorkshire, and at Jesus College, 
Cambridge, his uncle, Dr. Sterne, obtained for him, in 1738, the 
vicarage of Sutton, near York, and in 1741 a prebend in York 
Minster, with a house in Stonegate. In that year Sterne married. 
The first two volumes of Tristram Shandy were published at 
York, in December, 1759, witty and whimsical, suiting the spirit 
of the time in their defiance of convention, and sometimes of 
decency. Their success brought Sterne to London, and he 
thenceforth weakly sacrificed himself to the shallow flatteries 
of London society. The second edition of this part of "Tristram 
Shandy" was followed at once by two volumes of the Ser- 
mons of Mr. Yorick. Oliver Goldsmith, in his " Citizen of the 
World," condemned Sterne's affectations of freedom in dashes 
and breaks, with the worse licence of indelicacy, and was so 
far displeased by the superficial tricks of the book that he was 
unjust to the true genius of the writer, and missed the charm 
of his Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. In 1761 appeared 
volumes iii. and iv. of "Tristram Shandy;" in 1762, vols. v. 
and vi. ; in 1765, vols. vii. and viii. ; in 1767, vol. ix. In 
1768, after a visit to France, appeared Sterne's Sentimental 
Journey, of which the style reminds us that J 761 and 1762 were 
the dates of the chief sentimental writings of Rousseau. In the 
same year Sterne died, on the 13th of September, at lodgings in 
Bond Street, with no friend near ; the only sign of human affec- 
tion the knock of a footman, sent by some of his grand friends 
from a neighbouring dinner party to learn how Mr. Sterne was. 
A single mourning coach, with two gentlemen inside, one of 



S6o A FIRS 7' SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. i 759 

them his publisher, followed his body to the grave. It was dug 
up after burial, and recognised in a few days on the table of the 
Professor of Anatomy oi Cambridge. Sterne left no provision 
for his widow and daughter at York, but died in debt, and his 
family were aided by a collection made at next York races. 
His daughter, Lydia, married a Frenchman, and is said to have 
been among the victims of the French Revolution. 

56. Oliver Go Ldsmith (b. 1728, d. 1774) was producing his 
best works in the years immediately before the birth of Words- 
worth. He was one of eight children of the clergyman of 
Kilkenny West ; was educated at the village school ; entered, with 
aid from an uncle, Mr. Contarine, in 1745, as a sizar at Trinity 
College, Dublin, and there graduated as B.A. in 1749. From 
1752 to 1754 he was studying medicine at Edinburgh, and con- 
tinued like studies in 1754 at Leyden. He then travelled on foot 
about the Continent. In 175611c was in London again, and tried 
many ways of earning bread. He had no skill in managing 
outward affairs of life, but had within him a pure breath of 
genius. He wrote criticisms for the Monthly Review, and then 
for the Critical Review; published, in 1759, an Enquiry into 
the Present State of Polite Learning i7i Europe ; produced eight 
numbers of a paper called The Beej and contributed in 1760, to 
Newbery's new daily paper, the Public Ledger, two articles a 
week for a guinea a-piece. These essays, collected in 1762, as The 
Citizen of the World, are full of the kindliest humour, and in 
prose written with the unaffected grace of a true poet. In 1763 
Johnson, who felt the worth of Goldsmith, and was his firm 
friend, sold the MS. of the "Vicar of Wakefield" for ,£60, to, 
relieve Goldsmith from immediate distress and debt. In 
December, 1764, his poem of the Traveller ; or, a Prospect of 
Society, appeared, and Goldsmith rose in fame. Its success 
caused the purchaser of the Vicar of Wakefield to produce it, 
at last, in February, 1766; and it went through three editions 
before the end of August. Goethe tells us that when, aged 
twenty-five (and in the year of Goldsmith's death), he was a law- 
student at Strasburg, Herder read to him a translation of the 
*' Vicar of Wakefield." More than half a century after Gold- 
smith's death, when the German poet was by many regarded as 
the patriarch of contemporary European literature, he ascribed, 
in a letter to his friend Zelter, the best influence over his mind 
to the spirit of that wise and wholesome story as it was made 
known to him "just at the critical moment of mental develop- 



TOA.D. I774-] GOLDSMITH. CHATTERTON. CHURCHILL. 86 1 

merit." In 1768 Goldsmith's first comedy, the Good-natured 
JMati, was produced ; in 1 770 appeared his other poem of great 
mark, The Deserted Village; in 1772, his other comedy, She 
Stoops to Conquer, was acted ; and Goldsmith died on the 4th 
of April, 1 774. He did much other work of the pen, wrote 
histories of Greece, Rome, England, and of Animated Nature. 
His " Vicar of Wakefield" brought idyllic grace into the novel 
of real life, and his Traveller and Deserted Village calmly reflect 
some shadows of the life and thought of Europe in his day. 

57. In the year of the birth of Wordsworth, 1770, George III. 
had been ten years on the throne. In August of that year, 
Thomas Chatterton committed suicide. He was a youth of 
eighteen, who had been taught at a charity school in his native 
town of Bristol, and articled to an attorney. The boy, with a 
poet's genius, and a turn for antiquities, played upon the re- 
viving taste for our old national literature among men who had 
still but a faint critical sense of its form of thought or language, 
by inventing a series of mock antique poems, which he ascribed 
to an imaginary monk of Bristol, named Thomas Rowley. 
Rowley lived, he said, three centuries before the poems were 
discovered by his father in an old chest in the church of St. 
Mary Redcliffe, where he and his forefathers had been sextons 
for many generations. Chatterton came to London in 1770, with 
the confidence of genius, warmed by young hope and ambition ; 
found himself starving in the midst of plenty, with a defiant 
sense of power. He was but a boy ; his was not yet a sustaining 
power ; and he poisoned himself in the agony of his despair. 

58. In the year of the birth of Wordsworth, 1770, Pope had 
been dead twenty-six years ; Fielding had been dead sixteen 
years, Richardson nine, and Smollett had but another year to 
live. Thomson had been dead twenty-two years ; Dyer and 
Allan Ramsay twelve, Shenstone seven. Collins had been dead 

. fourteen years. Gray died in that year, and Akenside the year 
before. Charles Churchill had died six years before, at the 
age of thirty-three. He had been ordained without a degree ; 
had a wife and two sons, and lived by a poor school when he 
succeeded his father as curate and lecturer of St. John's, West- 
minster, and added to his little income by teaching English to 
young ladies at a boarding-school. He delighted in the theatre, 
and in 1761 published at his own cost, as a shilling pamphlet, 
the Rosciad, a critical satire on the stage, in thought bold, in 
verse masterly. Other keen satires in verse followed. Churchill 



o02 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1762 

turned to the larger stage, supported Wilkes, wrote, in 1762, 
The Ghost ; in January, 1763, The Prophecy of Famine, a 
satire on Scotland and the Scotch ; lived a wild life, wrote other 
satires, and died after four years of a brilliant intellectual career, 
that caused Garrick to say of him after his death, "Such 
talents, with prudence, had commanded the nation." 

59. Janies Grainger died three years before the birth of 
Wordsworth, aged about forty. He was a Scotch physician, 
who left practice in London, and, finding a wife on his way out, 
settled in the island of St. Christopher, where he wrote his poem 
of the Sugar Cane, published in 1764. Another Scot, "William 
Falconer, published in London, in 1762, a touching poem, 
called The Shipwreck, and himself died by shipwreck in 1769. 
James Beattie (b. 1735, d. 1803) was the son of a village 
shopkeeper at Lawrencekirk. He became an usher in the 
Aberdeen Grammar School, published Original Poems and 
Translations in 1760 ; in 1770 an angry Essay on Truth against 
Hume ; and in 1771 the first canto of The Minstrel. That won 
him strong friends in London, a pension of ^200 from the 
king, and the professorship of Moral Philosophy and logic in 
Marischal College, Aberdeen, Another Scotsman, James 
Macpherson (b. 1738, d. 1796), published, in 1762, poems 
attributed to Ossian, or Oisin (ch. i. § 5), founded in part on 
Gaelic traditional poetry, but so modern in form and expressive 
of the sentimental gloom then fashionable, that they owed their 
great success to the reproduction in new form of living ten- 
dencies of thought. The controversy as to their genuineness 
was, like that over the Rowley Poems, sign of a sympathy 
with the past, that was not yet informed by any critical under- 
standing. Thomas Percy (b. 1729, d. 181 1), son of a grocer 
at Bridgenorth, was sent from his town grammar-school with 
an exhibition to Oxford, and was from 1753 to 1778 Vicar of 
Easton Maudit, in Northamptonshire. He married in 1759, 
and had six children ; had a turn for literature, and amused 
himself as a collector of old ballads, having for the basis of his 
collection a folio MS. collection in a handwriting of about the 
time of Charles I. The result was his Reliques of Ancient 
English Poetry, published in 1765, in which he meddled with 
the old £>allads to bring them into some accord with the con- 
ventional taste of his age, and still was condemned by many as 
an antiquary. But his book struck a true note, and was food 
for young minds in the coming time. Walter Scott remembered 



toa.d. 1770] SCOTTISH POETS. PERCY'S REL1QUES. S63 

the spot where he read Percy's " Reliques " for the first time, 
and believed that he read no book " half so frequently, or with 
half the enthusiasm." Percy became chaplain to the Duke of 
Northumberland, with whose house his name of Percy inspired 
him to claim kindred ; he was blessed also with a wife whose 
pride it was to have once nursed a prince ; Percy became 
Dean of Carlisle in 1778, and, in 1782, Bishop of Dromore, 
in Ireland. William Cowper, who had not yet published verse, 
was thirty-nine ; and Joseph Priestley (b. 1733, d. 1804) was 
thirty-seven in 1770. Thomas Paine (b. 1737, d. 1809), was 
then, like Gibbon, thirty-three years old ; John Home Tooke 
(b. 1736, d. 1812) was twenty-four; and John Wolcot (b. 1738, 
d. 1 8 19), afterwards satirist in verse as Peter Pindar, thirty-two ; 
Hannah More (b. 1745, d. 1833) was twenty-five ; William Paley 
(b. 1743, d. 1805) was twenty-four. 

60. In 1770 Samuel Foote (b. at Truro about 1720, d. 
1777) was satirizing men of his time in the series of comedies 
begun in 1752. Garrick also was among the dramatists; and 
George Colman (b. about 1733, d. 1794) and Richard Cum- 
berland (b. 1732, d. 181 1), who begun their dramatic careers 
in 1760. John Home (b. 1724, d. 1808), ordained, in 1750, 
minister of Athelstaneford, in East Lothian, had produced, 
in 1756, at Edinburgh, his tragedy of "Douglas," whereby he 
so much offended the Presbytery, that, to avoid Church cen- 
sure, he resigned his living and became a layman. 

Adam Smith (b. at Kirkcaldy in 1723, d. 1790) was from 
1752 to 1764 Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, and 
published, in 1759, his Theory of Moral Sentiments, but his 
Inquiry i?ito the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations 
did not appear till 1776. This famous book developed Locke's 
doctrine that labour is the source of wealth. Sir "William 
Blackstone published the first volume of his Commentaries 
on the Laws of England in 1764, and finished in 1768. Among 
the youths and children, in 1770, who were to express the 
thought of England for a coming generation, were Jeremy 
Bentham, aged twenty-two ; Richard Brinsley Sheridan, nine- 
teen; Fanny Burney, eighteen; Elizabeth Inchbald, seventeen ; 
Sophia Lee, twenty ; Harriet Lee, fourteen ; Joanna Baillie, 
eight ; Maria Edgeworth, five ; George Crabbe, sixteen; William 
Godwin, fourteen ; William Gifford, thirteen ; Robert Burns, 
Richard Porson, and Richard Beckford, eleven ; Wm. Cobbett, 
eight ; Samuel Rogers, seven ; and Robert Bloom field, four. 



864 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1770 

Intensity of thought and feeling, in the days before and after 
the French Revolution, roused men who were young during the 
stir of it to new sense of life. Wordsworth (d. 1850) was born 
in 1770; Walter Scott (d. 1832), James Montgomery (d. 1854), 
Sydney Smith (d. 1845), and John Lingard (d. 185 1), were born 
in 1771 ; Samuel Taylor Coleridge (d. 1834) and James Hogg 
(d. 1835) in 1772. Francis Jeffrey (d. 1850) was born in 1773. 
Robert Southey (d. 1843) m I 774- Jane Austen (d. 1817) and 
Charles Lamb (d. 1834) were born in 1775 ; Jane Porter (d. 
1850) and James Smith (d. 1839) in 1776; Thomas Campbell 
(d. 1844) and Henry Hallam (d. 1859) in 1777 ; William Hazlitt 
(d. 1830) and Mary Brunton (d. 1818) in 1778 ; and in 1779 
Thomas Moore (d. 1852), Henry Brougham (d. 1868), John Gait 
(d. 1839), and Horace Smith (d. 1849). 

61. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whose wit revived 
English comedy towards the close of the eighteenth century, 
was born in Dublin in 1 75 1, son of an actor who taught elocu- 
tion. After education at Harrow, he eloped from Bath with 
Miss Linley, a famous singer, then eighteen years old, and 
daughter of a composer ; fought two duels ; and then, having 
to live by his wits, produced his comedy of The Rivals, in, 
January, 1775, when he was twenty-four years old. The Duenna 
followed at the close of the same year ; in February, 1777, The 
Trip to Scarborough, an alteration of Vanbrugh's " Relapse ; " 
and in May, 1777, The School for Scandal. Sheridan's last 
piece was The Critic, in 1779. He died in July, 1816. 

62. William Cowper, though he lived longer and wrote 
later in life, was of the same age as Charles Churchill, and about 
three years younger than Goldsmith. He was born in Novem- 
ber, 1 73 1, son of the Rev. John Cowper, rector of Great Berk- 
hamstead, and chaplain to George II. His mother died when 
he was six years old. After early experience of a rough school 
and two years' suffering from inflammation of the eyes, Cowper 
v/as sent, aged ten, to Westminster School, where he had Charles 
Churchill (§ 58) and Warren Hastings among his schoolfellows. 
The kindness of schoolfellowship made Cowper afterwards re- 
cognise in his verse the good of Churchill when the world only 
condemned him for his faults. In 1748 Cowper left West- 
minster, was entered of the Middle Temple, and articled for 
three years to a solicitor, who had two daughters. One of them, 
Theodora, touched his young fancy ; the other, Harriet, was his 

, friend afterwards as Lady Hesketh. A nervous melancholy, 



toa.d. 1782.] SHERIDAN. WILLIAM COWPER. 865 

shadow of evil to come, had weighed on •Cowper. When he 
was called to the bar in 1754, Theodora's father refused sanction 
to his daughter's engagement with Cowper, and he saw her no 
more. Two years later, his father, who had married again, 
died. Cowper's means diminished. He was made a Commis- 
sioner of Bankrupts, which brought him £60 a year. In 1763, 
a cousin, Major Cowper, offered him the offices of Clerk of the 
Journals of the House of Lords, and of Reading Clerk, and 
Clerk of Committees, to which he had a right of presentation. 
He flinched from taking more than one ; and when the major's 
right of nomination to that was questioned, and the fitness of 
the nominee was to be tested, Cowper's nervous excitement 
passed into lunacy, and he was placed, in December, 1763, in an 
asylum at St. Albans. When he recovered, Cowper gave up his 
small office of Commissioner of Bankrupts, and was chiefly 
dependent on his friends. In June, 1765, he went into retired 
lodgings at Huntingdon, where he became acquainted with the 
Rev. Mr. Unwin and his wife, and their son, a young clergyman. 
He went to live with them as friend and lodger. Mrs. Unwin 
became a widow in June, 1767, and presently removed, Cowper 
with her, to Olney, Buckinghamshire, where the Rev. John 
Newton, once master of a slave-vessel, was curate. The 
influence of Mr. Newton, and the death of his own brother, in 
1770, increased Cowper's melancholy. In 1771 Cowper joined 
Newton in the composition of a hymn-book, for which Cowper 
wrote those signed " C." in the volume published in 1779, as 
Olney Hymns. In 1773 Cowper had another attack of insanity, 
in which he attempted suicide. Mrs. Unwin watched over him. 
He took to gardening. A friend gave him three hares, which 
he cherished, and which live yet in his verse. He had also five 
rabbits, two guinea-pigs, two dogs, a magpie, a jay, a starling, 
canaries, pigeons, and goldfinches. In 1779 Mr. Newton left 
Olney. Mrs. Unwin then suggested to Cowper that he should 
write some sustained work in verse, believing that this occupa- 
tion would preserve health for his mind. He wrote the Progress 
of Error — found health in the occupation — and wrote on Truth, 
Table Talk, Expostulation, these pieces being all written 
between December, 1780, and the following March. They were 
sent to a publisher who asked for more. Then Hope and Charity 
were added ; Co?iversatio?i and Retireinent while the book was 
being printed ; and in March, 1782, William Cowper, aged fifty, 
first joined the company of English poets. Lady Austin, a 

D D D 



866 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1770 

baronet's widow, sister-in-law of a clergyman near Olney, had 
then become Cowper's friend. Her liveliness cured his low 
spirits ; she set him laughing with the story of John Gilpin. 
When he went to bed, it amused him half through the night, 
and next morning it was turned into the best of playful ballads. 
Lady Austin advised him to give up the couplet, and write 
something in blank verse. " Set me a subject, then," said he. 
" Oh, you can write on anything. Take the Sofa." So Covvper 
began the best of his poems, and called it The Task, begun 
in the summer of 1783, finished in 1784, and published in 1785. 
In 1784 he began his Translation of Homer. Mrs. Unwin's 
jealousy had obliged Cowper to deny himself the wholesome 
friendship of Lady Austin. Work at Homer was his chief 
security for health. The Homer, in blank verse, was pub- 
lished in 1 791, and ^1,000 paid for it. Then Mrs. Unwin was 
seized with palsy. Cowper's mind suffered again. He battled 
with insanity ; planned work upon Milton ; but sank again into 
painful sickness of mind, from which, after Mrs. Unwin's death, 
in 1796, only revision of his Homer gave relief. "I may as 
well do this," he said, "for I can do nothing else ;" and worked 
on sadly till his death in 1800. The rising spirit of the time 
speaks even from the pure strain of Cowper in his solitude. 
He denounced the Bastile. " My ear is pained," he said, 

" My soul is sick with every day's report, 
Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled." 

63. William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, on 
the 7th of April, 1770, second son of John Wordsworth, attorney 
and law-agent to Sir James Lowther, afterwards Earl of Lons- 
dale. His mother, Anne, was only daughter of William Cook- 
son, mercer, of Penrith. Wordsworth's grandfather had come 
into Westmoreland out of a Yorkshire family. From 1770 to 

1778, when his mother died of consumption, Wordsworth spent 
his infancy and early boyhood at Cockermouth, and sometimes 
with his mother's parents at Penrith. He was the only one of 
her five children about whom she was anxious ; for he was, he 
says, of a stiff, moody, violent temper. He was bold in outdoor 
sports ; and, free to read what he pleased, read Fielding through 
in his boyhood, " Don Quixote," " Gil Bias," " Gulliver's Travels," 
and the " Tale of a Tub." After home teaching at a dame 
school, and by a Rev. Mr. Gilbanks, Wordsworth was sent, in 

1779, to Hawkshead School, in the Vale of Esthwaite, in Lan- 
cashire. Boys at the school lodged in neighbouring cottages, 



toad. 1800.] COWPER. BURKE. WORDSWORTH. 867 

and Wordsworth lodged with an old dame, Anne Tyson, who 
lived to be eighty, and whom he honoured afterwards with loving 
recollection in his " Prelude." Wordsworth was a boy in the 
days of the American War of Independence, by which, and by 
the later struggle of the French Revolution, the chief energies ot 
Burke were stirred into action. 

64. Edmund Burke, the son of an attorney at Dublin, 
was born in 1730, educated first at a famous school kept by 
Abraham Shackleton, a member of the Society of Friends, at 
Ballitore, in Kildare, then at Trinity College, Dublin, where he' 
was fellow-student with Goldsmith, and graduated as B.A. in 
1748, M.A. in 175 1. In 1750 he came to study law in London, 
To aid his means of entering into society he contributed to 
periodicals. In 1756 he published as a satire upon Bolingbroke 
(§ 20), whose works Mallet had published in 1753, and against 
the new turn of thought in France (§ 46, 47), A Vindication 
of Natural Society, or a View of the Miseries and Evils 
arising to Mankind from every species of Artificial Society. 
In a letter to Lord * * * , by a late Noble Writer. This piece 
of irony was followed in the same year by Burke's Philoso- 
phical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime 
and Beautiful. This continued the form of speculation of 
which Addison had given the first example in his Essays on 
Imagination (ch. xi. § 33), and worked out with ingenuity and 
eloquence of style, a theory that sense of beauty is associated 
with relaxation, terror with contraction, of the fibres of the body. 
Burke's health suffered ; there were signs of consumption ; and 
he was received at Bath into the house of an Irish physician. 
Dr. Nugent, whose daughter he married in the spring of 1757. 
In January, 1758, his only son Richard was born. Burke re- 
sumed work in London, and on Christmas Day, 1758, first dined 
with Dr. Johnson, thenceforth his warm friend, at Garrick's 
house. In June, 1759, he started the Amtual Register, and was 
its chief writer and editor for several years. In 1761 he was 
appointed Private Secretary to W T illiam Gerard Hamilton, then 
become chief Secretary in Ireland, For his help to the Irish 
Government Burke received in 1763 a pension of ^300 a year, 
which he resigned when he had held it two years, because he 
found it was regarded as a pledge of servitude, Burke became 
one of the first members of the literary club founded in 1764 at 
the Turk's Head in Gerrard Street, Soho : Goldsmith and its 
founders, Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds, were among the 

D D D 2 



b68 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1770 

other members. A Mr. William Fitzherbert was so much im- 
pressed by Burke's powers, as shown at the Turk's Head Club, 
that he recommended him to the Marquis of Rockingham, who 
became Premier in July, 1765, as private secretary. Another 
of Burke's admirers at the same time gave him a seat in 
Parliament for Wendover. Lord Rockingham felt Burke's power 
and used his counsel in dealing with the American difficulty. 
Parliament in the beginning of 1764 had voted its right to tax 
the colonies ; it proceeded to tax sugar and other articles of 
colonial import, and passed a Stamp Act which had been pro- 
posed some time before. The American colonies protested 
vigorously, and the first Congress of the colonies produced a 
" Declaration of Rights and Liberties" on the 19th of October, 
1765. Burke, who dreaded revolution in all forms, reverenced 
all old institutions, and was by nature a conservative, advised 
the avoidance of collision by a compromise. Great Britain 
should assert the right to tax, but at the same time abstain from 
using it. Accordingly, the Stamp Act was repealed, and an Act 
was passed asserting the legislative power of Great Britain. Lord 
Rockingham's ministry then gave place, in July, 1766, to that of 
Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and Burke defended its policy in A 
Short Account of a late short Administration. To the liberality 
of Lord Rockingham Burke owed the means of buying in 1768, 
for ,£23,000, the estate at Beaconsfield. His heart was set upon 
founding a family, his hope all rested upon his one son Richard. 
Burke was among those wrongly suspected of authorship of 
the Letters of Junius, which appeared in the Public Adver- 
tiser, with bold denunciation of the men in power, between 
1769 and 1772, and are now often ascribed to Sir Philip 
Francis. His policy of conciliation caused Burke to be ap- 
pointed in 1 77 1 agent for New York, while the English Govern- 
ment was making the breach with the colonies more hopeless. 
In 1773 he published Thoughts on the Cause of the Present 
Discontents, in which he maintained that government ought to 
be in the hands of an aristocracy. On the 19th of April, 1774, 
he made a famous Speech on America?i Taxation, including a 
history of the question for the last eleven years. " Again and 
again," he said, " revert to your old principles ; seek peace and 
ensue it . . . Be content to bind America by laws of trade ; 
you have always done it. Let this be your reason for binding their 
trade. Do not burden them by taxes ; you were not used to do 
so from the beginning. Let this be your reason for not taxing. 



to a.d. 1784.3 EDMUND BURKE. SAMUEL JOHNSON. 869 

These are the arguments of states and kingdoms. Leave 
the rest to the schools." In 1774 Burke became member tor 
Bristol, and his colleague, who had to follow him as orator on 
the hustings, in thanking the electors, contented himself with, 
"Gentlemen, I say ditto to Mr. Burke ! ditto to Mr. Burke !" 
On the 22nd of March, 1775, Burke laid before the House of 
Commons thirteen resolutions for reconcilement with America, 
and made a famous Speech on American Conciliatio?i. He was 
opposed by his friend Samuel Johnson, who in this year pub- 
lished Taxation no Tyranny. In June, 1775, George Washington 
was appointed commander-in-chief of the forces of the United 
Colonies. On the 2nd of July, 1776, the colonies declared their 
independence, and established as free and independent the United 
States oi America. The American War then followed to its 
end in the recognition of American Independence by treaties 
signed on the 3rd of September, 1783, when Wordsworth was 
thirteen years old. 

65. Samuel Johnson (§ 51) died in the following year. He 
had paid a Visit to the Hebrides, and described it in the year 
before he wrote his pamphlet on the American question. In 1777, 
when he was sixty-nine years old, the booksellers asked him to 
write lives of the poets since the Commonwealth, to be prefixed 
to new editions of their works in a series of volumes. The Lives 
oj the Poets appeared in 1779-81, and represent the clearness of 
Johnson's critical power, and the natural force of his style in later 
life. He had his own strong predilections, and was himself in 
his judgments, but he tried honestly to be fair. " They will ask 
you to write the life of some dunce," Boswell said : " will you do 
that, sir ? " "Yes, and say he was a dunce." When Johnson was 
asked to name his own price for his work, he fixed it at ^200 ; 
the publishers gave more, but still much less than the work was 
worth. Johnson, true to his own maxim, "I hate a complainer," 
was thoroughly content. " It is not," he said, " that they gave 
me too little, but that I wrote too much." In 1782 his friend 
Levitt died. In 1783 his friend Mrs. Williams died, and he had 
a stroke of palsy. In 1784 he died himself. Opium was given 
to him in his last illness to relieve pain ; he asked if it could 
restore health, and being told that it could not, said, " Then I 
will take no more, for I wish to meet my God with an unclouded 
mind." The dread of loss of intellect remained to the last. He 
turned his prayers into Latin to assure himself that he was still 
master of his faculties. On the 13th of December he whispered, 



870 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a-D. 1787 

" Jam moriturus " (Now I am about to die), and fell into a 
quiet sleep. In that sleep God took the soul of a true servant, 
who had lived in his own different way, like Milton, as ever in 
his great Taskmaster's eye. 

66. William Wordsworth. (§ 63) was then at school at 
Hawkshead, become an orphan by his father's death in 1787. 
The father bequeathed only a considerable debt from his em- 
ployer, paid to his children long afterwards, when Lord Lonsdale 
died. In October, 1787, Wordsworth's uncles sent him to 
Cambridge, where the university life of that time fell below his 
young ideal. He spent his first summer vacation, 1788, in the 
old cottage at Esthwaite with Dame Tyson ; his second vacation 
he spent with his uncles at Penrith, who were educating him, 
and who designed him for the Church. But that was the year 
when the Fall of the Bastile (July 14th, 1789) resounded through 
Europe, and young hearts leaped with enthusiastic hope. It was 
with young Wordsworth as with his Solitary in the Excursion, 
Men had been questioning the outer and the inner life, 

" The intellectual power through words and things 
Went sounding on. a dim and perilous way," 

and men were roused from that abstraction ; 

" For lo ! the dread Bastile, 
With all the chambers in its horrid towers, 
Fell to the ground ; by violence overthrown 
Of indignation and with shouts that drowned 
The crash it made in falling ! From the wreck 
A golden palace rose, or seemed to rise, 
The appointed seat of equitable law 
And mild paternal sway. The potent shock 
I felt : the transformation I perceived, 
As marvellously seized as in that moment 
When, from the blind mist issuing, I beheld 
Glory, beyond all glory ever seen, 
Confusion infinite of heaven and earth, 
Dazzling the soul. Meanwhile, prophetic harps 
In every grove were ringing ' War shall cease ; 
Did ye not hear that conquest is abjured ? 
Bring garlands, bring forth choicest flowers to deck 
The tree of Liberty.' My heart rebounded ; 
My melancholy voice the chorus joined — 
" Be joyful all ye nations in all lands, 
Ye that are capable of joy be glad ! . 

Henceforth, whate'er is wanting in yourselves 
In others ye shall promptly find ; and all, 
Enriched by mutual and reflected wealth, 
Shall with one heart honour their common kind." 

His next holiday Wordsworth took in France, with his 



to a.d. 1794. ] FRENCH RE VOL UTION. WORDS IVOR TH. 87 1 

friend Robert Jones, each carrying a stick, his luggage in a 
handkerchief, and ^20 in his pocket. They landed at Calais on 
the eve of the fete of the Federation, July 14, anniversary of the 
Fall of the Bastile, when the king was to swear fidelity to the 
Constitution. All that he saw raised Wordsworth's enthusiasm 
as they travelled through France to the Alps. 

"A glorious time, 
A happy time that was ; triumphant looks 
Were then the common language of all eyes ; 
As if awaked from sleep, the nations hailed 
Their great expectancy." 

{Prelude, Book VI.) 

67. Wordsworth came home, graduated as B.A. in 1791 ; 
visited his friend Jones in the Vale of Clwydd, and made an 
excursion in North Wales. In November he was in Paris again, 
went thence to Orleans, to learn French where there were fewer 
English. At Orleans, where he formed intimate friendship with 
the Republican general Beaupuis, at Blois, and at Paris, where 
he arrived a month after the September massacres, he spent 
thirteen months. In events terrible to him he saw the 
excesses of reaction, but he sympathised so strongly with the 
Brissotins that he would have made common cause with them, 
and perhaps have perished, if he had not been compelled to 
return to London before the execution of the king, January 21, 
1793. After that event England prepared war against the 
Revolution, and Edmund Burke was leader of the war-cry. 
Burke had been twice a minister as Paymaster of the Forces, 
and was foremost prosecutor in the seven years' trial of Warren 
Hastings, which ended with his acquittal, in April, 1795. He 
first expressed in the House, in February, 1790, his desire to 
check the French Revolution by armed interference. In October, 
1790, he published his Reflections on the Revolution in France. 
This pamphlet was answered by Thomas Paine with the 
first part of The Rights of Man; by James Mackintosh, 
afterwards Sir James, then a young man of twenty-six, with 
his Vindicia* Gallicoe. In December, 1791, Burke published 
Thoughts on French Affairs. In 1794 occurred the calamity of 
Burke's life, that crushed all his energy. He had lived in his 
son Richard, then thirty-six years old, a barrister, for whom, 
in July, 1794, he vacated his seat at Malton. Richard was to 
outshine his father, who was anxious to become Lord Beacons- 
field, that he might transmit the title to his son ; and that his 
son, uniting himself with the aristocracy, might realize his own 



872 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1783 

highest ideal. Because it crossed this hope, Burke had 
forbidden his son's marriage to a young lady who had lived in 
the house as companion to his mother, and whom he loved. 
Richard obeyed. On the 26th of July there was a dinner party 
at Burke's house, to celebrate his son's return as member for 
Malton — father and mother alike blind to the fact that he was 
dying of consumption. The truth was urged on them. Richard 
was taken to a house at Brompton, and, as he lay there dying, 
he heard his father and mother in loud lament in the next room, 
rose, dressed, and tottered in to them, that he might seem well 
and cheer them. He spoke comfort, heard the rustle of the 
trees outside, said, "What is that— does it rain ?" then, seeing 
what it was, he repeated twice the lines of Milton that his father 
had delighted in : 

" His praise, ye winds, that from four quarters blow, 
Breathe soft or loud ; and wave your tops, ye pines, 
With every plant, in sign of worship wave," 

then bowed his own head in sign of worship, sank on his 
mother's lap, and died. Burke cared no more to be Lord 
Beaconsfield. He was a broken man for the remaining three 
years of his life, and died in July, 1797. 

68. Wordsworth and other young men of the day were 
bitterly indignant at the alliance of their country with despotic 
powers to put down the Revolution. That war of the Revolution, 
which began on the 1st of February, 1 793, and ended at the Peace 
of Amiens on the 27th of March, 1802, was in his eyes an 
unholy war, and laid the foundations of the patriotic war against 
Napoleon which followed, from the 29th of April, 1803, to the 
battle of Waterloo, on the 18th of June, 181 5. In 1793, after his 
return from France, Wordsworth published Descriptive Sketches 
duri?ig a Pedestrian Tour on the Italian, Swiss, and Savoy ai'd 
Alps j also, an Evening Walk, an Epistle in Verse. In May, 
1 794, he was in London, planning a literary and political miscel- 
lany, called " The Philanthropist/' which was to be Republican, 
not Revolutionary. In November, he was looking for em- 
ployment on an Opposition newspaper, that he might pour 
out his heart against the war. But presently he heard of 
the sickness of a young friend at Penrith, Raisley Calvert, 
like himself the son of a law agent. Wordsworth went to 
Penrith and nursed him. Calvert was dying, and had ^900 
to leave, a sum that would make Wordsworth master of his 
fortunes. He died in January, 1795, and left W T ords worth 



toa.d. 1797.] BURKE. WORDSWORTH. ROBERT BURNS. 873 

his money. Then Wordsworth resolved, by frugal living, to 
secure full independence, and to be a poet. In the autumn he 
and his sister Dorothy settled at Racedown, near Crewkerne, a 
retired place with a post once a week. And thus Wordsworth 
began his career at the time when that of Burns was ending. 

69. Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759, two 
miles south of the town of Ayr. His father, William Burness, 
had been a gentleman's gardener near Edinburgh, went to 
Ayrshire, married Agnes Brown, in December, 1757; was then 
gardener and overlooker to a Mr. Ferguson, of Doonholm. 
Robert was his first son. In 1766, when Robert Burns was 
six or seven years old, his father, with ^100 lent by his 
master, took the farm of Mount Oliphant, in the parish of Ayr. 
He was unsuccessful, and Mr. Ferguson's death left him in the 
hands of a harsh factor. Robert Burns was sent, at six years 
old, with his next brother, Gilbert, to a school at Alloway Mill 
for a few months ; then taught with children of neighbours by a 
Mr. Murdoch ; then by their father, a devout, hardheaded Scot, 
with a touch of obstinacy in him. Then they were sent to 
school on alternate days for a quarter, at Dalrymple, two or 
three miles off, for writing-lessons. About 1777 the lease of 
Mount Oliphant was broken, and William Burness went to 
Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton, where his temper embittered 
litigation as to the conditions of the lease. Robert was sent to 
Kirkoswald parish school to learn mensuration, and passed his 
nineteenth summer on a smuggling coast. At home he and his 
brother worked on the farm, and had £j a year each as wages 
from their father, with which to clothe themselves and meet 
other expenses. In 178 1-2 Robert went for six months to 
Irvine to learn flax-dressing. In 1783, at the end of the year, 
three months before their father's death, he and his brother 
Gilbert had taken the farm of Mossgiel, of 119 acres, at £90 
rent, in the neighbouring parish of Mauchline. Robert was 
there four years, during which the farm did not prosper, but the 
poet's genius developed fast. He found a friend in Gavin 
Hamilton, writer, of Mauchline, from whom the farm was 
sub-leased, and joined in a feud of his with Mr. Auld, the 
minister of Mauchline, who was fierce against all heterodox 
opinions. Thus Burns came to write The Holy Fair, the Twa 
Herds, and Holy Willie's Prayer, a scathing satire against self- 
righteous intolerance. To the same period belong Halloween and 
the Collet's Saturday Night, in which his father was the pious 



874 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a.d. 1783 

cotter. Burns drew his notion from The Farmer's Ingle of 
Ronert Ferguson, a Scottish poet, nine years older than him- 
self, son of a draper's clerk at Edinburgh, who had poured out 
his native strain of verse between 1771 and the date of his death 
in a lunatic asylum, in 1774, when he was only twenty-four years 
old. Burns sang to himself also in the days at Mossgiel as he 
drove the plough (completing the verses in his head and writing 
them down when he went home in the evening) his touching 
poems to the Mountain Daisy, that lay in the path of his 
plough, and The Mouse, whose home the ploughshare laid in 
ruins. In the unprosperous farm Burns was thinking of emi- 
gration from his native land when he wrote — 

" But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane, 
In proving foresight may be vain ; 
The best laid schemes of mice and men 

Gang oft agley, 
And leave us nought but grief and pain 
For promised joy. 

" Still thou art blest, compared wi' me 1 
The present only toucheth thee ; 
But, och ! I backward cast my e'e 

On prospects drear, 
And forward, tho' I canna see, 

I guess an' fear !" 

Hopeless of Mossgiel, Robert Burns thought of trying his 
fortune as manager of a plantation in- the West Indies, if he 
could raise money to pay for his passage. Then his brother 
Gilbert suggested that the money might be raised by printing 
the poems he had written. He added a new piece or two, in- 
cluding The Twa Dogs, and the Poems of Robert Burns first 
appeared, printed at Kilmarnock, in the autumn of 1786. At 
the last moment, when Burns was about to leave Scotland, 
a generous letter from Dr. Thomas Blacklock changed his 
destiny. Blacklock was the son of a Scotch bricklayer ; had 
been blinded by small-pox in his infancy, and had developed 
unusual powers through being much read to by his friends. 
When he was nineteen, his father was crushed by the fall of a 
kiln ; and in his desolation he was befriended by Dr. Stevenson, 
of Edinburgh, who enabled him to develop his powers. He 
became a scholar and a poet, was a man of the finest tone of 
mind, and having been made easy by a post in the University, 
he took orders and became D.D. The gentle Blacklock, who 
had also published verse, brought Burns to Edinburgh, and 
found him friends in the University. In April, 1787, a second 



toa.d. 1796.] ROBERT BURNS. 87$ 

edition of his poems was published at Edinburgh, by subscrip- 
tion. Burns was supplied with money, but although then and 
always he yielded too readily to temptation, he held to his 
vocation as a farmer, sent .£200 to his brother to help him at 
Mossgiel, and after a little tour agreed for a farm at Ellisland, 
in March, 1787. Johnson's "Museum of Scottish Song" was 
started in 1787, and to this Burns, whom Nature had made 
greatest among lyric poets, sent lyric after lyric in pure love 
of song, taking no payment, and disdaining the thought of being 
paid for singing. In August he married Jean Armour, who had 
been refused him by her father when he was poor and there 
was scandal in their love ; and then he sang to her : 

" She is a winsome wee thing, 
She is a handsome wee thing. 
She is a bonny wee thing, 

This sweet wee wife o' mine. 
* * * * 

" The warld's wrack we share o't, 
The warstle and the care o't ; 
Wi' her I'll blithely bear it, 

And think my lot divine." 

The wild, wilful, defiant verse, the wanton lines cast in the 
teeth of censure, belonged partly to Burns's own nature, partly to 
the tumult of his time ; but out of the depths of his soul came 
many a strain of thought and feeling that had taken root there 
in the poor farm at Mount Oliphant, when, "the cheerful supper 
done, with serious grace the saint, the father, and the husband 
prayed." Burns asked for and got a place in the Excise, in aid 
of his income from the farm at Ellisland, but it took him away 
from his farm-work. Captain Grose, the antiquary, came to 
his farm when gathering materials for his Antiquities of Scotland, 
published in 1789-91. Burns told him a Galloway legend, and 
gave it him in verse for his book as Tarn o' Shanter. In the 
winter of 1791 Burns was promoted to the Dumfries division of 
the Excise, with ^70 a year, and went with his family to 
Dumfries. Parted from the Nature of which he was poet, 
exposed to the temptations that he was weak to resist, Burns 
failed in health and spirits. War with France was impending. 
Burns felt all the revolutionary fervour and the hope that sprang 
out of the ruins of the Bastile. He had gallantly seized an 
armed smuggling craft, and when her effects were sold he 
bought four small carronades, and sent them as a gift from 
Robert Burns to the French Convention. They were stopped 



876 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. r A .D. 1793 

at Dover, and the too zealous exciseman was admonished. 
The rest is a sad tale of poverty and failing health, until the 
poet's death on the 21st of July, 1796. 

70. William Wordsworth, when, in 1803, he visited the 
grave of Burns, sang of him, in one of his own favourite 
measures, derived from Allan Ramsay and Robert Ferguson, 

" Fresh as the flower, whose modest worth 
He sang, his genius ' glinted ' forth, 
Rose like a star that touching earth, 

For so it seems, 
Doth glorify its humble birth 

With matchless beams. 

" The piercing eye, the thoughtful brow, 
The struggling heart, where be they now? 
Full soon th' aspirant of the plough, 

The prompt, the brave, 
Slept with the obscurest, in the low 

And silent grave. 

" I mourned with thousands, but as one 
More deeply grieved, for he was gone 
Whose light I hailed when first it shone, 

And showed my youth 
How Verse may build a princely throne 

On humble truth." 

Wordsworth was newly settled with his sister at Racedown 
when he heard of the death of Burns. He had just written his 
tragedy of The Bo?'derers (first published in 1842). At Race- 
down, in June, 1797, Coleridge, who had read the " Descriptive 
Sketches," looked in upon Wordsworth and his sister. Each 
young poet felt the genius of the other, and there was soon 
a warm friendship between them. 

71. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, two years and a half 
younger than Wordsworth, was born October 21, 1772, the son 
of the vicar and schoolmaster at Ottery St. Mary. His father 
died when he was nine years old. In the following year he 
had a presentation to Christ's Hospital from an old pupil of his 
father's, and was educated there till 1791. Then he was sent 
to Jesus College, Cambridge, and obtained, in the summer, Sir 
W. Brown's gold medal for a Greek ode on the Slave Trade. 
In 1793 he passed the summer at Ottery, wrote "Songs of 
the Pixies;" and returned, in October, to Cambridge. In 
December, being in despair over his poverty and ^100 of 
college debt, he left Cambridge, and enlisted as Private Silas 
Titus Comberbach, in the 15th Light Dragoons. He was found 



toa.d. I797-] WORDSWORTH. COLERIDGE SOUTH EY. 877 

at last, his discharge was obtained in April, 1794, and he went 
back to Cambridge, gave up hope of a fellowship, but could not 
take orders because he had become a Unitarian. He resolved 
to join Citizen Southey, and turn author. After a ramble in 
Wales he went to see Southey at Bristol. 

72. Robert Southey, nearly two years younger than Cole- 
ridge, was born at Bristol, August 12, 1774, the son of an unpros- 
perous linendraper. He was educated by help of his mother's 
maiden aunt, Miss Tyler, until 1788, when Miss Tyler, and an 
uncle, the Rev. Herbert Hill, chaplain to the English factory at 
Lisbon, sent him to Westminster School. He was expelled from 
the school for a jest on the head master's faith in flogging, con- 
tributed to a school magazine called the Flagellant. His uncle 
Hill thought he had been hardly treated, and resolved that 
Robert Southey should still have justice done to his unusual 
abilities. He was sent, therefore, to Balliol College, Oxford, in 
1792, soon after his father's death. There he distinguished him- 
self by his fervent zeal for the cause of the French Revolution, the 
general overthrow of tyrannies, and the re-establishment of the 
world on a right basis. At Easter, 1794, Coleridge came to him, 
and sympathized with all his aspirations, joined him afterwards 
at Bristol, was introduced to Robert Lovell, George Bennett, and 
other kindred spirits. In this year Southey published his 
revolutionary dramatic poem of Wat Tyler, and joined Coleridge 
in his writing of the Fall of Robespierre. The new associates 
agreed that as the old state of things in Europe would impede 
prompt settlement in social questions, the wisest thing they could 
possibly do would be to proceed to the New World, and there, 
on virgin soil, establish a community in which all should be 
equal and all good. From three Greek words meaning "all- 
equal-government," they called their proposed state a Pantiso- 
cracy. Wives, of course, would be needed, and there were the 
three Miss Frickers, eligible wives. One of these ladies was an 
actress, one kept a little school, one was a dressmaker. Lovell 
would marry one, Coleridge one, and Southey one. They would 
and they did. Sarah Fricker became Mrs. Coleridge, and Edith 
Fricker was to become Mrs. Southey, when Aunt Tyler had 
been told of the young enthusiast's intentions. Aunt Tyler 
raged, and discarded Southey. Good-natured Uncle Hill held 
by the youth, in whom he saw " everything you could wish a 
young man to have, excepting common sense and prudence," 
and as (for want of funds) the Pantisocrats could not get to the 



»7° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1796 

Susquehannah, tempted him with the offer ot a visit to Lisbon. 
Change of scene, and absence from Bristol, might suffice to 
cure his fever. Southey went with his uncle, but privately- 
married Edith Fricker the day before he started. When he 
came home, in 1796, he claimed his wife, and at once began to 
seek his living as an indefatigable writer. He produced at 
Bristol his first epic, Joan of Arc, and as he worked on with 
patient industry, and saw much to disenchant him, he became, 
in time, a supporter of the old order of things. 

73. Coleridge, after the break-up of the Pantisocracy, wrote 
patriotism, preached and travelled to obtain subscribers for a 
periodical outpouring of thought, to be called The Watchman, 
which appeared from the ist ot March to the 13th of May, 
1796, in which year also there were Poems of his published. He 
earned money by writing verse in a newspaper. In September 
of that year, his son, Hartley, was born. Coleridge had rare 
powers as poet and thinker, and a gift of speech that made 
them felt in daily intercourse by those about him. To be near 
a substantial helper, Mr. Thomas Poole, he went to live in a 
cottage at Nether Stowey, on the Bristol Channel. There was 
his home when he called on Wordsworth and his sister, and 
so strong a friendship was established that the house at Race- 
down was given up, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth 
went to live at Alfoxden, to be near Coleridge. In the autumn 
of 1797, Coleridge, with Wordsworth and his sister, started 
from Alfoxden for Linton, and in the course of the walk The 
Ancient lllarmer was planned as a poem to be sent to the 
London Magazine, and bring five pounds towards expenses of 
the little holiday. Coleridge made the story out of a dream of 
his friend, Mr. Cruikshank. Wordsworth suggested introducing 
into it the crime of shooting the albatross, because he had been 
reading about albatrosses in Shelvocke's Voyage (1726) a day or 
two before. Wordsworth also suggested the navigation of the 
ship by dead men, and furnished here and there a line. The 
poem grew till it was too important to be given to a magazine. 
The friends then began to plan the volume of Lyrical Ballads, 
first published in September, 1798. It included the "Ancient 
Mariner," with Wordsworth's " We are Seven," the " Idiot Boy," 
&c, written with distinct sense of a principle that deliberately 
condemned and set aside the poetic " diction ; ' of the eighteenth 
century. As much pains was taken by Wordsworth to avoid the 
diction as other men take to produce it. The poet, he argued, 



TOA.D. i8oo.] COLERIDGE. WORDSWORTH. 879 

-thinks and feels in the spirit of human passions, and differs from 
others in a greater promptness to think and feel without imme- 
diate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing 
such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him in that 
manner. His painting of men and nature must show his percep- 
tion of deep truths ; but to do that fitly, it must be true itself to 
the life of his fellow-men in every imagined incident, and speak 
the common language. A selection, he said, of the language 
really spoken by man, wherever it is made with taste and feeling, 
will itself form a distinction far greater than would at first be 
imagined, and will entirely separate the composition from the 
vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life. For if the poet's subject 
be judiciously chosen, it will naturally, and upon fit occasion, 
lead him to passions the language of which, if selected truly and 
judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and variegated, and 
alive with metaphors and figures. In their common work, 
Coleridge was to give the sense of reality to visions of the fancy, 
Wordsworth to make the soul speak from the common things of 
life. The first edition of the " Lyrical Ballads " was published 
by Southey's friend, Cottle, at Bristol. The second edition, con- 
taining only Wordsworth's work, was published in London, in 
1800, as Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems. After the founding 
of the Edinburgh Review in 1802, Wordsworth had to fight for 
his doctrine, and stormed all the positions of the hostile critics. 

74. For the first edition of the " Lyrical Ballads," in Sep- 
tember, 1798, there was some money paid. Wordsworth had 
thirty guineas for his part, and a holiday abroad was resolved on. 
Wordsworth and his sister, with Coleridge and a friend of his, 
crossed, in the autumn of 1798, from Yarmouth to Hamburg, 
where they stayed a few days, and met Klopstock several times. 
Coleridge went north, to Ratzburg ; Wordsworth and his sister 
went south, and wintered, for cheapness, at Goslar, near the Hartz 
mountains. There, in the spring, Wordsworth wrote the opening 
lines of that autobiographical poem which was published after 
his death, in 1850, as The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind. 
His purpose was to review thoughtfully the course of his own 
mind through surrounding influences, and now that he had, with 
the " Lyrical Ballads/' fairly begun work as a poet, to determine 
what his aim should be, what was the highest duty he could 
hope to do in his own calling. This work of retrospect and self- 
examination was not complete until the winter of 1805-6. Mean- 
while he married. After his return from Goslar, in the spring of 



8 So A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1800 

1799, his first visit was to the family of Mary Hutchinson, his 
cousin, his old playmate and companion at dame school, and 
his future wife. He then settled with Dorothy in a small cot- 
tage at Grasmere, to which, in 1802 he brought his wife. It was 
then that he finished the " Prelude," and after tracing his life 
from childhood to the days of his enthusiastic sympathy with 
the French Revolution, showed how, after his return, the in- 
fluence of his sister Dorothy, and communion with nature, 
brought him calmer sense of the great harmony of creation and 
of the place of man in the great whole. His interest in man 
grew deeper, as he cared less for the abstract questions about 
life, and more for the real man ; 

" Studious more to see 
Great truths, than touch and handle little ones. " 

We have fought our battle, and won freedom enough to work 
on and show the use of freedom — to what end the powers of 
civil polity were given. All we have now to do is to remove 
hindrances and furnish aids to the development of each individual 
Englishman and Englishwoman. Let each unit become better 
and wiser, and the whole nation will grow in strength and 
wisdom by the growth of its constituent atoms. There are 
millions helpless or mischievous because not born to conditions 
which have made the lives of others happy. We are not idly to 
lament "what man has made of man," but actively to mend the 
mischief. Whoever makes his own life and its influence whole- 
some, or in any way helps to make lives about him wholesome, 
adds thereby to the strength of England, and is doing the true 
work of the nineteenth century. Having gained, said Words- 
worth, 

" A more judicious knowledge of the worth 
And dignity of individual man ; 
No composition of the brain, but man — 
Of whom we read, the man whom we behold 
With our own eyes — I could not but inquire, 
Not with less interest than heretofore, 
But greater, though in spirit more subdued, 
Why is this glorious creature to be found 
One only in ten thousand ? What one is 
Why may not millions be ? " 

Upon this thought Wordsworth rested. Here, also, this nar- 
rative draws to its close, touching the key-note of the days in 
which we live. Wordsworth made it the one work of his life as 
a poet to uphold the " dignity of individual man," strengthen 



TOA.D.1813.] WORDSWORTH. CAMPBELL. CRABBE. SCOTT. 88l 

tne sense of all the harmonies of nature, and show how, among 
them all, when taking its true place, 

"The mind of man becomes 
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth 
On which he dwells, above this frame of things 
(Which, 'mid all revolution in the hopes 
And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged) 
In beauty exalted, as it is itself 
Of quality and fabric more divine." 

As the storm of revolution rolled through Europe, hearts beat 
high. The United States became independent. Poland rose. 
Even in St. Domingo Toussaint l'Ouverture led the vain fight 
for freedom. Then the Greeks struggled to be free. Belgium 
won independence. Great Britain abolished slavery in her pos- 
sessions. The Italians, the Hungarians rose. Stirred by the 
living energies about him, Thomas Campbell, a young man 
of two-and-twenty, sang, in the last year of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, The Pleasures of Hope : 

" Ye that the rising morn invidious mark, 
And hate the light, because your deeds are dark ; 
Ye that expanding truth invidious view, 
And think, or wish, the song of Hope untrue ; 
Perhaps your little hands presume to span 
The march of Genius and the power of man ; 
Perhaps ye watch, at Pride's unhallow'd shrine, 
Her victims newly slain, and thus divine : — 
Here shall thy triumph, Genius, cease, and here 
Truth, Science, Virtue, close your short career. 
Tyrants ! in vain ye trace the wizard ring ; 
In vain ye limit Mind's unwearied spring." 

The couplet through which young Campbell poured his new 
music, and through which, in all their naked wretchedness, 
the sorrows of the poor were uttered to the rich by George 
Cralbbe, who had lived among them and felt what they were 
— that measure, dear to former critics of the time now ended, 
was put to new use. It was cast aside, too, for bold freedom 
in the revival of old measures and fearless experiment with 
new. There were not only the free measures of Coleridge in 
Christabel (1806), of Walter Scott in Marmion (1808), of 
Byron in the Giaour (181 3), and their like, but, in his Tha- 
laba (1802), and Curse of Kehama (18 10), Southey revelled 
in defiance of all past metrical rule, and quoted from Wither : 

" For I will for no man's pleasure 
Change a syllable or measure. 
Pedants shall not tie my strains 
To our antique poet's veins 



882 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1813 

Being born as free as these, 
I will sing as I shall please." 

Reaction against a too formal life led many with ill-regulated 
minds to an extravagant defiance of conventional law or con- 
ventional opinion. But their strength was the truth that was 
in them. Whatever Byron's faults, the soul of his time stirred 
in him. The pages in his Childe Harold (1812-18) that won 
him fame were those in which he represented his own time 
with an enthusiasm that sent him to die among the Greeks 
at Missolonghi. It speaks from his Ode on Waterloo ; 

" But the heart and the mind, 
And the voice of mankind, 
Shall arise in communion— 
And who shall resist that proud union ? 
The time is past when swords subdued — 
Man may die— the soul's renewed." 

The deep stir of life was again filling the land with song. Young 
John Keats, in his short journey to the grave (1796—1821), 
began to seek expression for the thought that the reign of the 
old gods, the Titans, must pass away as the new life glows in 
Hyperion : 

" As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far 
Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs ; 
And as we show beyond that heaven and earth 
In form and shape compact and beautiful, • 
In will, in action free, companionship, 
And thousand other signs of purer life ; 
So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, 
A power more strong in beauty, born of us 
And fated to excel us, as we pass 
In glory that old Darkness." 

Disdaining bondage to imperfect forms, and stung by tyranny, 
the pure spirit of Percy Bysshe Shelley defied God, yet 
declared Him in his verse. He lived for a far ideal of beauty, 
in which love and truth should be supreme : 

" The one remains, the many change and pass ; 
Heaven's light for ever shines, Earth's shadows fly; 
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, 
Stains the white radiance of Eternity, 
Until Death tramples it to fragments. Die, 
It thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek.'' 

What Shelley sought was love like that of Heaven, and a justice 
that remembers mercy. He died in 1822. 

As the tumult lessened, the calm voices spoke. A poet who 
sings to us still, sang in his youth of the life and work oi men. 



to a.d. 1840.] BYRON. THE BROWNINGS. TENNYSON. 883 

In the second of his two poems, Paracelsus (1835) and Sordello 
(1840), Robert Browning wrote. 

" God has conceded two sights to a man — 
One of men's whole work, time's completed plan ; 
The other of the minute's work, man's first 
Step to the plan's completeness." 

He taught, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning— the best 
English poetess — afterwards taught, in Aurora Leigh (1856), 
that we must be content to do our day's work in our day, 
and the more quietly for the far vision of what may be, which 
should include conviction that 

" No earnest work 
Of any honest creature, howbeit weak, 
Imperfect, ill-adapted, fails so much, 
It is not gathered, as a grain of sand 
To enlarge the sum of human actions used 
For carrying out God's ends." 

Alfred Tennyson, in his In Memoriam (1850), has based 
upon a human love a strain that rises step by step from the 
first grief of the bereaved to the. full sense of immortality and 
of the upward labour of the race of man, each true soul being 

"A closer link 
Betwixt us and the crowning race 
Of those that, eye to eye, shall look 
On knowledge." 

Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1859—73) is one great allegory of 
a divine voice in each man's soul that should be king over his 
passions and desires. In prose and verse there is one mind. 
Jane Austen, painting only from the life she knew, was 
contrasting Sense and Sensibility (181 1), attacking Pride and 
Prejudice (181 3) in novels, of which Scott wrote in his " Diary" 
after their writer's death in 1817, "That young lady had a 
talent for describing the involvements, feelings, and characters 
of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met 
with. The big bow-wow I can do myself like any one going, 
but the exquisite touch which renders common-place things and 
characters interesting from the truth of the description and the 
sentiment is denied me." And there was the bright romance 
and poetry of " the big bow-wow " in Scott himself, the shrewd 
humour, the genial sense of life that made the sequence of his 
novels, from Waverley, in 18 14, to his death, in 1832, as one of 
the powers of Nature for the health of men. Then Charles 
Dickens sought to undo wrong and quicken goodwill among 

E E E 2 



884 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1770 

men ; "William Makepeace Thackeray attacked the petty- 
vanities and insincerities of life, and with a cynical air up- 
held an ideal opposite as his own inmost simplicity and kind- 
liness to the life of the men who scorn their neighbours and 
consider themselves worldly wise. Now, too, George Eliot 
in all her novels instils her own faith in "plain living and high 
thinking," by showing that it is well in life to care greatly for 
something worthy of our care ; choose worthy work, believe in 
it with all our souls, and labour to live through inevitable 
checks and hindrances, true to our best sense of the highest 
life we can attain. If Thomas Carlyle involves more 
in his condemnation of the times than may deserve his 
censure, his war is the true war of his century, with the host 
of false conventionalities that yet remain, with all that stands 
in the way of the work now chiefly left for us to do. " Men 
speak," he says, " too much about the world. Each one of 
us here, let the world go how it will, and be victorious or 
not victorious, has he not a life of his own to lead ? One 
life, a little gleam of time between two eternities, no second 
chance to us for evermore. It were well for us not to live as 
fools and simulacra, but as wise and realities. The world's 
being saved will not save us, nor the world's being lost destroy 
us. We should look to ourselves : there being great merit 
here in the duty of staying at home. And on the whole, to 
say the truth, I never heard of worlds being saved in any 
other way. That mania of saving worlds is itself a piece of 
the eighteenth century with its windy sentimentalism • let us 
not follow it too far." 

To these notes on the spirit of our Literature in the nine- 
teenth century I must be content to add some indication of its 
substance in the form of Annals. 



ANNALS. 



Henry Mackenzie (b. 1745, d. 1831), The Man of Feeling, 1771. Sir Joshua 
Reynolds (b. 1723, d. 1792), Discourses, 1772. Edmund Burke, Thotights on the 
Present Discontents, 1773. Joseph Priestley (b. 1733, d. 1804), Natural and Re- 
vealed Religion, 1774. Burke, Speech on American Conciliation; Johnson, 
Taxation no Tyranny, 1775. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776. Sheridan's 
School for Scandal, 1777. Frances Burney, Evelina, 1778. Johnson's Lives of the 
Poets, 1779 — 1781. Hannah Cowley (b. 1743, d. 1809), The Belle's Stratagem, 



to a.d. 1804.] ANNALS. 885 

1780. Erasmus Danvin, The Botanic Garden, 1781. William Cowper, John Gilpin, 
1782 ; The Task, 1783. Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, 1784. George Crabbe, The 
Newspaper, 1785. Robert Burns, Poems {printed at Kilmarnock), 1786, {printed 
at Edinbtcrgh) 1787. Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 
completed 1788. Gilbert White (b. 1720, d. 1793), Natural History of Selborne, 
1789. Henry James Pye (b. 1745, d. 1813) succeeds Thomas Warton as Poet 
Laureate, 1790. Edmund Malone (b. 1741, d. 1812), Edition of Shakespeare, 1790. 
Elizabeth Inchbald (b. 1753, d. 1821), A Simple Story, 1791. Mary Wollstonecraft, 
Vindication of the Rights oj Women, 1792. William Wordsworth, Descriptive 
Sketches, and An Everting Walk, 1793. Robert Southey, Wat Tyler; S. T. Cole- 
ridge, The Fall of Robespierre, 1794. Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk, 1795. 
Walter Scott, translation of Burger's Leonora and the Wild Huntsman, 1796. 
William Gifford begins editing the Anti-Jacobin, 1797 {Poetry of the Anti- Jacobin, 
1801). Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 1798. 



1799. Thomas Campbell (b. 1777, d. 1844), Pleasures of Hope. Robert Southey, 
(b. 1774, d. 1843), Poems, with Robert Lovell. Walter Scott (b. 1771, d. 
1832), Translation of Goethe's Gotz von Berlichingen. Matthew Gregory 
Lewis (b. 1775, d. 1818), Tales of Terror. William Cobbett (b. 1762, d. 
1835), Works of Peter Porcupine. William Godwin (b. 1756, d. 1836), St. 
Leon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Pizarro, from Kotzebue. Erasmus 
Darwin (b. 1731, d. 1802), Phytologia [Botanic Garden, 1781]. 

1800. William Wordsworth (b. 1770, d. 1850), Lyrical Ballads, 2nd Ed. Robert 

Bloomfield (b. 1766, d. 1823), Farmers Boy. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
(b. 1772, d. 1834), Translation of Schiller's Wallenstein. Walter Scott, 
Eve of St. John. Thomas Moore (b. 1779, d. 1852), Anacreon. 

1801. Robert Southey, Poems, 2 Vols. M. G. Lewis, Tales of Wonder. Dugald 

Stewart (b. 1753, d. 1828), Life of W. Robertson {Philosophy of the Human 
Mind, Vol. ii., 1792]. James Hogg (b. 1772, d. 1835), Scottish Pastorals. 
James Henry Leigh Hunt (b. 1784, d. 1859), Jzivenilia. Maria Edgeworth 
(b. 1767, d. 1849), Early Lessons, Belinda, Castle Rackrent. Amelia Opie 
(b. 1769, d. 1853), Father and Daughter. T. Moore, Little's Poems, 

1802. Charles Lamb (b. 1775, d. 1834), JoJin Woodvil, a Tragedy [Rosamond 
Gray, 1798]. R. Bloomfield, Rural Tales. R. Southey, Thalaba. W. 
Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vols, i., ii. William Paley (b. 
1743, d. 1805), Natural Philosophy SJrlorce Paulina, 1790; Evidences, 1794'. 
Thomas Paine (b. 1737, d. 1809), Letters to the Citizens of the United- 
States [Rights of Man, Part i., 1791 ; Part ii., 1792]. William Gifford (b. 
1757, d. 1826), Juvenal in English Verse [Baviad, 1791 ; M&viad, 1795]. 
Maria Edgeworth, Moral Tales. William Lisle Bowles (b. 1762, d. 1850), 
Sonnets, 8th Ed. [Fourteen Sonnets, 1789]. Edinburgh Review established. 

'803. W. Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. iii. R. Southey, 7V. 
Amadis of Gaul. Ed. Chatterton. Charles Dibdin (b. 1745, d. 1814), 
Autobiography, with Words of 600 Songs. W. Godwin, Life of Cltaucer. 
James Hogg, The Mozintain Bard. Jane Porter (b. 1776, d. 1850), 
Thaddeus of Warsaw. 

1804. W. Scott, Ed. Sir Tristrem. R. Bloomfield, Good Tidings. Charlotte 
Smith (b. 1749, d 1804), Conversations [Sonnets, 1784 ; Emmeline, 1788]. 
Anna Seward (b. 1731, d. 1809), Memoirs of Darwin. James Grahame 
(b. 1765, d. 1811), The Sabbath. Maria Edgeworth, Popular^ Tales. 
.Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray. Anna Maria Porter (b. 1781, d. 1832), 



886 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1804 

Lakes of Killarney. W. L. Bowles, Spirit of Discovery by Sea. Joanna 
Baillie (b. 1762, d. 185 1), Miscella?ieous Plays. 

1805. W. Scott,' Lay of the Last Minstrel. R. Sou they, Modoc W. Godwin, 

Fleetwood. Mary Tighe (b. 1773, d. 1810), Psyche. James Hogg, Pilgrims 
of the Sun. James Grahame, Sabbath Walks. Hannah More (b. 1745, d. 
1833), Hints for the Education of a Young Princess. William Roscoe (b. 
1753, d. 1831), Life of Leo X. [Life of Lorenzo de' Medici, 1795]. Sophia 
Lee (b. 1750, d. 1824) and Harriet Lee (b. 1756, d. 1851), Canterbury Tales, 
5 Vols., 1797 — 1805. William Hazlitf (b. 1778, d. 1830), Essay on the 
Princi/les of Human Actiojis. 

1806. S. T. Coleridge, Christabel. W. Scott/ Ballads and Lyrical Pieces. James 
Hogg, Mador of the Moor. James Grahame, Birds of Scotland. Maria 
Edgeworth, Leonora, and Letters. Amelia Opie, Simple Tales. T. 
Moore, Epistles, Odes, &c. W. ' L. Bowles, Ed. Pope's Works. James 
Montgomery' (b. 1771, d. 1854), Wanderer of Switzerland. 

1807.. .George Crabbe (b. 1754, d. 1832), The Parish Register [The Newspaper, 
1785]. W. Wordsworth, Poems, 2 vols. S. T. Coleridge, Zapolya, 
Sybilline Leaves. A. M. Porter, The Hungarian Brothers. Sydney 
Smith (b. 1769, d. 1845), Peter Plymley's Letters on the Catholics. R. 
Southey, Espriella's Letters, Tr. Palmerin of England. Henry Kirke 
White (b. 1785, d. i8o6\ Remains, Edited by R. Southey, 1807 — 1822, in 
3 vols. T. Moore, Irish Melodies, 1807 — 1834. George Gordon, Lord 
Byron (b. 1788, d. 1824), Hours of Idleness. C. and M. Lamb, Tales from 
Shakespeare. Elizabeth Carter (b. 1717, d. 1806), Memoirs of. by M. Pen- 
nington. J. H. Leigh Hunt, Dramatic Criticism, Classic Tales. Thomas 
Robert Malthus (b. 1766, d. 1834), Lette) on Poor Laws [Principles of 
Population, 1798]. 

1808. W. Scott, Marmion. Life and Works of Dryden. R. Southey, Tr. Chronicle 

oj tlie Cid. W. Godwin, Faulkner, a Tragedy. Henry Mackenzie (b. 
1745, d. 1831), Works, 8 vols. Jeremy Bentham (b. 1748, d 1832), Scotch 
Reform. Hannah" More, Ccelebs in Search of a Wife. Anna Letitia 
Barbauld, Lessons for Children. Quarterly Review established. 

1809. Byron, English Bards' and Scotch Reviewers. S. T. Coleridge, The Friend, 
June 1st, 1809, to March 15th, 18 10. T. Campbell, Gertrude of Wyoming. 
Reginald Heber (b. 1783, d. 1826), Palestine. James Grahame, British 
Georgics, Africa Delivered. 

1810. W. Scott, Lady of the. Lake.. G. Crabbe, The Borough. R. Southey, 

Curse of Kehama, History of Brazil. James Hogg, The Forest Minstrel. 
Dugald Stewart, Philosophical Essays. Jane Porter, The Scottish Chiefs. 

1811. Jane Austen (b. 1775, d. 1817), Sense and Sensibility. W. Scott, Vision of 

.Roderick. R. Bloomfield, Banks of the Wye. Leigh Hunt, The Reflector. 

Dugald Stewart,': Biographical Memoirs. Maria Edgeworth, Tales of 
Fashionable Life. David Ricardo (b. 1772, d 1823), Price of Bullion. 
Hannah More, Practical Piety. Mary Brunton (b. 1778, d. 1818), Self- 
Control. A. M. Porter, Ballad Romances. John Wilson (b. 1785, d. 1854), 
Elegy on J. Grahame. Isaac Disraeli (b. 1767, d. 1850), Despotism, a 

Novel. 

1812. Byron, Childe Harold, Cantos i.. ii. ; Curse of Minerva. Samuel Rogers 

(b. 1763, d. 1855), Poems ^Pleasures of Memory, 1792]. Jane Austen, 
Pride ana Prejzidice. G. Crabbe, Tales in Verse. R. Southey, 07nnia7ia, 
Attempts in Verse by John Jones. Isaac Disraeli, Calamities of Authors. 
Reginald Heber,_ Poems and Translations. J. Wilson, Isle of Palms. 



to a.d. 1820.] ANNALS. 887 

John Gait (b. 1779, d. 1839), Tragedies, &c. Joanna Baillie, Plays on the 
Passions, Vol. iii. James Smith (b. 1775, d. 1839), Horace Smith (b. 1772, 
d. 1849), Rejected Addresses. Frances d'Arblay (b. 1753, d. 1818), Traits 
of Nature ^Evelina, 1778, Cecilia, 1782]. Amelia Opie, Temper. Samuel 
Rogers, Poems [Pleasures of Memory, 1792]. 

1813. W. Scott, Rokeby, Bridal of Triermain. Byron, Waltz, Giaour, Bride 
of Abydos. S. T. Coleridge, Remorse, a Tragedy. Percy Bysshe Shelley 
(b. 1792, d. 1822), Queen Mab. W. Gifford, Ed. Massinger. James Hogg, 
The Queen's Wake. Barbara Hofland, Son of a Genius. J. Montgomery, 
World before the Flood. Southey succeeds Pye as Poet Laureate. 

1814. W. Wordsworth, The Excursio7i. Byron, Ode to Napoleon, Corsair, Lara. 

Walter Scott, Lord of the Isles, Waverley. R. Southey, Roderick. W. L. 
Bowles, Spirit of Discovery by Sea. Jane Austen, Mansfield 1 ark. Leigh 
Hunt, Feast of the Poets. Dugald Stewart, Philosophy of the Human 
Mind. Vol. ii. T. R. Malthus, Effect of Corn Laws. F. 'd'Arblay, The 
Wa7iderer. Mary Brunton, Discipline. S. Rogers, Jacqueline. I. Disraeli, 
Quarrels of AutJwrs. 

1815. Wordsworth, White Doe of Rylstone ; Poems -with New Preface and Sup- 
plementary Essay. Scott, Guy Matmering, Paul's Letters, Field of 

Waterloo. Byron, Hebrew Melodies. Heber, Bampton Lectures. D. 
Ricardo, Price of Corn. Mrs. Opie, Simple Tales. Henry Hart Milman 
(b. 1791, d. 1867), Fazio, a Tragedy. 
181G, Scott, The Antiquary, Black Dwarf, Old Mortality. Byron, Childe 
Harold, Canto iii. ; Siege of Corinth; Parisina; Prisoner of Chillon. 
Jane Austen, Emma. Coleridge, A Lay Sermon. Southey, Pilgrimage 
to Waterloo, Lay of the Latireate. P. B. Shelley, Alastor, and other 
Poems. Leigh Hunt, Story of Rimini. John Wilson, The City of the 
Plague. W. Gifford, Ed. Ben Jonso?i. Jeremy Bentham, Chresto- 
mathia. 

1817. John Keats (b. 1796, d. 1821), Poems. Byron, Manfred, Lament of Tasso. 
Scott, Harold the Dauntless ; Border Antiquities, Vol. ii. (Vol. i., 1814). 
Moore, Lalla Rookh. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria. W. Hazlitt, 
Characters of Shakespeare' s Plays. Mrs. Barbauld, Hymns in Prose for 
Children. Maria Edgeworth, Co7nic D7-amas. Felicia Hemans (b. 1794, 
d. 1S35), Modern Greece. I. Disraeli, Curiosities of Literature, Vol. iii. 
[Vols, i., ii., 1791-3]. Blackwood's Magazi7ie established. 

1818. Keats, E7idy77iion. Shelley, Revolt of Islam, Laon and Cythna. Scott, 
Heart of Midlothian, Bride of JLammennoor, Legend of Montrose, 
Rob Roy. Byron, Childe Harold, Canto " Beppo. H. H. Milman, 
Samor. Moore, The Fudge Family z'« Pc o. Jeremy Bentham, Par- 
Uame7itary Reform Catechis7n. Henry Hallam (b. 1778, d. 1859), Europe 
duri7ig the Middle Ages. James Mill (b. 1773, d. 1836), History of British 
India. James Morier (b. 1780, d. 1849), Second Jour7iey through Persia. 

1819. Wordsworth, Peter Bell. Byron, Mazeppa, D071 Juan, Cantos i., ii. 

Crabbe, Tales of the Hall. Shelley, The Cenci, Rosalind a7id Helen. 
Thomas Hope (b. 1770 (?), d. 1831), A7iastasius. Jeremy Bentham, Radical 
Reform. Rogers, Htmian Life. Bryan William Procter (b. 1790), Dramatic 
Sce7ies. James Montgomery, Greenland. Felicia Hemans, Tales a7id 
Historic Scenes. 

1820. Wordsworth, The River Duddon. Scott, Iva7ihoe, Monastery, Abbot. 
Southey, Life of Wesley, Keats, La77iia, Isabella, Eve of St. Ag7ies, &c. 
Thomas Brown (b. 1778, d, 1820), Philosophy of the Human Mind. E. 



biSQ A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, [a. d. 1820 

Lytton Bulwer (b. 1804, d. 1873), Ismael, an Oriental Tale. B. W. Procter. 
A Sicilian Story. H. H. Milman, Fall of Jerusalem, a Dramatic Poem. 

1821. Scott, Kenilworth. Byron, Marino Faliero, Prophecy of Dante, Sardana- 
i>alus, TJie Two Foscari, Cain, Don Juan, Cantos iii., iv., v. Southey, Vision 
of Judgment. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, Epipsychidion. 
W. Gifford, Persius in English Verse. John Gait, Annals of the Parish, 
Ayrshire Legatees. Jeremy Bentham, On tJie Restrictive Commercial 
System. Letitia Elizabeth Landon (b. 1802, d. 1838), The Fate of Adelaide. 

1822. Scott, Fortunes of Nigel, Pirate. Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical SketcJies. 
Byron, Werner, Vision of Judgment, Heaven and Earth. Rogers, Italy. 
James Montgomery, Songs of Zion. Charles Lamb (b. 1775, d. 1834), 
Essays of Elia (in London Magazine). John Wilson, Lights and Shadows 
of Scottish Life. Thomas Lovell Beddoes (b. 1803, d. 1849), The Bride's 
Tragedy. H. H. Milman, Martyr of Antioch, Belshazzar. 

1823. Scott, Peveril of the Peak, Quentin Durzuard. Byron, Don Juan, Cantos 
vi. — xiv. ; The Island; Age of Bronze ; Morgante Maggiore Tr., Canto i. 
Moore, Fables for the Holy Alliance, Loves of the Angels. Southey, 
History of Peninsular War, Vol. i. John Gibson Lockhart (b. 1794, d. 1854), 
Ancient Spanish Ballads. Harriet 'Martineau (b. 1802), Devotional 
Exercises for the Use of Young Persons. John Foster (b. 1770, d. 1843), 
Essays. John Wilson, Trials of Margaret Lindsay. Mary Howitt (b. 
1800), TJie Forest Minstrel. Charles Knight (b. 1791, d. 1873), Quarterly 
Magazine. C. Lamb, Elia (in a volume). 

1824. Byron, The Deformed Transformed. Scott, St. Ronan's Well, Red 
gauntlet. Southey, Book of t lie Church. Thomas Campbell, f Theodric, 
•with other Poems. C. Lamb, Elia, 2nd Series, in London Magazine. 
Thomas Carlyle (b. 1795), Tr. of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. J. G. Lockhart, 
Reginald Dalton. Heber, Life of Jeremy Taylor. James Morier, Hajji 
Baba. Robert Chambers (b. 1802, d. 1871), Traditions of Edinburgh. 
Walter Savage Landor {b. 1775, d. 1864), Imaginary Conversatiotis, Vol. i. 

1825. S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection. Scott, Betrothed, Talisman, Lives oj 
British Novelists. Southey, Tale of Paraguay. Thomas Carlyle, Life of 
Schiller. James Hogg, Queen Hynde. Robert Plumer Ward (b. 1765, d. 
1846), Tremaine. Moore, Memoirs of Sheridan. Henry Brougham (b. 
1779, d. 1868), Education of the People. 

1826. Scott, Woodstock. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (b. 1809, d. 1861), 'An 
Essay on Mind, and other Poems. Harriet Martineau, Principles and 
Practice, The Rioters. Horace Smith, Brambletye House. H. H. Mil- 
man, Anne Boleyn. Benjamin Disraeli (b. 1805), Vivian Grey. 

1827. Alfred Tennyson (b. 1809), with Charles Tennyson, Poems by Two Brothers. 

Scott, Tales of a Grandfather, Life of Napoleon, Two Drovers, Highland 
Widow, Surgeon s Daughter. T. Carlyle, Specimens of German Romance. 
John Keble (b.1792, d. 1866), The Christian Vear,Heber's Hymns. E. Lytton 
Bulwer (afterwards Lytton), Pelhatn. James Montgomery, Pelican Island. 
Dugald Stewart, The Philosophy of the Human Mind, Vol. iii. Moore, 
Epicurean. Thomas Hood (b. 1798, d. 1845), Plea of the Midsummer 
Fairies. 

1828. Scott, Fair Maid of Perth, Tales of a Grandfather, 2nd Series. E. L. 
Bulwer, The Disowned. T. Moore, Odes upon Cash, Corn, and Catholics. 
Alexander Dyce (b. 1798, d. 1869), Ed. Peele. W. Hazlitt, Life of 
Napoleon. W. S. Landor, Imaginary Conversations, Vol. .iii. {Gebir, 1798]. 



to a.d. 1836.] ANNALS. 889 

1829. A Tennyson, Timluctoo. Scott, Anne of Geierstein, Tales of a Grand- 
father, 3rd Series. Southey, All for Love. Douglas Jerrold (b. 1803, d. 
1857), Black-Eyed Susan. George Robert Gleig (b. 1796), Chelsea Pen- 
sioners. E. L. Bulwer, Devereux. R. Chambers, The Scottish Songs. 
H. H. Milman. History of the Jews. 

1830. A. Tennyson, Poems chiefly Lyrical. Scott, Tales of a Grandfather, 4th 

Series ; History of Scotland, 2 Vols. ; Demonology and Witchcraft ; Doom 
of Devorgoil ; Auchindrane. W. Godwin, Cloudesley. T. Moore, Life of 
Byron. Thomas Arnold (b. 1795, d. 1842), Christian Duty of Granting the 
Claims of the Catholics. Hood's Comic Annual (1830 to 1839). 

1831 ( Scott, Count Robert oj Paris, Castle Dangerous. Ebenezer Elliott (b. 1781, 
d. 1849), Corn Law Rhymes. B. Disraeli, The Young Duke. Mary 
Somerville (b. 1792, d. 1872), Mechanism of the Heavens. Caroline Elizabeth 
Norton (b. 1808), The Undying One. Letitia E. Landon, Romance and 
Reality- Sir James Mackintosh (b. 1765, d. 1832), History of England. 
, John Payne Collier (b. 1789), History of English Dramatic Poetry. 
Thomas Love Peacock (b. 1785, d. 1867), Crotchet Castle. 

1832. Southey, History of the"' Peninsular War, Vol. in., Harriet Martineau, 

Illustrations of Political Economy. Douglas Jerrold, The Rent Day, &C 3 
E. L. Bulwer, Eugene Aram. W. and R. Chambers, Journal established." 
C. Knight, Penny Magazine established. B. W. Procter, English Songs. 
Henry Taylor (b. 1800), Isaac Comnenus. William^Edmonstoune Aytoun 
(b. 18 1 3, d. 1865), Poland, Homer, and other Poems. Anna Maria Hall, 
The Buccaneer. 

1833. Alfred Tennyson, Poems. Hartley Coleridge (b. 1796, d. 1849), Poems. 

Southey, Lives of British Admirals, Vol. i. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor 
Resartus (in Erasers Magazine). Elizabeth Barrett (afterwards Browning), 
Translation of Prometheus Bound, and Poems. Robert Browning (b. 
1812), Pauline: a Fragment. E. L. Bulwer, Godolphin. T. Moore, 
Travels of an Irish Gentleman in search of a Religion. Charles Knight, 
Penny Cyclopaedia begun. Michael Faraday (b. 1791,^. 1869), Experimental 
Researches in Electricity. B. Disraeli, Alroy. Charles Lamb, Last Essays 
of Elia. William Howitt, History of Priestcraft. ^Felicia Hemans, 
Hymns on the Works of Nature. 

1834. Remains of Arthur Henry Hallam (b. 1811, d. 1833). Southey, The 

Doctor, Vol. i. Hartley Coleridge, Life of A. Marvell. W. Godwin, 
Lives of the Necromancers. Harriet Martineau, Illustrations of Taxation. 
William Harrison Ainsworth (b. 1805), Rookwood. Edward Bouverie 
Pusey (b. 1800), with John Henry Newman, John Keble, and others, 

' Tracts for the Times, 90 Nos. (1834 — 1841). Frederick Denison Maurice 
(b. 1805, d. 1872), Eustace Cotiway : a Novel. Felicia Hemans, Hymns 

for Children. A. M. Hall, Tales of Woman's Trials. Charles Mackay 
(b. 1812), Poems. Captain Frederick Marryat (b. 1786, d. 1848), Peter 
Simple, Jacob Faithful. Mary Somerville, Connection of the Physical 
Sciences. John Foster, Essay on Popular Ignorance. E. L. Bulwer, Last 
Days of Pompeii. Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons. Henry 
Taylor, Philip van Artevelde. B. Disraeli, The Revolutionary Epic. 

1835. Wordsworth, Yarrow Revisited. Robert Browning, Paracelsus. Leigh 

Hunt, Captain Sword and Captain Pen. E. L. Bulwer, Rienzi. B. 
Disraeli, Vindication of the British Constitution, L. E. Landon, Lay of 
the Peacock. Thomas Noon Talfourd (b. 1765, d. 1854), Ion. 

1836. Charles Dickens (b._ 1812, d. 1870), Sketches by Boz. Captain Marryat, 



59° A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [a.d. 1836 

Japket in Search of a Father. E. L. Bulwer, Athens. Henry Taylor, 
The Statesman. Hartley Coleridge, Lives of Northern Worthies. Earl 
Stanhope (b. 1803), History of England from the Peace of Utrecht. 

1837. Charles Dickens, Pickwick. Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution. 
Robert Browning, Straford. Harriet Martineau, Society hi America. 
E. L. Buhver, Ernest Maltravers. Thomas Campbell, Letters from the 
South. Henry Hallam, Literature of Europe in the 15th, 16th, and zjth 
Centuries, 4 Vols. (1837-39) B. Disraeli, Henrietta Temple, Venetia. 

1838. Wordsworth, Sonnets. Dickens, Oliver Twist. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor 
Resartus (in a vol.), Miscellanies. Elizabeth Barrett (Browning), The 
Seraphim, and other Poems. Douglas Jerrold, Men oj Character. 
Frances Trollope (b. 1778, d. .1863), Widow Barnaby. E. L. Bulwer, 
Alice, Lady oj Lyons. William Ewart Gladstone (b. 1809), The State in 
its Relation with the Church. Martin Farquhar Tupper (b. 1810), 
Proverbial Philosophy; Geraldi?ie : a Sequel to Coleridge's Christabel 
Francis William Newman (b. 1S05), Lectures on Logic. Lady Charlotte 
Elizabeth Guest, The Mabinogion (1838 to 1849). Eliza Cook (b. 1818), 
Poems. 

1839. Thomas Moore, Alciphron. Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby. Thomas Carlyle, 

Chartism. Harriet Martineau, Deerbrook. W. H. Ainsworth, Jack 
Sheppard. E. L. Bulwer, Richelieu, The Sea-Captain. H. H. Milman, 
Life of Gibbon. B. Disraeli, Count Alarcos : a Tragedy. Charles Knight, 
Pictorial Sliakespeare. Charles Lever (b. 1806, d. 1872), Harry Lorrequer 
Philip James Bailey (b. 18 16), Festus. 

1840. Dickens, Master Humphrey's Clock. William Makepeace Thackeray 
(b. 181 1, d. 1863), Paris Sketch-Book. John Forster (b. 1812), Statesmen 
of the Commonwealth. Robert Browning, Sordello. Leigh Hunt, A 
Legend of Florence. Harriet Martineau, The Hour and the Man. 
Barbara Hofland, Farewell Tales. Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord 
Houghton (b. 1808), Poetry for the People. E. L. Bulwer, Money. H. H. 
Milman, History of Christianity. W. E. Gladstone, Church Principles 
in their Results. 

1841. Thomas Carlyle, Hero Worship. Douglas Jerrold, Cakes and Ale. 

Punch established. Isaac Disraeli, Amenities of Literature. Thomas 
Campbell, Life of Petrarch. E. L. Bulwer, Night and Morning. Charles 
James Lever, C/uzrles O'Malley. Samuel Warren (b. 1806), Ten Thousand 
a Year. John Westland Marston (b. 1820), The Patricians Daughter: 
a Tragedy. 

1842. Thomas Babington Macaulay (b. 1800, d. 1859), Lays of Ancient Rome, 

Critical and Historical Essays (from the Edinburgh Review). Wordsworth, 
Guide to the Lakes. Alfred Tennyson, Poems, 2 Vols. Robert Browning, 
Pippa Passes, King Victor and Ki?ig Charles, Dramatic Lyrics. John 
Wilson, Recreations of Christopher North. Henry Taylor, Edwin the 
Fair. Leigh Hunt, The Palfrey. Thomas Campbell, Pilgrim of Glencoe, 
and other Poems. E. L. Bulwer, Zanoni, Eva. Dickens, Atnerican 
Notes. Thackeray, Irish Sketch-Book. John Payne Collier, Ed. 
Shakespeare. 

1843. Dickens, Christmas Carol. Th m is Carlyle, Past and Present. Robert 
Browning, A Blot on the 'Sutcheon, Return oj the Druses. Douglas 
Jerrold, Story of a Feather. Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sick Room. ^ 
Lucy Aikin, Life of Addison. Matthew Arnold (b. 1822), Cromwell; 

a Prize Poem. Alexander Dyce, Ed. Beau7?iont and Fletcher. John 



to a.d. 1849.] ANNALS. 891 

Stuart Mill (b. 1806), System of Logic. James Martineau (b. 1806) 
Endeavours after the Christian L ife. Hood, Song of the Shirt. Words 
worth succeeds Southey as Poet Laureate. 

184:4. Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, Cricket on the Hearth. Robert Browning, 
Colombe's Birtliday. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Poems. Robert Plumer 
Ward, Chatsworth. R. Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), Palm Leaves. 
B. Disraeli, Coningsby. Sydney Smith, Letters on American Debts. A. 
Dyce, Edition of Skelton. E. Bulwer Lytton, Tr. Poems a?id Ballads 
of Schiller. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (b. 1817), Life of Dr. Arnold. 
Alexander William Kinglake (b. 1811), Eothen. George Lillie Craik, 
Sketches of History of Literature in England (1844 to 1851). Elizabeth 
Missing Sewell (b. 1815), Atny Herbert. Charlotte Mary Yonge (b. 1823), 

, Abbey Church. 

/ 1845, Thomas Carlyle, CromwelVs Letters and Speeches. Robert Browning, 
Dramatic Rojnances and Lyrics. Charles Dickens, TJie Chhnes. 
Douglas Jerrold, Mrs. Caudles Cztrtain Lectures. George Henry Lewes 
(b. 1817), Biographical History of Philosophy. Harriet Martineau, Forest 
and Game Law Tales. W. E. Aytoun, The Glenmutchkin Railway. 
Arthur Helps, The Claims of Labour. Robert Chambers, Vestiges 0/ 
the Natural History of Creatisn. Caroline E. Norton, The Child oj the 
Islands. Mary Cowden Clarke (b. 1809), Concordance to Shakespeare. 

1846. Dickens, Pictures from Italy, Battle of Life. Douglas Jerrold, Punch's 
Complete Letter-Writer, Chronicles of Clovernook. Robert Browning, 
Luria, A Soul's Tragedy. G. H. Lewes, Biographical History of 
Philosophy, 2nd Series. Edward Augustus Freeman (b. 1823), Principles 
of Church Restoration. Robert Bell (b. 1800, d. 1862), Life of Canning. 
James Orchard Halliwell (b. 1820), Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial 
Words. Charles Kingsley (b. 1819), The Saints' Tragedy. George Grote 
(b. 1794, d. 1871), History of Greece, 12 Vols. (1846 to 1856). C, E., and A. 
Bronte, Poejns, by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell 

1847. Alfred Tennyson, The Princess. Dickens, The Haunted Man. 

Thackeray, Mrs. Perkins's Ball. Leigh Hunt, Men, Women, and 
Books. John Keble, Lyra Innocentium. G. H. Lewes, Comte's Philo- 
sophy, Rantlwrpe. Arthur Helps, Frietids in Council. G. R. Gleig, Story 
of Waterloo. E. B. Lytton, The New Timon. James Anthony Froude 
(b. 1818), The Shadows of the Clouds. B. Disraeli, Tancred. James 
Martineau, Endeavours after Christian Life, Vol, ii. Charlotte Bronte 
(b. i8i6,d. 1855), Jane Eyre. Emily Bronte (b. 1818, d. 1848), Wuthering 
Heights. Anne Bronte (b. 1820, d. 1849), Agnes Grey. 

1848. John Forster, Life of Golds?nith. T. B. Macaulay, History of England, 
from the Accession of James II., Vols, i., ii. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell 

(b. 1810, d. 1865), Mary Barton. Mary Somerville, Physical Geography. 
J. S. Mill, Prbiciples of Political Econoviy. Herjry Taylor, Notes from 
Life. J. A. Froude, The Nemesis of Faith. Ebenezer Elliot, More 
Verse and Prose. Arthur Hugh Clough (b. 1819, d. 1861), The Bothie of 
Tober-Na-Vuolich. Arthur Helps, The Conqtierors of the New World. 
Matthew Arnold, The Strayed Reveller. R. Monckton Milnes (Lord 
Houghton), Life and Remai?is of Keats. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Our 
Street. Dickens, Dombey and Son. 

1849. Charlotte Bronte, Shirley. Thackeray, Pendennis, Dr. Birch. Robert 
Browning, Poems. 2 Vols. W. E. Aytoun, Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers ■> 
Douglas Jerrold, A Man made of Money. E. B. Lytton, The Caxtons, 
King Arthur. Austin Henry Layard (b. 1817), Nineveh and its Remains. 



«9 2 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. [ad. 1849 

E. A. Freeman, History of Architecture. Leigh Hunt, The Town: A 
Book for a Corner. Harriet Martineau, Household Education. G. H. 
Lewes, Life oj Robespierre. William Hepworth Dixon (b. 1821), John 
Howard. Arthur Hugh Clough, Ambarvalia. 

1850. Wordsworth, The Prelude. Alfred Tennyson becomes Laureate, In 
Memoriam. Robert Browning, Christmas-eve and Easter-day. Dickens, 
David Copperfield, Household Words established. Thackeray, The 
Kickleburys, Rebecca and Rowena. Leigh Hunt, A utobiography . Douglas 
Jerrold, The Catspaw. Harriet Martineau, History of England during 

->«J the Thirty Years' Peace. Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets: E.G. 
Gaskell, Moorland Cottage. E. B. Lytton, Harold. Thomas Lovell 
Beddoes, Death's Jest-Book. Alexander Dyce, Ed. Marlowe. W. Wilkie 
' Collins (b. 1824), Antonina. Sydney Dobell (b. 1824), The Ro7nan. Francis 
"W. Newman (b. 1805), PJiases of Faith. F. D. Maurice, Moral and 
Metaphysical Philosophy, Part i. Charles Merivale (b. 1808), History of 
the Romans under the Empire, 7 Vols. (1850 to 1861). 

1851. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Casa Guidi Windows. Thomas Carlyle, Life 
— J of John Sterling. Arthur Helps, Companions of My Solitude. Douglas 

Jerrold, Retired from Business. W. Hepworth Dixon, William Penn. 
E. B. Lytton, Not so Bad as We Seem. J. O. Halliwell, Ed. Shakespeare. 
Robert Chambers, Life atid Works of Burns. W. E. Gladstone, Two 
Letters on Neapolitan State Prosecutions. Charles Kingsley Yeast. 
G. L. Craik, T/ie English Language. Richard Chenevix Trench (b. 1807), 
Study of Words. 

1852. Thackeray, Esmond. Dickens, Child's History of England. W. Wilkie 

Collins, Basil. B. Disraeli, Lord George Bentinck : a Political Biography. 
John Earl Russell, Memoirs of Thomas Moore. W. Hepworth Dixon, 
Robert Blake. Charles Reade (b. 1814), Peg Woffington. Charles 
Kingsley, Phaeton. A. H. Layard, Nineveh and Babylon. 

1853. Charlotte Bronte, Villette. Macaulay, Speeches. Dickens, Bleak House. 
Thackeray, English Humorists. Sydney Dobell, Balder. Leigh Hunt, 
Religion of the Heart. Elizabeth C. Gaskell, Cranford, Ruth. Matthew 
Arnold, Empedocles on Etna, Poems. E. B. Lytton, My Novel. Charles 
Knight, Once upon a Time. J. S. Mill, Enfranchisement of Women. 
Michael Faraday, Lectures on Non-Metallic Elements. Charles Kingsley, 
Hypatia. Charles Reade, Christie Joh7istone. 

1854. Dickens, Hard Times. John Forster, Life of Goldsmith, Enlarged Edition. 
W. E. Aytoun, Firmilian. Douglas Jerrold, A Heart of Gold. Robert 
Bell, Annotated Edition of tJie Poets begun. H. H. Milman, History of 
Latin Christianity, Vols, iii., iv. Gerald Massey (b. 1828), Ballad of Babe 
Christabel. William Allingham (b. 1828), Day and Night Songs. Thomas 
Henry Huxley (b. 1825), Educational Value of Natural History. Richard 
Owen (b. 1804), Structure of Skeleton and Teeth. F. D. Maurice, Moral 
and Metaphysical Philosophy. John Doran {b. 1807), Table Traits. 

1855. Robert Browning, Men and Women. Alfred Tennyson, Maud. Dickens, 
Little DorriL Thackeray, The Rose and the Ring. G. H. Lewes, Life 
of Goethe. Arthur Helps, TJie Spanish Conquest of America (1855—1861). 
Macaulay, History of England, Vols. iii. , iv. Charles Kingsley, Glaucus, 
Westward Ho. A. P. Stanley, Sinai and Palestine. George Macdonald, 
Within and Without: a Dramatic Poem. George Meredith (b. 1818), 
Shaving of Shagpat. Leigh Hunt, The Old Court Suburb, Stories in 
Verse. Elizabeth C. Gaskell, North and South. Anthony Trollope (b. 



V 



to a.d. 1863.] ANNALS. 893 

1815), The Warden. Matthew Arnold, Poems, 2nd Series. Charles 
,' Shirley Brooks (b. 1816), Aspen Court. Saturday Review established. 

1856. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh. W. E. Aytoun, Both-well. 
David Masson (b. 1822), Essays, Biographical and Critical. Alexander 
Dyce, Ed. Shakespeare, Ed. Table Talk of Samuel Rogers. J. O. 
Halliwell, Ed. Marston. J. A. Froude, History of England from Fall 
of Wolsey to Death of Elizabeth, Vols, i., ii. Thackeray, Miscellanies. 
Dinah Maria Mulock (Craik), John Halifax. E. A. Freeman, History 
and Conqjtests of the Saracens. 

1857. Thomas Hughes (b. 1823), Tom Brown's School Days. E. C. Gaskell, Life 

of Charlotte Bronte. Anthony Trollope, Bare/tester Towers. Alexander 
Dyce, Ed. Webster. Henry Thomas Buckle (b. 1822, d. 1862), History of 
Civilisation. Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago. Charles Reade, Never 
Too Late to Mend. 

1858. Thackeray, The Virginians. "George Eliot," Scenes of Clerical Life. 
John Forster, Historical and Biographical Essays. Thomas Carlyle, 
Life of Friedrich II, Vols, i., ii. Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne. 
J. A. Froude, History of England, Vols, hi., iv. Arthur Helps, Oulita 
the Serf: a Tragedy. Matthew Arnold, Merope : a Tragedy. E. B. 
Lytton, What will he Do with It? Robert Chambers, Domestic 
Annals of Scotland. William Morris (b. 1834), Defence of Gtdnevere, 
and other Poems. W. E. Gladstone, Studies on Homer. Adelaide Anne 
Procter (b. 1824, d. 1864), Legends and Lyrics. 

1859. " George Eliot," Adam Bede. Alfred Tennyson, Idylls of the King 
Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities. Charles Darwin (b. 1809), Origin of 
Species. Sir William Hamilton (b. 1788, d. 1856), Lectures on Metaphysics 
and Logic. Anthony Trollope, The West Indies. David Masson, Life of 
Milton, Vol. i. ; British Novelists. John Payne Collier, Ed. Shakespeare 
revised. J. S. Mill, On Liberty. John Earl Russell, Life of C. J. Fox. 
Thomas de Quincey {b. 1785, d. 1859), Works Collected (1853— i860). 

1860. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Poems before Congress. " George Eliot," 

The Mill on the Floss. G. H. Lewes, Physiology of Co7nmon Life. John 
Forster, Arrest of the Five Members. C. Shirley Brooks, The Gordian 
Knot. W. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White. Macaulay, Mis- 
ceilaneous Writings, History of England, Vol. v. J. A. Froude, History of 
England, Vols. v. and vi. Charles Reade, TJie Cloister and the Hearth 

1861. "George Eliot," Silas Marner. Dickens, Great Expectations. Thackeray, 

The Four Georges, Lovel. Anthony Trollope, Framley Parsonage. Thomas 
Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford. W. E. Aytoun, Norman Sinclair. 
Charles Knight, Popular History of England (1858— 1862). Earl Stan- 
hope, Life of Pitt. Theodore Martin (b. 1816), Tr. of Catullus. 

1862. Thackeray, Adventures of Philip, Roundabout Papers. Thomas Carlyle, 
Life of Friedrich II. , Vol. iii. E. B. Lytton, A Strange Story. Sir Henry 
Taylor, St. Clement' s-eve. F. D. Maurice, Claims of the Bible and of 
Science. David Gray (b. 1838, d. 1861), The Ltiggie, and other Poems. 
Caroline E. Norton, The Lady of Garaye. Jean Ingelow(b. 1830), Poems. 
Mrs. Browning's Last Poems. John William Colenso, The Pentateuch and 
Book of Joshtta Examined, 5 Parts (1861 to 1865). Theodore Martin, Tr, 
Dante's Vita Nuova. Charles Darwin, Fertilization of Orchids. 

1883. " George Eliot," Romola. Thomas Henry Huxley, Evidence as to Mans 
Place in Nature. Edward A. Freeman, History of Federal Government, 
Vol. L Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies. A. W. Kinglake, History 



594 A FIRST SKETCH OF ENGLISH LITER A TURE [a.d. 1863 

of the Invasion of the Crimea, Vols, i., ii. Elizabeth C. Gaskell, Sylvia's 
Lovers. John Keble, Life of Bis/top Wilson. A. P. Stanley, History of 
the Jewish Church. Florence Nightingale (b. 1820) Notes on Hospitals. 
George Macdonald, David Elginbrod. 

1854. Alfred Tennyson, Enoch Arden. Robert Browning, Dramatis Persona. 
John Forster, Life of Sir John Eliot. Algernon Charles Swinburne (b. 
1843), Atalanta in Calydon. John Henry Newman (b. 1801), Apologia 
pro Vitd Sud. William Allingham, Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland. 
G H. Lewes, Aristotle. Thomas Carlyle, Life of Friedrich II., Vol. iv. 
Alexander Dyce, Revised Edition of Shakespeare. £. B. Pusey, Lectures 
on Daniel, An Eirenicon. John William Kaye (b. 1814), History of the 
Sepoy War. John Doran, Their Majesties' Servants. 

186.'5. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend. Algernon C. Swinburne, Chastelard. 
John Stuart Mill, Comte and Positivism. Fortnightly Review established. 
Thomas Carlyle, Life *f Friedrich V 7., Vols, v., vi. Elizabeth C. Gaskell, 
Wives and Daughters. W. H. Dixon, Tfic Holy Land. F. D. Maurice, 
Conflict of Good and Evil in Our Day. George Grote, Plato. 

18G6 "George Eliot," Felix Holt. Lord Lytton, The Lost Tales oj Miletus. 
James A. Froude, History of Englana, Vols, ix., x. W. Wilkie CoHins, 
Armadale. Matthew Arnold, New Poems. Bryan W. Procter, Charles 
Lamb: a Memoir. Christiana Rosetti, The Prince's Progress, &c. 

1887. William Morris, Life and Death oj Jason. Edward A Freeman, History 
of the Norman Cotiquest, Vol. i. Thackeray, Denis Duval. Jean Ingelow, 
A Story of Doom. G. H. Lewes, Biographical History of Philosophy 
(Enlarged Ed.). Thomas Carlyle, Shooting Niagara, and After ? W. H. 
Dixon, New America. Theodore Martin, Memoir oj W. E. Aytoun. 
Matthew Arnold, Study of Celtic Literatur-e. J. A. Froude, Short Studies 
on Great Subjects. Augusta Webster, A Woman Sold, &c. John Hill 
Burton, History of Scotland, Vols. i. — iv. 

1838. "George Eliot," TJie Spanish Gypsey : a Poem. Robert Browning, The 
Ring and the Book. William Morris, The Earthly Paradise. Gerald 
Massey, Shakespeare's Sonnets Interpreted. E. A. Freeman, History of 
Norman Conquest, Vol. ii. W. H. Dixon, Spiritual Wives. A. P. Stanley, 
Memorials of Westminster A bbey. 

18 6 9 . Matthew Arnold, Culture and A narchy. E. A. Freeman, History of Norman 
Conquest, Vol. in. John Forster, Lije oj W. S. Landor. Harriet Mar- 
tineau, Biographical Sketches. W. H. Dixon, Her Majesty's Tower. 
Vols, l, ii. Alexander Dyce, Ed. Ford. 

1870. Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Brood. John Stuart Mill, The 
Subjection oj Women. Matthew Arnold, St. Paul and Protestantism. 
Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Poems. Thomas Henry Huxley, Lay Sermons, 
Essays and Reviews. John Henry Newman, Miscellanies. 

1871. Robert Browning, Balaustions Adventtcre. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau. 

Robert Buchanan, Napoleon Fallen: a Lyrical Drama. Lord Lytton, 
The Coming Race. David Masson, Life of Milton, Vol. ii. W. H. Dixon, 
Her Majesty's Tower, Vols, iii., iv. Benjamin Jowett, The Dialogues of 
Plato translated, with Analyses and Introductions. Charles Kingsley, 
At Last: a Christmas in tlie West Indies. John Morley, Voltaire. 
A. C. Swinburne, Songs before Sunrise. Anthony Trollope, Ralph the 
Heir. 

1872. " George Eliot," Middlemarch. Alfred Tennyson, Gareth and Lvnette. 

Robert Browning, Fifine at the Fair. William Mc r is, Love is Enough. 



to a.d. 1873.] ANNALS. 895 

George Grote, Aristotle, edited by Alexander Bain and George Croom 
tf Robertson. William Chambers, Memoir of Robert CJiambers. John Forster, 

Life of Dickens, Vols, i., ii. Edward A. Freeman, History of the Norman 

Conquest, Vol. iv. James A. Froude, The English in Ireland in the 

Eighteenth Century. Charles Darwin, Expression of the Emotions. 
1873. Lord Lytton, Kenehn Chilliitgly. Anthony Trollope, Australia and New 

Zealand. Samuel Plimsoll, Our Seamen. John Morley, Roussea7i. 

E. A. Freeman, Historical Essays. Matthew Arnold, Literature and 

Dogma. 



APPENDIX. 



I. — Chaucer. 

Some of our best Chaucer scholars, while doing great service to literature by the 
publication of texts, and fresh scrutiny into the authority for current opini ons, 
have arrived at a few conclusions which I do not yet accept, and therelore have 
not embodied in my narrative. This book, however, would be incomplete without 
a proper statement of them ; and that has, at my request, been kindly furnished 
by one of their ablest supporters, Mr. F. J. Furnivall, to whose enthusiasm we 
are mainly indebted for the Chaucer Society, the Early English Text Society, 
and other valuable aids to a true study of our literature. 

The first thing for a critical student of Chaucer to do, is to examine 
carefully the evidence for the genuineness or spuriousness of the works 
attributed to him. This evidence is either external or internal. The 
external evidence is mainly that from early MSS. naming Chaucer as the 
author of this work or the other ; and the internal evidence is that from 
the use of rymes, constructions, phrases, allusions, besides general tone 
and spirit. 

Of the works ascribed to Chaucer only the following have external 
evidence in their favour : — "A B C," "Compleynte of Pity" (ab. 1367) ; 
" Parlament of Fowles" (ab. 1374); "Mars," "Anelida," "Boece, " 
"Troylus," "Adam Scrivener," "House of Fame" (? 1384); "Legende 
of Good Women" (? 1386) ; "Canterbury Tales" (? 1373 — 1400) ; "Truth 
(Fie fro the presse)" (1386—87) ; " Astrolabe'' (1391) ; "Venus," "Envoy 
to Skogan," "Marriage (Envoy to Bukton)," " Gentlenesse, " "Lack of 
Stedfastness/' (? 1397) ; " ForLune," '* Compleynte to his Purse " (September, 
1399). To these must be added the pretty " Former Age " (? 1381), in the. 
best Cambridge University MS. of Boece ; and the death of '' Blaunche 
the Duchesse" (ab. 1369), which has internal evidence in its favour, and is 
linked indissolubly to the "Compleynte of Pity," Chaucer's earliest 
original work. 

Testing the rymes of the poems above-named, we find that out of the 
many thousand rymes they contain, Chaucer has always avoided ryming 
the infinitive in ye, the Latin-derived noun in ye, and the adverb in ye, with 
the pronoun /, the adverb in ly, and other words in y ; except in one 
instance in "Sir Thopas," where he rymes Sir " Guy" with "chyvalrye." 
This proves that Chaucer's law is not to ryme ye—y; and we may fairly 
conclude that if any poem frequently rymes ye with y, that poem is almost 
certainly not Chaucer's. Now all the following poems do frequently ryme 
ye—y, besides breaking other laws of Chaucer's ryme, and containing 



CHA UCER. STUDENTS* BOOKS. 097 

phrases, poverties, &c., inconsistent with his work. There is no external 
evidence in favour of these poems ; many of them are ridiculously inferior 
to, and many plainly later than, his genuine works ; and they must be 
considered as spurious till some one can establish their genuineness, which 
I make bold to doubt whether any one ever can or will do: — "Court 
of Love," "Craft of Lovers and Remedy of Love" (both too bad;; 
"Lamentation of Mary Magdalene" (very poor); " Romaunt of the 
Rose" (Chaucer's version is lost); "Complaint of the Black Knight" 
(stated to be Lydgate's by Shirley, the contemporary of him and Chaucer) ; 
" Chaucer's Dream" (or, "Isle of Ladies" — late) ; " Flower and the Leaf" 
(? after 1450 A.D.) ; " Cuckoo and Nightingale." 

The author of the prose "Testament of Love " makes Love call Chaucer 
"myne owne true servaunt, the noble Phylosophicall Poete in English 
... all that willen me good, owe to doe hym worship and reverence both : 
truely his better ne his pere, in schoole of my rules could I never find. . . . 
Certainely his noble sayings can I not amend : in goodnesse of gentle 
manliche speech, wythout any manner of nycetie of stafieres imagination, 
in wit and in good reason of sentence, he passeth all other makers." 
Compare this with the author's own description of his own "rude wordes 
and boistous," "dull witte and thoughtful soule," in the Prologue of the 
"Testament." 

There is no evidence whatever that Thomas Chaucer was the poet 
Geoffrey's son or relative — Lydgate, when addressing Thomas, never 
hints at any relationship— and no evidence that Geoffrey was born in 1328. 
His own statement, and that order of his poems which I contend is right, 
leave little doubt that he was born about 1340 A.D. Besides the ordinary 
printed cast of the Prologue to the "Legende of Good Women," there is 
another in the Cambridge University MS., Gg. iv. 27, containing most 
interesting differences, and with no praise of his own ■ ' lady, " but only of 
Alcestis. 

October 28, 1872. F. J. Furnivall. 

II.— Students' Books. 
Old English History. By Edward A. Freeman, D.C.L. Macmillan. 

Price 6s. [The best short sketch of English history before the 

Conquest.] 
The Growth of the English Constitution from the Earliest Times. By E. 

A. Freeman. Price 5s. Macmillan and Co. 
Select Charters, and other Illustrations of English Constitutional History, 

from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward I. Arranged and 

Edited by William Stubbs, M.A., Regius Professor of Modern History. 

Price 8s. 6d. Clarendon Press Series. Macmillan. [A thorough 

manual of early constitutional history, with citation of the whole text 

of important documents, and many illustrative extracts, chiefly in 

Latin.] 
The Student's Hume. Being the history of England abridged, continued 

to the present time, incorporating the researches of recent historians. 

Price 7s. 6d. John Murray. 
Charles Knight's School History of England; from the Earliest Period to 

F F F 



590 APPENDIX. 

our own Times. Abridged from the "Popular History of England," 

under the superintendence of the author. Price 7s. 6d. Bradbury 

and Evans. 

[Charles Knight's original work, ' ' The Popular History of England, " 

is in eight volumes, 8vo. It is a careful "History of the English People,' 

freely illustrated with woodcuts, but not to be confounded with the 

" Pictorial History of England." That was by other writers, and its 

political chapters are less satisfactory.] 

A Grammar of the Anglo-Saxo?i Tongue, from the Danish of Erasmus 
Rask. By Benjamin Thorpe. Second edition. Price 5s. Triibner 
and Co. 
A Compeiidious Anglo-Saxon and English Dictionary. By the Rev. 

Joseph Bosworth, D.D. Price 12s. J. R. Smith. 
Analecta Anglosaxonica. By Benjamin Thorpe. Price 7s. 6d. J. R. 

Smith. 
Bibliothek der Angehdchsischen Poesie, von C. W. M. Grein. Two vols., 
price 18s. Gb'ttingen : Wigand. London : D. Nutt, 270, Strand ; or 
Asher, 13, Bedford Street, Covent Garden. 

[Contains "Beowulf," "Caedmon," the poems of the Exeter and Vercelli 
Book, and all the chief pieces of First English poetry. There is an elaborate 
glossary, First English and Latin, in two companion volumes.] 

Beowulf alone has been edited with a full glossary (German), by C. 
W. M. Grein (price 3s. 6d.) and by Moritz Heyne (price 4s. 6d.). 

C<zdmon has been edited by K. W. Bouterwek, with Glossary, First 
English and Latin (price about 7s.). 

Specimens of Early English. A new and revised Edition, with Introduc- 
tion, Notes, and Glossarial Index. By the Rev. Richard Morris, 
LL.D., and the Rev. Walter W. Skeat, M.A. First Volume pre- 
paring. Second Volume (price 7s. 6d.), from Robert of Gloucester to 
Gower, A.D. 1298 to A.D. 1393. Clarendon Press Series. Macmillan. 
Specimens of English Literature from the " Ploughman: 's Crede" to the 
" Shepheardes' Calendar," A.D. 1394 — A.D. 1579. With Introduction, 
Notes, and Glossarial Index. By the Rev. Walter W. Skeat, M.A. 
Price 7s. 6d. Clarendon Press. Macmillan. 
Chaucer: the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, the Knightes Tale, The 
Nomies Prestes Tale. Edited by the Rev. R. Morris, LL.D. With 
Introduction, Notes, and Glossary. Price 2s. 6d. Clarendon Press 
Series. Macmillan. 
The Riches of Chaucer. By Charles Cowden Clarke. Price 10s. 6d. 
Lockwood and Co. 

[A very good Chaucer for young readers and ladies, with omissions, 
and with the spelling modernized.] 

The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman, by William Lang- 
land. Edited by the Rev. W. W. Skeat, M.A. With Introduction, 
Notes, and Glossary. Price 2s. 6d. Clarendon Press. Macmillan. 
No books produced in this country give more efficient help than those 
of Mr. Skeat and Dr. Morris to the student who begins to make acquaint- 
ance with our early English authors. Other good aids to the study of 
English literature in the Clarendon Press series are Mr. Kitchin's school 



STUDENTS' BOOKS. 899 

editions (price 2s. 6d. each) of the First and of the Second Books of 
Spenser's Faerie Queene ; the Rev. R. W. Church's edition (price 2s.) of 
the First Book of Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, and the fully annotated 
editions of Select Plays of Shakespeare, by Messrs. W. G. Clark and 
Aldis Wright, which are published at is. and is. 6d. each, and are the 
best books of the kind. These editions already include The Merchant of 
Venice, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Richard II. Mr. W. Aldis Wright has 
contributed also to the series a thoroughly good student's edition of Bacon's 
Advancement of Learning (price 4s. 6d.), and I know no compact body of 
notes upon Milton fuller or more judiciously selected than those in the 
Clarendon Press edition by Mr. R. C. Browne of Milton's Poems, in two 
volumes (price 4s. and 3s. each). The Rev. Mark Pattison contributes to 
the same series, in two volumes (price is. 6d. each), fully annotated editions 
of Pope's Essay on Man and of his Epistles and Satires. 

A good annotated edition of Pope's Works (price 3s. 6d.) has been 
contributed by Professor A. W. Ward to the Globe Edition of English 
Authors. Macmillan. In the same series (also price 3s. 6d.) is our best 
annotated Dryden, with a memoir, revised text, and notes, by W. D. 
Christie, M.A. It has a carefully-corrected text ; and Dr. Morris has 
secured the same advantage for the Spenser in the Globe series, which is 
not annotated, but has a glossary and an excellent introductory memoir by 
J. W. Hales, M.A. 

Mr. Hales has also provided teachers and young students with a class- 
book containing about thirty of the best English poems, each • complete, 
from Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, 
Burns, Cowper, Coleridge, Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and Shelley, 
under the title of Longer English Poems, with Notes, Philological and 
Explanatory, and an Introduction on the Teaching of English (price 4s. 6d.). 
Macmillan. The notes are very full and good, and the book, edited by 
one of our most cultivated English scholars, is probably the best volume 
of selections ever made for the use of English schools. 

Older students will find among the Publications of the Early English 
Text Society, which gives a most liberal return of books for the annual 
subscription of a guinea, many of the chief old romances, including 
Havelok, which may be had separately for 5s. ; and Sir David Lindsay's 
works, The Satire of the Three Estates, forming a separate part, price 
2s. 6d. Information about the work of the Early English Text Society 
and the Chaucer Society may be obtained by addressing the Hon. Sec, 
care of N. Triibner and Co., 60, Paternoster Row. 

The English Reprints of Mr. Edward Arber (issued by himself from 
5, Queen Square, Bloomsbury) are exact reprints of valuable books, other- 
wise scarce, with good bibliographical and biographical introductions. The 
series includes Udall's Ralph Roister Bolster (6d.) ; Sir Thomas Mores 
Utopia, in Ralph Robynson's Translation (is.); Latimer 's Sermon on the 
Ploughers (6d.); Seven Sermons before Edward VI. (is. 6d.) ; Ascham's 
Toxophilus (is.), Schoolmaster (is.); Tottel's Miscellany (2s. 6d.); Lyly's 
Euphues (4s.); Gascoigne's Steel Glass, and other pieces of his (is.); Gosson's 
Schoole of Abuse (6d.) ; Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie (6d.) ; Putlenham's 
Arte of English Poesie (2s.) ; King James I.'s Essays of a Prentise in the 

F F F 2 



900 APPENDIX. 

Divine Art of Poesie, and Counterblast to Tobacco (is.); A Harmony of 
Bacon's Essays (5s.) — the texts of Bacon's editions in parallel columns, 
showing at a glance every successive omission, addition, and correction ; 
The Duke of Buckingham s Rehearsal (is.), &c. &c. Books hitherto unat- 
tainable, or reproduced only at high price for a limited number of sub- 
scribers, are here made accessible to all students at a price not above that 
of the best cheap literature of the day. To the single energy of Mr. Arber, 
who is his own publisher, students of English are indebted for this first 
attempt to give them free access to books in which the general reader has 
yet to acquire an interest. 

The King and the Commons, Cavalier and Puritan Song, selected and 
arranged by Henry Morley (2s. 6d.). In the "Bayard Series." Sampson 
Low and Co. [Lyric poetry of the time of Charles I. and the Common- 
wealth.] 

The Spectator. A new edition reproducing the Original Text, both as 
first issued, and as corrected by its Authors. With an Introduction and 
Notes by Henry Morley. (3s. 6d.) In Routledge's Standard Library. 

Dr. Edwin A. Abbott, Head Master of the City of London School, 
has been the first to produce, besides other good aids to the study of 
English, a Shakespearian Grammar. This has been developed in successive 
editions, is well arranged, and so indexed as to be handy either for 
chance reference, or for use in the study of a single play. It is entitled 
A Shakespearian Grammar. An Attempt to Illustrate some of the Differ- 
ences betweefi Elizabethan and Modern English. For the Use of Schools. 
Price 6s . ( Macmillan. ) 



INDEX. 



Absalom and Achitophel, 715 — 719 

Academy, the French, 631 

Actors, 330, 331, 383—387, 414, 440, 

5°5, 635, 636 
Addison, Joseph, 753, 754 — 756, 769 — 

77i, 779—785, 79i, 796—793 
Advancement of Learning, Bacon's, 

5i7, 5i8 
jElfric, 37, 38 
Aidan, 16 
Aikin, Lucy, 89c 
Ailred of Rievaulx, 64 
Ainsworth, William Harrison. 889, 890 
Akenside, Mark, 836, 837 
Alain de i'lsle, 120 

Alcestis in Chaucer, in, 112, 148, 149 
Alcuin, 24 
Aldhelm, 21 
Alemanni, 288, 289 

Alexander, King, Romances of, 77, 78 
Alexander, William, Earl of Stirling, 

504 
Alfred, King, 31 — 35 

— of Beverley, 48 
Allegory, Development of, 46, 47, 87, 

88, 119, i2i, 211, 212, 215, 216, 218 

— 220, 376, 406 
Allegro, IS, 553 
Allen, Ralph, 820, 822, 833 
Allingham, William, 892, 894 
Amadis of Gaul, 281, 392 
Amyot, Jacques, 379 
Ancren Riwle, the, 76 
Andre, Bernard, 221 
Andrew, Legend of St. , 28 
Andrewes, Lancelot, 511, 512 
Aneurin, 6 

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 34 
Anglo-Saxons, 11, 12 
Annus Mirabilis, 648 — 653 
Anselm, 43 

Apollo Club, Ben Jonson's, 536 
Aquinas, 92 

Arabs, Influence of the, 45 — 47 
Arbuthnot, John, 801, 802 
Arcades, Milton's, 555 
Arcadia, 278, 279, 392 — 394, 629 
Areopagitica, 581 — 583 
Ariosto, 200, 279 — 281, 391, 449 ; trans- 
lated, 469 



Arminius, 514, 738 
Armstrong, John, 823 
Arnold, Matthew, 890 — 895 

— , Dr. Thomas, 889 

Arthur, King, 7, 8, 30, 31, 61—64, 446, 

562, 765 
Ascham, Roger, 305 — 307, 351 
Ashmole, Elias, 620 
Assembly of Foules, 119— 121 
Asser, 35, 36 
Astrea, D'Urfe's, 629, 630 

— , the Divine, 683 
Astrolabe, Chaucer on the, 155 
Astrophel and Stella, 421, 422 
Athelard of Bath, 45 
Atterbury, Francis, 773 
Aubrey, John, 653, 654 
Aungervyle, Richard, 93 — 97 
Austen, Jane, 883, 886, 887 
Authority, Contest about the Limit of, 

52— 54> 735, 736 
Avesbury, Robert of, 98 
Ayenbite of Inwit, the, 108 
Aylmer, John, 321, 322, 374 
Aytoun, William Edmondstoune, 889, 



B 

Bacon, Francis, 381 — 383, 399, 432, 
433, 461, 463—468, 517—524, 504 

— , Roger, 80—82 
Bailey, Philip James, 890 
Baillie, Joanna, 886, 887 
Balades, 130, 209 
Baldwin, William, 337, 338 
Bale, John, 300, 339, 340 
Ballads, 206 — 209 
Ballot, 611 

Bannatyne, George, 349 
Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 886, 887 
Barbour, John, 145, 146 
Barclay, Alexander, 217, 218 

— , Robert, 664, 665 
Barrow, Isaac, 665, 666 

Bartas, G. Saluste du, 379, 405 — 407, 
475. 476 



902 



Bath, Athelard of, 45 

Baxter, Richard, 612, 613, 664, 709, 726 

Beaton, Cardinal, 277, 302, 303 

Beattie, James, 862 

Beaumont, Francis, 501 — 504 

Becket, Thomas a, 54 

Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 888, 892 

Bede, 8, 22 — 24, 33 

Behn, Aphra, 682—684 

Bell, Robert, 891, 892 

Bellarmin, Cardinal, 511 

Bellenden, John, 263, 264 

Benedict's Rule, 36 

Bentham, Jeremy, 886—888 

Bentley, Richard, 773 

Beowulf, 13, 14 

Berkeley, George, 790 

Berners, Juliana, 187 

— , Lord, 250 
Bestiary, Metrical, 27, 76 
Beveridge, William, 666, 667 
Beverley, Alfred of, 48 

Bible, the, 14, 17—21, 58, 74, 75, 137, 
175, 194. 233—241, 249, 250, 
253—255, 343, 344, 347 

Bilney, Thomas, 248 

Bishops' Bible, the, 347, 359 

Blackfriars Theatre, 387 

Blacklock, Thomas, 874 

Blackmore, Sir Richard, 765, 766, 787, 
791 

Blackstone, Sir William, 863 

Blair, Robert, 841 

Blanche, Duchess, 119, 125, 126 

Blaneford, Henry of, 98, 183 

Blank Verse, 294, 295, 327, 370, 371, 
537. 638—642, 654, 655 

Blind Harry, 188, 189 

Bloomfield, Robert, 885, 886 

Boccaccio, 115 — 118, 148, 149, 163, 164, 
169, 184, 337 

Bodenham, John, 478 

Bodley, John, 343, 346, 347 

— , Sir Thomas, 343, 508 
Bodmer, 845 

Boece, Hector, 263 

Boethius, King Alfred's, 34, 35 ; 

Chaucer's, in 
Boiardo, 200 

Boileau, 632, 633, 667 — 669 
Bolingbroke, Lord, 779, 816, 817 
Boscan, 279 
Boswell, James, 855 
Bourchier, John, Lord Berners, 250 
Bourne, Vincent, 839 
Bowles, William Lisle, 885—887 
Boyle, Charles, 773 

— , Robert, 584, 585, 619, 642, 685 — 

688 

— , Roger, 584, 622, 638 
Bracton, Henry of, 82 
Bradwardine, Thomas, 97 
Brady, Nicholas, 751 
Brandt, Sebastian, 218 
Brome, Alexander, 547 
Bromyard, John of, 175, 176 
Bronte, Anne, 891 

— , Charlotte, 891, 892 



Bronte, Emily, 891 
Brooke, Arthur, 350 
Brooks, Charles Shirley, 893 
Broome, William, 807 
Brougham, Henry Lord, 888 
Brown, Thomas, 703, 767 
Brown, Dr. Thomas, 887 
Browne, Sir Thomas, 585 

— , William, 524, 525 
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 88^ 

8S9— 891, 893 
.— , Robert, 882, 883, 889—804 
Brownists, 462, 587 
Bruce, Barbour's, 145 
Brunanburh. Battle of, q6, 37 
Brunellus, 56 

Brunne, Robert of, 92, 93, 101 
Brunton, Mary, 886, 887 
Brut, 49, 65, 66, 73, 74 
Bryskett, Lewis, 369 
Buchanan, George, 401 — 404 

— , Robert, 894 

Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke 
of, 656—658, 716 

— , John Sheffield, Duke of, 669— 

671 
Buckle, Henry Thomas, 893 
Budgell, Eustace, 782 
Bulwer, Lord Lytton, 888—895 
Bunyan, John, 615, 616, 662—664 
Burgh, Benedict, 188 
Burke, Edmund, 867—869, 871, 872 
Burley, Walter, 98 
Burnet. Gilbert, 667, 758 

— , Thomas, 761 

Burney, Fanny (D'Arblay), 887 
Burns, Robert, 873—876 
Burton, John Hill, 894 

— , Robert, 509 

— , William, 508 
Bury, Richard of, 93 — 97 
Butler, Joseph, 819 

— , Samuel, 673— 676 
Byrhtnoth, the Death of, 37 

Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 881, 



Cabbala, the Threefold, 570 

Caedmon, 14, r7 — 21 

Caeilte M'Ronan, 4 

Calderon, 504, 679 

Calderwood, David, 566 

Calprenede, 631, 632 

Calvin, 303, 304, 320, 330, 344 

Camden. William, 348, 428, 460, 507 

Campbell, Thomas, 881, 885, 886 



Campion, Edmund, 409, 410 
Canterbury Pilgrimage, the, 54 
— Tales, Chaucer's, 163 — 170 
Canute, 38 



903 



Capgrave, John, 187, 

Carew, Richard, 469 

Carlyle, Thomas, 884, 

Carter, Elizabeth, 886 

Cartvvright, William, 546 

Cattraeth, Battle of, 5, 6 

Cavendish, George, 247 

Caxton, William, 195, 196 

Celts, 2— 11 

Censorship of the Press, 431,474,581 — 

583 ; of the Stage, 828 
Centlivre, Susannah, 797 
Cervantes, 427, 503, 504 
Chambers, Robert, 888, 889, 891-^893 

— , William, 889, 895 
Chapman, George, 487, 488, 505, 506 
Character Writing, 533, 540 
Charlemagne and Alcuin, 24, 25 

— Romances, 61 
Chatterton, Thomas, 861 

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 108 — 112, 117 — 129, 
146—156, 159— 161, 163—170, 
377, 378, 442, 764, 805, 896, 
897 

Chaucer's Stanza, 117, 118, 406 

Cheke, Sir John, 301, 302, 307, 315 

Chester Plays, 102, 103 

Chesterfield, Earl of, 853, 854 

Chestre, Thomas, 188 

Chettle, Henry, 389, 436, 437 

Chevy Chase, 208 

Cheynell, Francis, 568 

Child, Sir Josiah, 689 

Chillingworth, William, 568 

Chivalry, Romances of, 61 — 64, 279 — 
282 

Chrestien of Troyes, 64 

Christis Kirk of the Green, 185 

Chronicle, the Saxon, 34; Monastic, 
42, 43, 347 

Churchill, Charles, 861, 862 

Churchyard, Thomas, 338, 339 

Cibber, Colley, 763, 806, 821 

Cid Campeador, the, 55 

Clarendon, Lord, 691 

Clarissa Harlowe, 831 

Clarke, Mary Cowden, 891 

Cleveland, John, 547 

Clough, Arthur Hugh, 891, 892 

Cobbett, William, 885 

Cockayne, Land of, 91 

Colenso, John William, 893 

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 876 — 879, 
881, 885—888 

— , Hartley, 889, 890 
Colet, John, 222, 223 
Colin Clout, 245, 373, 444 
Collier, Jeremy, 763, 794 

— , John Payne, 889, 893 
Collins, William, 841, 842 

— , W. Wilkie, 892—894 
Colman, George, Elder and Younger, 

853, 863 
Columba, 15 
Columbus, 198, 230, 
Colvil, Samuel, 677 
Commission, High Court of, 344, 345, 

515 



Compendious Book of Godly and 

Spiritual Songs, 304 
Comus, 555— 557. 
Confessio Amantis, 157 — 159 
Congreve, William, 761, 762 
Constance, Council of, 172, 190 
Constantinople, the Fall of, 192, 193 
Cook, Eliza, 890 
Cooper, Thomas, 431 
Corbet, Richard, 545 
Corneille, 633, 634 
Coryat, Thomas, 529 
Cotton, Charles, 734 

— , Sir Robert, 507, 508 

Court of Love, Chaucer's, 109, in, 112 

Courts of Love, 83 — 85 

Courtier, Castiglione's, 354 

Covenanters, 564, 565 

Coventry Plays, 103 

Coverdale, Miles, 249, 253, 310, 314, 

346 
Cowley, Abraham, 548, 623, 671—673 

— , Hannah, 885 
Cowper, William, 864—866 
Crabbe, George, 881, 886, 887 
Craik, George Lillie, 891, 892 
Cranmer, Thomas, 247 — 249 
Cranmer's Bible, 254 
Crashaw, Richard, 547, 548 
Creech, Thomas, 725 
Cromwell's Bible, 254 
Crowne, John, 679 
Crusades, the, 55, 85 — 87 
Cuckoo and Nightingale, the, 152 
Cudworth, Ralph, 665, 740 
Culdees, the, 15 
Cumberland, Richard, 863 
Cuthbert, 17 

Cymry, the, 2, 3, 5, 8 
Cynewulf, 26, 28 



Daisy, Chaucer's, 148, 149 
D'Alembert, 846 
Danes, the, 31, 32 
Daniel, Samuel, 457, 507 
Dante, 86 — 89, 113, 146, 147 
D'Arblay, Frances, 887 
Dares, 67 
Darwin, Charles, 893, 895 

— , Erasmus, 885 
Davenant, Sir William, 539, 540, 623 — 

626, 635 — 637, 640 
David, St., 15 

Davies, Sir John, 459, 460, 473 
Day, John, 340 — 342 
Decameron, the, 118, 163, 167, 168 
De Foe, Daniel, 726 — 729, 774 — 778, 

782, 799 — 801 
Dekker, Thomas, 488, 490, 491, 500, 

505 
Denham, Sir John, 547, 640 
Dennis, John, 767, 787, 788, 791 



904 



Deposition of Richard II., Poem on 



the.. 



32 , 



De Quincey, Thomas, 893 

Devil Tavern, 536 

Diana, Montemayor's, 279 

Dibdin, Charles, 885 

Dickens, Charles, £83, 889—894 

Dictys, 66 

Dicuil, 29 

Diderot, Denis, 846 

Diet of Worms, 236 

Digby, Sir Kenelm, 621 

Dillon, Wentworth, Earl of Ros- 
common, 667 — 669 

Diodati, Charles, 534, 558, 562 

Disraeli, Isaac, 886, 887 
— , Benjamin, 888—892 

Dixon, William Hepworth, 892, 894 

Dobell, Sydney, 892 

Dominic, 72, 73 

Donne, John, 527 — 529 

Doran, John, 891, 892, 804 

Dorset, Charles Sackville, Earl of, 
651, 655, 750 

Dort, or Dordrecht, Synod of, 514, 
561, 568 

Douglas, Gavin, 215, 216, 258 — 261 

Drake, Sir Francis, 423, 424, 434 

Drama, Rise of the, 282 — 284. 296, 297, 
330—335, 3*9, 383—389,410,4", 
440, 474 — 5o6, 535— 539, 633—636 

Drapier's Letters, 803 

Drayton, Michael, 484, 485, 524 

Dream, Chaucer's, 122, 123 

Drummond, William, of Hawthornden, 

_ 532, 533- 54i 

Dryden, John, 626 , 627, 636 — 642, 648 — 
658, 697 — 701, 715 — 726, 729 — 

_ , 731, 735, 750—754, 763—765 

Duck, Stephen, 840 

Dugdale, William, 621, 622 

Dumoulin, Pierre, 603 

Dunbar, William, 205, 210 — 215 

Dunciad, the, 815, 821 

Duns Scotus, 92 

Dunstable, Miracle Play at, 50 

Dunstan, 36 

D'Urfey, Thomas, 676, 677, 794 

Dyce, Alexander, 888, 890—894 

Dyer, John, 813, S25 



Eadmer, 43 
Earie, John, 540 
Earthquake of 1580, 390 
Edinburgh Review, 885 
Edgeworth, Maria, 885 — 887 
Edward the Confessor, a Life of, 38, 39 
Edwards, Richard, 383, 384 
— _, Thomas, 588 
Eikon Basilike. 595 
Eliot, George, 884, 893, 894 
Elizabeth, Queen, Lines by, 430 
Elliott, Ebenezer, 889, 891 



Ell wood, Thomas, 643 

Ely, Thomas of, 64 

Elyot, Sir Thomas, 249 

Erasmus, 234, 235, 297, 310 

Erigena, John Scotus, 29, 30 

Essay on Man, Pope's, 815 — 819 

Essays, Bacon's, 464 — 466, 519, 521 

Ethelwold, 36 

Etherege, Sir George, 677, 697 

Euphuism, 352, 353, 355—361, 394, 409, 

415, 526, 527, 529 
Evelyn, John, 620, 653, 759, 760 
Exeter Book, the, 26—28 
— , Joseph of, 65, 66 



Fabyan, Robert, 220, 221 

Faerie Queene, the, 397, 446 — 457 

Fairfax, Edward, 469 

Falconer, William, 862 

Falls of Princes, 184, 335, 337 

Fame, House of, Chaucer's, 146, 147, 

805 
Fanshawe, Sir Richard, 622 
Faraday, Michael, 889, 892 
Farquhar, George, 762, 763, 781 
Faust, John, Printer, 195 
Faustus, Doctor, 417, 418 
Feltham, Owen, 56S 
Fenton, Elijah, 808 
Fergus Finnbheoil, 4 
Ferguson, Robert, 874 
Ferrers, George, 338 — 342 
Field, Nathaniel, 505 
Fielding, Henry, 827—835 
Filmer, Sir Robert, 589, 601, 743 
Filostrato, Boccaccio's, 117 
Finnesburg, the Fight at, 23 
Fionn M'Cumhaill, 4 
First English, n, 12, 41 
Fisher, John, 205, 222, 250 
Fitzstephen, William, 54 
Flecknoe, Richard, 720, 721 
Fletcher, Giles, LL.D., 473 

— , Giles, 473, 525, 520 

— , John, 501 — 504 

— , Phineas, 473, 544 
Flodden, 258 

Florence of Worcester, 43 
Florio, John, 468 

Flower and the Leaf, the, 152 
Fly tings, 214, 242 
Foote, Samuel, £63 
Ford, John, 536 
Fordun, John of, 99 
Forster, John, 891 — 895 
Fortescue, Sir J-jhn, 189, iqo 
Foster, John, 888, 889 
Fox, George, 616 — 618, 758 

— , John, 314, 340, 486 
Francis of Assisi, 72 
Frederick II., Emperor, 85, 86 
Freeman, Edward Augustus, 891 — 895 



9°5 



Frobisher, Martin, 423 
Froissart, Lord Berners's, 250 
Froude, James Anthony, 891, 893 — £ 
Fuller, Thomas, 570, 571, 614, 665 
Fyshe, Simon, 311 



Gabhra, Battle of, 4, 5 

Gaddesden, John of, 98 

Gaels, 2 — 5, 10 

Gaimar, Geoffrey, 48, 49 

Galahad, 63 

Gait, John, 887, 888 

Gamelyn, the Tale of, 166 

Garcilasso de la Vega, 279 

Garrick, David, 850 

Garth, Samuel, 766, 795 

Gascoigne, George, 369—371, 384 

Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 891 — 894 

Gauden, John, 594, 595 

Gaudia, 76 

Gaunt,John of, 118, 119, 121, 123, 125 — 

128, 162 
Gay, John, 790, 791, 814, 815 
Genesis and Exodus, 76 
Geneva Bible, the, 343 
Geoffrey the Grammarian. 188 

— , of Monmouth, 47 — 49 

— , of Vinsauf, 68 
Gerland, 41 
Gerson, 174. 
Gervase of Tilbury, 71 
Gibbon, Edward, 858, 859 
Gifford, William, 885, 887, 888 
Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 368, 422 — 424 
Gilbertus Anghcus, 98 

Gildas, 31 

Gildon, Charles, 795 

Giraldus Cambrensis, 68 — 70 

Gladstone, William Ewart, 890, 892, 

893 ' 
Glanvilie, Ralph, 65 
Gleig, George Robert, 889, 891 
Globe Theatre. 440 
Gloucester Fragments, 36 

— , Robert of, 90 
Glover, Richard, 839 
Gododin, the, 5 

GodwiD, William, 885, 886, 889 

Goethe, 845 

Golding, Arthur, 329, 390, 407 

Goldsmith, Oliver, 860, 861 

Golias Poems, 58, 59 

Gomberville, 631 

Gongora, Luis de, 526 

Googe, Bamaby, 408, 409 

Gottsched, 845 

Gorboduc, 330 — 335 

Gosson, Stephen, 387, 388 

Gower, John, 129, 130, 138 — 145, 156 — 

159, 160 — 163 
Graal, the Holy, 62, 64 
Grafton, Richard, 347, 348 



Grahame, James, 885, 886 

Grainger, James, 862 

Granville, George, Lord Lansdovvne, 

- 7 6 7 
Gray, David, 893 

— , Thomas, 6, 842 — 844 

Greek, Study of, 192 — 194, 199, 200, 

223, 224, 301 
Green, Matthew, 786 
Greene, Robert, 389, 414 — 416, 434— 

437 
Gregory's Pastoral Rule, 35 
Grenviile, Sir Richard, 462 
Greville, Fulke, Lord Brooke, 364, 539 
Grey, Arthur Lord, 369, 395 
Grimald, Nicholas, 327 
Grindal, Edmund, 375, 376, 470 
Griselda, Tale of, 167 
Grocyn, William, 199 
Grosseteste, Robert, 71, 72, 78 — 80 
Grote, George, 891, 895 
Grub Street, 341 
Guardian, the, 789 

Guest, Lady Charlotte Elizabeth, 890 
Guillaume de Lorris, 87 
Gulliver's Travels, 804 
Gutenberg, John, 194, 195 
Guthlac, St., Legend of, 27 
Guy of Warwick, 77 
Gwalchmai, 71 



H 

Habington, William, 540 

Hakluyt, Richard, 427 

Hales, John, 567, 568 

Halifax, Charles Montague, Lord, 732, 

770, 780 
Hall, Anna Maria, 889 

— , Arthur, 408 

— , Edward, 300, 301 

— , Joseph, 473—475. 5*0, 567, 572, 

573. 576 
Hallam, Henry, 887, 890 

— , Arthur Henry, 889 
Halliwell, James Orchard, 891 — 893 
Hamilton, Sir William, 893 
Hampole, the Hermit of, 106 — 108 
Hanmer, Sir Thomas, 822 
Harding, John, 182, 183 
Harington, Sir John, 469 
Hariot, Thomas, 426 

Harlaw, Battle of, 177, 178 
Harrington, James, 609 — 612 
Hartley, David, 842 
Hartlib, Samuel, 583, 584, 619 
Harvey, Gabriel, 362, 363, 372, 390, 473 

— , William, 516, 544 
Havelok, 77, 90 
Hawes, Stephen, 218 — 220 
Hawkesworth, John, 853 
Hayward, Sir John, 460 
Hazlitt, William, 886—888 
Heber, Reginald, 886—888 
Hehodorus, iEthiopics of, 392 



906 



Helps, Arthur, 891, 893 
Hemans, Felicia, 887, 889 
Hendyng, Proverbs of, 91 
Henry of Blaneford, 9 s , 183 

— of Huntingdon, 52 

— the Minstrel, 188, 189 
Henryson, Robert, 201, 202 
Herbert, Edward, Lord Cherbury, 

516, 517, 542 

— , George, 542—544 
Herrick, Robert, 550 
Herringman, Henry, 753 
Heylin, Peter, 563 
Heywood, Jasper, 327, 328 

— , John, 299, 3 o, 315 

— , Thomas, 488, 505 
Higden, Ralph, 99, 100 
Higgins, John, 338 
Hilarius, 49 

Hilda, Abbess, 16, 17 
Hind and Panther, 729 — 731 
■ , Transversed, 731, 732 



, 607 — 609, 



Hobbes, Thomas, 

619, 620, 691, 
Hoccleve, Thomas, 179—181 
Hofland, Barbara, 887, 890 
Hogg, James, 885, 886 
Holcot, Robert, 98 
Holinshed, Ralph, 348 
Holyday, Barten, 540, 541 
Home, John, 863 
Homer, Translations of, 408, 487, 805, 

807, 80S 
Homilies, iElfric's, 38 ; the Book of, 

310, 375 
Hood, Thomas, 888, 889, 891 
Hooke, Robert, 685, 686 
Hooker, Richard, 469—473, 744 
Hope, Thomas, 887 
Hopkins, John, 312, 329, 330 
Hoveden, Roger of, 67, 68 
Howard, Hon. Edward, 638 

— , Sir Robert, 638, 641, 655 
Howe, John, 613, 614 
Howel, Prince, 71 

Howitt, Mary, 888 ; William, 889 
Hughes, John, 791, 792 

— , Thomas, 893 
Hume, David, 856—858 
Hundred Merry Tales, 300 

Hunt, John Henry Leigh, 885, 886, 

887, 889, 890—892 
Hunting of the Cheviot, the, 208 
Huntingdon, Henry of, 52 
Hunton, Nicholas, 589 
Hurd, Richard, 840 
Huss, John, 171 

Huxley, Thomas Henry, 892- -894 
Hyde, Edward, Lord Clarendon, 691 



I 



Idols, Bacon's, 522, 523 
Inchbald, Elizabeth, 885 
Ingelo, Nathaniel, 622 
Ingelow, Jean, 893, 894 



Instauratio Magna, Bacon's, 521, 52a 
Interludes, 298 299 
Iscanus, Josephus, 65, 66 
Italian Plays, Early, 282—284 
Itinerary of Richard I., 68 



James I. of Scotland, 176 — 178, 184, 185 

— IV. — , 210, 211, 257, 258 

— V. — , 258, 262—270 

— VI. — , I. of England, 404 — 406 
Jean de Meung, 87, 88 

Jerrold, Douglas, 889 — 892 
Jest Books, 300 
Jewel, John, 342, 381 
John of Bromyard, 175, 176 

— — Fordun, 99 

— — Oxnead, 89, 90 

— — Salisbury, 59, 60 

— — Trokelowe, 98, 183 
Johnson, Richard, 449 

— , Samuel, 849—856, 869, 870, 885 
Jonson, Ben, 489—491, 497—501, 535, 

536 
Joseph of Exeter, 65, 66 
Jowett, Benjamin, 894 
Judith, a First English Poem, 28 
Junius, Letters of, 868 

— , Francis, the Elder, 366 

— , — , the Younger, 602 



Kaye, John William, 894 
Keats, John, 882, 887 
Keble, John, 888, 891, 894 
Ken, Thomas, 733, 734, 757 
Kennedy, Walter, 214 
Killigrew, Thomas, 635 
King Alexander, 77 

— Horn, 77 

— , William, 767 

Kinglake, Alexander William, 891, 893 
King's Quair, the, 177 
Kingsley. Charles, 891 — 894 
Knight, Charles, 888, 889, 892, 893 
Knighton, Henry, 175 
Knight's Tale, Chaucer's, 116 
Knolles, Richard, 506 
Knox, John, 303, 320 — 326, 399 — 401 
Kyd, Thomas, 389 — 401, 489 
Kynddelw, 71 



Lamb, Charles, 885, 886, 88 
— , Mary, 886 
Lancelot, 61 — 63 
Landon, Letitia Elizabeth, 
Landor, Walter Savage, 88i 
Langbaine, Gerard, 751 



9 o7 



Langland, William, 131— 135 
Langtoft, Peter, 90, 93 
Languet, Hubert, 368, 369 
Lansdowne, George Granville, Lord, 767 
Latimer, Hugh, 252, 253, 255, 312 — 314 
Latin Quantity in English Verse, 68, 

390, 407, 408, 429, 474 
Laureate Poets, 204, 635, 751, 786, 806, 

839, 840, 885, 887, 891, 892 
Layamon, 73, 74 
Layard, Austin Henry, 891, 892 
Leclerc, Jean, 739 
Lee, Harriet, 886 

— , Nathaniel, 680 

— , Sophia, 886 

Legend of Good Women, the, 148, 149 

Leibnitz, 817, 818 

Leighton, Robert, 666 

Leland, John, 255, 256, 289 

Leo X., 233 — 236 

L'Estrange, Sir Roger, 710, 711 

Lever, Charles James, 890 

Leviathan, Hobbes's, 608, 609 

Lewes, George Henry, 891 — 894 

Lewis,_ Matthew Gregory, 885 

Licensing of Books, 474, 581 — 583 

— of Plays, 828, 823 
Lightfoot, John, 568, 569 
Lillo, George, 838 

Lily, William, 223, 224 

Limborch, Philip van, 738, 739 

Linacre, Thomas, 199, 200, 224 

Lindisfarne, 15 

Lindsay, Sir David, 256 — 258, 264 — 

278, 302, 308 — 310 
Lindwood, William, 181 
Lismore, Book of the Dean of, 4 
Llywarch Hen, 6, 7 

— ab Llywelyn, 71 

Locke, John, 706 — 709, 725, 726, 738 — 
75° 

Lockhart, John Gibson, 888 

Lodge, Thomas, 389, 435, 438 

Lollards, 175, 181, 182, 186, 187 

Looking Glass for London and Eng- 
land, 435, 436 

Lope de Vega, 504, 679 

Lorris, Guillaume de, 87 

Lovelace, Richard, 549 

Lovell, Robert, 877, 885 

Lucan Translated, 537 

Luces de Gast, 64 

Luther, Martin, 235, 236 

Lycidas, 558 — 560 

Lydgate, John, 178, 179, 184, 335 

Lyly, John, 335—36i, 389, 413, 414, 
43 J > 440, 44i 

Lyttelton, George, Lord, 838 

Lytton, Lord, 888—895 



M 

Macaronic Verse, 284, 285 
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 890 — 

893 
Macdonald, George, 892, 8Q4 



MacFlecknoe, 720 
Machiavelli, 284 
Mackay, Charles, 889 
Mackenzie, Sir George, 759 

— , Henry, 885, 886 
Mackintosh, Sir James, 871, 889 
Macpherson, James, 862 
Maid's Tragedy, the, 503 
Mair, John, 260 

Maldon, Battle of, 37 
Malherbe, 629 
Malory, Sir Thomas, 197 
Mallet, David, 813, 823, 838, 839 
Malmesbury, Aldhelm at, 21, 22 

— , William of, 44, 45 
Malone, Edmund, 885 
Malthus, Thomas Robert, 886, 887 
Mandeville, Sir John, 135 — 137 

— , Bernard, 810, 811 
Map, Walter, 56—64 
Marianus Scotus, 41 
Marino, Gianbatista, 526, 527 
Marlowe, Christopher, 389, 416 — 421, 

437, 438, 473 
Marot, Clement, 279, 304, 305, 330, 376, 

377 
Marprelate Controversy, 399, 430 — 432 
Marryatt, Captain Frederick, 889, 890 
Marsilius of Padua, 143 
Marston, John, 473, 488, 490, 500 

— , John Westland, 890 
Martin, Theodore, 893, 894 ' 
Martineau, Harriet, 888—894 

— , James, 891 

Marvell, Andrew, 605, 606, 627, 692 — 

697, 709 
Masques, 298, 331, 332, 519 
Massey, Gerald, 892, 894 
Massinger, Philip, 505, 536 
Masson, David, 893 
Matthew Paris, 83 
Matthew's Bible, 254 
Maurice, Frederick Denison, 889, 

892 — 894 
May, Thomas, 537 
Mayne, Jasper, 538, 607 
Medici, the, 190 — 192, 196, 200 
Merchant of Venice, 479 — 486 
Meredith, George, 892 
Meres, Francis, 478 
Meilyr, 71 
Merlin, 7, 47 
Mermaid Tavern, 497 
Meung, Jean de, 87, 88 
Michael Scot, 82, 86 
Michel of N01 thgate, 108 
Middleton, Thomas, 488, 505 
Milesians, the, 10, 11 
Mill, James, 887 

— , John Stuart, 891, 894 
Milman, Henry Hart, 887—889, 890, 

892 
Milnes, Richard Monckton, Lord 

Houghton, 890, -891 
Milton, John, 533— 535, 550—565, 

572—584, 587, 588, 591, 592, 

594 — 606, 627, 628, 642 — 648, 

658—661, 756 



908 



Minot, Laurence, 106 
Miracle Plays, 49 — 52, 54, 100 — 105 
Mirror for Magistrates, 335 — 338, 509 
Moliere, 633 

Monmouth, Geoffrey of, 47 — 49 
Montague, Charles, Lord Halifax, 732, 
770 

— , Lady Mary Wortley, 844 
Montaigne, 406 

Montemayor, George of, 279, 392 
Montesquieu, 846 
Montgomery, James, 886, 887 
Moore, Edward, 838 

— , Thomas, 885 — 890 
Morality Plays, 245 — 247, 271 — 276 
More, Alexander. 603, 604 

— , Hannah, 886 

■ — , Henry, 569. 570, 685 

— , Sir Thomas, 224 — 234, 240 — 242 
Moreto, 679 

Morier, James, 887, 888 
Morley, George, 733, 734 

— , John, 894, 895 
Mornay, Philip du Plessis, 407 
Morris, William. 893, 894 
Morton, Cardinal, 224 — 226 
Mother Hubbard's Tale, 44:, 443 
Moytura, Battle of, 5 
Mulgrave, Earl of, 669—671 
Mun, Thomas, 689 

Munday, Anthony, 409 
Myrddhin, 7, 47 
Mystery Plays, 51 



N 

Napier, John, 517 

Nash, Thomas, 431, 432, 438, 473 

Nassington, William of, 183 

Neckham, Alexander, 67 

Needham, Marchmont, 710 

Nennius, 30, 31 

Netter, Thomas, 18 r, 182 

Neville, Alexander, 328 

Newbury, William of, 67 

Newman, Francis William, 890 

— , John Henry, 894 
Newspapers, 710, 711, 777 
Newton, Sir Isaac, 688, 689, 729, 794 

— , Thomas, 328 
Nibelungen, the, 55 
Niccols, Richard, 509 
Nicholas of Clamanges, 144 

— Guildford, 75 
Nigel Wireker, 55, 56 
Nightingale, Florence, 894 
Nominalists, 92 
Normans, 31, 32, 39, 40 

Norris and Drake, Farewell to, 434 
North, Roger, 711, 712 

— , Sir Thomas, 379, 380 
Northumbrian Psalter, 91 

Norton, Caroline Elizabeth, 889, 891, 

£» 

— , Thomas, 330 



Novum Organum, Bacon's, 522 
Nuce, Thomas, 328 
Nut-brown Maid, the, 208 



Occam, William, 92 

Occleve, Thomas 179, — 18 1 

Oceana, Harrington's, 610, 611 

Octave Rhyme, 117 

Odoric of Pordenone, 136 

Ohthere's Voyages, 33 

Oisin (Ossian), 4, 5 

Oldcastle, Sir John, 181 

Oldham, John, 713, 714 

Oldmixon, John, 767, 795 

Ollamh, the, 9 

Opie, Amelia, 885—887 

Opinion, 53, 54 

Ordericus Vitalis, 43, 44 

Orfeo, Politian's, 197, 198 

Orinda, 684, 685 

Orlando Furioso, 279—281 

Ormulum, 74, 75 

Orosius, King Alfred's, 33 

Osbern, 41 

Otterburn, Battle of, 208 

Otway, Thomas, 680—682 

Overbury, Sir Thomas, 533 

Ovid Translated, 329, 541, 753, 754 

Owain, Prince of Powis, 71 

Owen, Richard, 892 

Owl and Nightingale, 75 

Oxnead, John of, 89, 90 



Pageants, 413 

Paine, Thomas, 871, 885 

Paley, William, 885 

Palladis Tamia, 478 

Palmerin, 281, 392 

Pamela, Sidney's, 393, 394 ; Richard- 
son's, 826, 827 

Pandosto, 415 

Panther, the, 27 

Papacy, Schism in the, 142 — 145, 
172—174 

Paradise Lost, 563, 644—648, 655, 697 

Paris Garden, 440 

— , Matthew, 83 

Parker, Matthew, 342, 343, 345, 346 

— , Samuel, 692, 695, 696 
Parnell, Thomas, 802 
Parzival, 64 

Paston Letters, 188 

Pastoral Poetry, 197, 198, 201, 278, 

279> 372—377. 786, 788, 790 
Paternoster, Metrical, 76 
Patrick, St., 5, 15 
Patronage, 225, 411, 412 
Paynter, William, 350, 351 
Peacock, Thomas Love, 8S9 



9 o 9 



Pcock, Reginald, 185—187 

Peeblis to the Play, 185 

Peele, George, 410, 411, 413, 434, 438, 

_ , 439 
Pelagius, 14, 97 
Penn, William, 707, 708, 758 
Penry, John, 431 
Penseroso, 553 
Pepys, Samuel, 653 
Percy, Thomas, 862, 863 
Periods, the Four, of English Litera- 
ture, 112, 113, 628, 629, 736, 814 
Petrarch, 113 — 115, 167 
Petty, Sir William, 620 
Phaer, Thomas, 329 
Philips, Ambrose, 786 

— , John, 778, 779 

— , Katherine, 684, 685 
Philobiblon, 96 
Phoenix, the, 27 
Physiologus, 27, 76 

Piers Plowman, Vision of, 131 — 135 ; 

b Crede, 159 
Pilgrim's Progress, 663, 664 
Pisa, Council of, 173 
Pitt, Christopher, 839 
Platonism, 193, 194, 357, 569, 570 
Plimsoll, Samuel, 895 
Plutarch, North's, 379 
Pole,_ Reginald, 286 
Po'.itian, 197, 198 
Polychronicon, the, 99, 150 
Pomfret, John, 766 
Pope, Alexander, 785, 787—791, 805 — 

809, 815—819, 851 
Pordage, Samuel, 716 — 719 
Porter, Anna Maria, 885, 886 

— , Jane, 885, 886 

Prayer, Book of Common, 310, 31T, 

_ , . 344> 564 

Precieuses, the, 630, 631, 633 

Precisians, 345 

Prideaux, Humphrey, 758, 759 

Priestley, Joseph, 885 

Printing, Invention of, 194 — 196 

Prior, Matthew, 732, 733, 768—770, 

778, 783. 793 
Procter, Adelaide Anne, 893 

— , Bryan William, 887—889, 894 
Promptorium Parvulorum, 188 
Prose, English, 155, 156, 306 
Prynne, William, 538, 539, 563, 567, 

690, 691 
Psalms, Versions of the, 91, 107, 254, 

255, 288, 304, 305, 329, 342, 343 
Purchas, Samuel, 510 
Puritans, 344, 345, 372—376, 513 
Pusey, Edward Bouverie, 889, 894 
Puttenham, George, 378, 429, 430 



Quakers, 618 

Quarles, Francis, 532, 542 
Quarterly Review, 8S6 
Quixote, Don, 503, 504, 837 



Rabelais, 278 ; translated, 622 

Racine, 633 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 368, 395, 396 424, 

426, 427, 461—463, 509, 510 
Ralph Roister Doister, 296, 297 
Rambouillet, Marquise de, 630, 631 
Ramsay, Allan, 811, 812 
Randolph, Thomas, 538, 539 
Rape of the Lock, 788—790 
Ray, John, 760 
Reade, Charles, 892, 893 
Realists, 92 
Reid, Thomas, 858 
Reinaert, 55 
Religio Laici, 722 — 724 
Remonstrants, the, 514, 738, 739 
Repressor, Pecock's, 186, 187 
Revels, Master of the, 331, 384 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 885 
Ricardo, David, 886, 887 
Richardson, Samuel, 825—827, 831, 

832, 836 
Rievaulx, Ailred of, 64 
Rishanger, William, 183 
Robert of Avesbury, 98 

— — Brunne, 92, 93, 101 

— — Gloucester. 90 
Robertson, William, 858 
Robin Hood, 206 
Robinson Crusoe, 800, 801 
Rochester, Earl of, 667 
Rocleve, 181 

Roger Infans, 45 

Roger of Hoveden, 67, 68 

— — Wendover, 82, 83 
Rogers, John. 253, 254 

— , Samuel, 887 
Rolle, Richard, 106—108 

Roman de la Rose, 87, 88 ; English 

Version of the, no 
Romeo and Juliet, 350, 351 
Roscoe, William, 886 
Roscommon, Earl of 667 — 669 
Ross, Alexander, 674 
Rossetti, Christina, 894 

— , Dante Gabriel, 894 
Rousseau, 847, 848, 857, 858 
Rowe, Nicholas, 786 
Rowley, William, 488, 504 
Roy, William, 238 
Rushworth, John, 622 
Russell, John, Earl, 892, 893 
Rutherford, Samuel, 588 
Rymer, Thomas, 699, 700 



Sackville, Thomas, Lord Buckhurst, 

330—336, 338. 351 
— , Charles, Earl of Dorset, 651, 

655. 732, 75o 
Saswulf, 41, 42 
St. John, Henry, Lord Bolingbroke, 

779, 816, 817 



9 TO /A 

St. Maure, Benoit de, 49, 66, 67 
St. Nicholas, Miracle Play of, 50 
Salisbury, John of, 59, 60 
Salmasius, 599—603 
Saluste, Guillaume, du Bartas, 379, 

405, 406, 407, 475, 476 
Samson, Agonistes, 658—661 
Sanazzaro, 278, 392 
Sandys, George, 506, 541 
Satire of the Three Estates, 271—276 
Satires Burnt, 473 
Satiromastix, 490 
Savage, Richard, 852 
Savile, Sir Henry, 469, 470 
Schiller, 845 

Schoolmaster, Ascham's. 351 — 355 
Science, Development of, 45 — 47. 9 1 , 

517—519, 521—524, 571, 572, 

584—586, 618—621, 685—690, 

760, 761 
Scot, Michael, 82, 86 
Scott, Sir Walter, 881, 883, 885, 8S6— 

889 
Scotus, Duns, 92 
Scriptorium, the, 25, 42, 196 
Scuderi, Magdeleine, 632 
Secretum Secretorum, 157 
Sedley, Sir Charles, 655, 656 
Selden, John, 514—516, 590, 591 
Senchus Mor, 5 
Seneca Translated, 327, 328 
Settle, Elkanah, 678, 679, 716 
Seven Champions of Christendom, 448, 

449 
Seward, Anna, 885 
Sewell, Elizabeth Missing, 891 
Shadwell, Thomas, 677, 678, 751 
Shaftesbury, First Earl of, 705 — 709, 

711— 715, 726 
Shakespeare, William, 380, 381, 397 — 

399. 436, 437.439—441. 477—487, 

493 — 497> 498, 756, 808, 809, 852, 

854, 856 
Sheffield, John, Earl of Mulgrave, 

669—671 
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 882, 887, 888 
Shenstone, William, 823, 824 
Shepherd's Calendar, the, 372 — 380 

— , Play, the, 104, 105 
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 864, 885 
Sherlock, William, 756, 758 
Shirley, James, 536, 537, 607 
Shoreham, William of, 107 
Sibbes, Richard, 570 

Sidney, Algernon, 724 

— , Sir Philip, 364, 365, 368, 369, 371, 

372—380, 391—394, 421, 422, 

425, 426 
Skelton, John, 203, 216, 217, 242 — 246, 

^73 
Smectymnuus, 572, 573 
Smith, Adam, 863, 885 

— , Charlotte, 885 

— , Horace, 887, 888 

— , James, 887 

— , Sydney, 886, 891 

— , Sir Thomas, 301, 307, 315, 362 
Smollett, Tobias, 832, 836—838 



Somerville, Mary, 889, 891 

— , William, 815 
Somnium Scipionis, 120 

Sonnets, 84, 85, 88, 114, 293, 294, 421, 

422, 445, 496, 497, 551 
South, Robert, 758 
Southern, Thomas, 703, 724, 752 
Southey, Robert, 877, 878, 881, 885— 

889 
Speed, John, 508 
Spelman, Sir Henry, 586 

— , Sir John, 587 
Spence, Joseph, 839, 840 

Spenser, Edmund, 361—364, 372, 390, 
39i. 395—397. 411. 441—457,475. 
756, 808, 809 

Spottiswoode, John, 566 

Spectator, the, 784 

Sprat, Thomas, 686, 687 

Stanhope, Earl, 8go, 893 

Stanihurst, Richard, 407, 408 

Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, 891, 894 

— , Thomas, 607 

Steele, Richard, 755 — 757, 771, 772, 

780, 782 — 785, 792 793, 796—798 
Stepney, George, 725 
Sterne Laurence, 859, 860 
Sternhold, Thomas. 305, 312, 329, 330 
Stewart, Dugald, 885—887 
Stanza, Chaucer's, 117, 118 ; Spenser's, 

449 
Stillingfleet, Edward, 737 
Stow, John. 348, 460 
Strode, Ralph, 129 
Strype, John, 758 
Stuart Dramatists, 493 
Stubbes, Philip, 428 
Studley, John, 328 
Suckling, Sir John, 546 
Supplication for the Beggars, 311 
Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, 290— 

295 
Swift, Jonathan, 772 — 774, 781/ 783, 

784, 792, 793, 802, 803 
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 894 
Swinford, Catherine, 128, 202 
Sydenham, Thomas, 689, 690 
Sylvester, Joshua, 475, 476, 526 



Tain Bo, the, 5, 10 

Talfourd, Sir Thomas Noon, 889 

Taliesin, 7 

Tamburlaine, 416, 417, 474 

Tasso, 378, 379, 406, 449 ; translated, 

469 
Tate, Nahum, 721, 722, 751 
Tatler, the, 782—784 
Taverner, Richard, 254 
Taylor, Sir Henry 889, 890, 893 

— , Jeremy, 577, 578, 592—594 614, 

615 661 

— , John, the Water Poet, 529, 530, 

54i 



9ii 



824, 



Temple, Sir William, 703 — 705, 

709, 712. 773 
Tennyson, Alfred, 883, 888—890, £ 

. 894 
Teseide, Boccaccio's, 116 
Testament of Cresseid, 201 
— of Love, the, 154 
Teutons, 3 
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 

891—894 
Theatres, the First, 385—388,411, 

440 
Theobald, Lewis, 809, 820 
Thomas of Ely, 64 
Thomson, James, 812, 813, 822 - 

842 

Thorn, William, 99 
Thornton, Bonnel, 853 
Thrale, Mrs., 855 
Throckmorton, Job, 431 
Tickell, Thomas, 782, 790, 795 
Tighe. Mary, 886 
TiHotson, John, 666, 758 
Tiptoft, John, Earl of Worcester, 
Tobacco, 426 
Tom Jones, 833, 834 
Tonson, Jacob, 753 
Tottel's Miscellany, 315, 316, 326, 
Tourneur, Cyril, 504 
Towneley Mysteries, 103 
Toxophilus, 306 
Tradescants, the, 620 
Tragedies, 52, 169, 184, 332—338 
Transition English, 41 
Traveller's Song, the, 26, 27 
Travers, Walter, 470, 471 
Trench, Richard Chenevix, 892 
Trevisa, John, 150 
Tripartite Chronicle, Gower's, 151, 

161, 162 
Trivet, Nicholas, go 
Troilus and Cressida, Chaucer's, 

128, 129 

— Verse, 406 
Trokelowe, John of, 98, 183 
Trollope, Anthony, 892 — 895 

— , Frances, 890 
Troubadours, 55 
Troy, 49, 65—67 
Troynovant, 66 
Tudors, 202 

Tupper, Martin Farquhar, 890 

Turbervile, George, 350 

Turgot, 41 

Turner, Dr. Francis, 697 

Turpin, Archbishop, 61 

Tusser, Thomas, 316, 349 

Twyne, Thomas, 329 

Tyndal, William, 236—242, 248—: 



U 

Udall, John, 431 
— , Nicholas, 295— 297, 310, 312,315, 

383 
Unities, the Three, 634 



Urquhart, Sir Thomas, 622 
Usher, James, 512 — 514, 573, 587 
Utopia, More's, 228 — 233 



Vanbrugh, John, 762, 703 

Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare's, 430 

Vercelli Book, the, 26—28 

Vergil, Polydore, 221 

Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham, 

656—658, 715 
Vinsauf, Geoffrey de, 68 
Virgil, Translations of, 259, 294, 295, 

329, 407, 408, 763, 764 
Virginia, 424, 426, 427 
Vitalis, Ordericus, 43, 44 
Voltaire, 847 
Vox Clamantis, 139—142, 174 



W 

Wace, 49 

Wakefield Plays, 103 
Waldenses, 57, 58, 73 
Wallace, Blind Harry's, 189 
Waller, Edmund, 545, 546, 639, 640 
Wallis, John, 386, 619, 760 
Walpole, Horace, 842 — 844 
Walsh, William, 766, 767 
Walsingham, Thomas, 183 
Walton, Izaak, 623, 733, 734 
Warburton, William, 821, 822 
Ward, Robert Plumer, 888, 891 
Warner, William, 428 
Warren, Samuel, 890 
Warton, Joseph, 840 

— , Thomas, 840 
Watson, Thomas, 412, 413 
Watts, Isaac, 814 
Wavrin, John de, 182 
Webbe, William, 429 
Webster, Augusta, 894 

— , John, 505 
Wendover, Roger of, 82, 83 
Wesley, John, 819, 820 
West, Gilbert, 823 
Westminster Assembly, 507 
Whale, Myth of the, 27 
Wheloc, Abraham, 587 
Wr.etstone, George, 409 
Whiston, William, 761 
Whitby, 14, 16, 32 
White, Gilbert, 885 

— , Henry Kirke, 8S6 
Whitefield, George, 820 
Whitehead, Paul, 839 

— , William, 839 
Whitgift, John, 470, 473 
Whittingham, William, 343 
Whole Duty of Man, 692 



912 



Wiclif, John, 131, 137, 138, 171 
Wilkins, John, 571, 572, 586, 620, 687 
William of Malmesbury, 44, 45 

— — Nassington, 183 

— — Newbury, 67 

— — Rishanger, 183 

— — Shoreham, 107 
Will's Coffee House, 709, 710 
Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester, 667 
Wilson, John, 836— 8S8, 890 
Wireker, Nigel, 55, 56 

Wither, George, 530 — 532, 541, 542, 627 
Wolfram, von Eschenbach, 64 
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 885 
Wolsey, Thomas, 227, 228, 238, 242— 

245 
Wood, Anthony, 654 
Woodville, Anthony, Lord Rivers, 196 
Worcester, Florence of, 43 
Wordsworth, William, 866, 867, 870— 

873, 876, 878—881, 885—888, 

890, 892 
Wotton, Sir Henry, 567 

— , William, 773 



Wulfstan's Voyage, 34 
Wyat, Sir Thomas, 285 — 290, 304 
— — the Younger, 315 
Wycherley, William, -701 — 703 
Wyntershyllc, William, 183 



Ximenez, Cardinal, 233 



Yalden, Thomas, 753 
Yonge, Charlotte Mary, 891 
York, Alcuin at, 24 — 26 
Young, Edward, 841 
— , Thomas, of Loncardy, 534, 535 



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